A broken tulip

Dear daughter,

What do you do when you are the hindrance to your husband’s calling?

When my husband up and left everything to travel because God told him to, I was right there alongside him. I went too.

When my husband said to lie to a king in order to save his life, I did. God miraculously intervened to save me from shame. I was amazed that the Most High God would do so much on my behalf, on our behalf.

But that was over ten years ago now. Yahweh keeps telling Abram, my husband, that he will make of him a great nation.  My husband believes God. There is only one problem: me.

I am the problem.

My whole life I have been Sarai, the barren one. So what do you do when you are completely inadequate to give your husband what he needs for God’s promise to come true?

Yahweh told Abram his heir would be a child of his own body. He didn’t mention me. So, I gave Abram my maid, to gain a child by her. To see the promise come true. To erase the word barren from my name. To be the solution, and not the problem. To escape the shame.

My maid Hagar, she changed once she was with child. Changed. And suddenly I saw….  

I was further disgraced, further shamed, further distanced from my lord Abram. She came between us. At first she created a distance of just feather-breadth thinness, but that distance widened until all the desert miles we had traveled lay between us.

Abram loved his son Ishmael, born of Hagar. He loved him. One more place in my life swung shut into loneliness. Yes, the promise was coming true, for Abram. Was I on this long journey simply as an observer? Time and time again, I had watched Abram encounter God. I trusted what he told me of this God who asked so much from him, who promised so much to him. But I also watched the cares, worries, joy of other women as they bore and raised their children. I was outside of it all. Outside the promise, the pride, the pain.

Thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, God spoke again. He assured Abram of the blessing on Ishmael but made it clear that the promised child was not yet born. He changed Abram’s name; he changed mine.

Sarah. Princess.

“As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah.  I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”

Mother of nations? Mother of kings?

Abraham laughed.

Then visitors came. Yahweh came.

Abram was sitting at the front of the tent in the heat of the day. That’s when he looked up and saw them. Abram called to me and I kneaded bread for their feast. They asked about me. Me! Sarah!

God had promised Abram a child from his own body. And these men said within a year, I would have birthed him a son. I am his wife. I am his body.

What do you do when you are the hindrance to your husband’s calling?

It is the wrong question. My barrenness was Abraham’s. His wanderings were mine. I waited with my lord Abram and my husband Abraham waited with me. My empty body held visibly our mutual inadequacy; my empty arms echoed the circles Abram led us on in the desert. The promise, it turned out, was to both of us. The faith which drew this promise near, the faith which pushed us far out of our homeland, this faith belonged to both of us.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went,

even though he did not know where he was going.

By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country;

he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.

For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children

because

she considered him faithful who had made the promise.

And so from this one man, and he as good as dead,

came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky

and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

God placed Laughter deep into my old, old body. He birthed life from the laughter. He made me the mother of promise, mother of faith, of nations, of kings. The mother of Abraham’s sons of promise and Abraham’s daughters who do what is right in faith, without fear. Millennia later, God still spoke of my faith, how my holy Yes dressed my soul in undying beauty.

Your barrenness is the walk of his faith. His wandering is the walk of your faith. You both build a life on things unseen. You look past the shame. One day, you too will laugh with God.

All these people were still living by faith when they died.

They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.

People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.

If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.

Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God,

for he has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11)

It seemed appropriate, after posting a story from Hagar’s perspective last week, to also post a first-person story from Sarah’s perspective. I journaled this as an interaction with Scripture; it draws on 1 Peter and Hebrews 11. Not a wife nor a mother myself, I’m sure some of you readers will have even more empathy for Sarai. 🙂

Image: original oil pastel