Is Anything Too Hard?

Behind a tent flap, an old woman puts her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. A baby? At my age? Then a voice outside the tent says: why did Sarah laugh?

Abraham and Sarah have been waiting a very long time. Almost twenty-five years earlier, God told Abraham to leave his homeland and promised to make him a great nation. But they have no child together. Now Abraham is ninety-nine and Sarah is about ninety. Their tents are pitched by the great trees of Mamre, near Hebron, in the hill country. It is the heat of the day. Abraham is sitting in the shade of his tent doorway when he looks up and sees three men standing nearby.

Abraham jumps up and runs to meet them, an old man running in the heat. He bows to the ground. Please, my lord, don't pass by. Let me bring a little water to wash your feet. Rest under the tree, and I'll fetch a bit of bread. A bit of bread turns into a feast. Abraham hurries into the tent: Sarah, quick, take three measures of fine flour and bake cakes. He runs to the herd, picks out a tender calf, and has a servant prepare it. Then he brings butter, milk and the meat, and stands by them under the tree while they eat. The book of Genesis tells us that this was the Lord appearing to Abraham, with two angels.

Where is Sarah your wife? they ask. In the tent, says Abraham. Then the Lord says, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son. Sarah is listening behind the tent door. And she laughs to herself. After I am worn out, and my husband is old, shall I have this pleasure? Then the Lord says to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh? Why did she say, shall I really have a child when I am old? And then the question at the heart of this story. “Is any thing too hard for the LORD?” At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son. Sarah is afraid. I did not laugh, she says. No, he answers gently but firmly. You did laugh.

Turn the pages forward to chapter twenty-one. The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and did for her as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the very time God had spoken. Abraham names the boy Isaac, and when he is eight days old, Abraham circumcises him, as God had commanded. Abraham is a hundred years old. And Sarah laughs again, but this is a different laugh. God has made me laugh, she says, and everyone who hears will laugh with me. Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse a baby? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.

The name Isaac is a play on words. In Hebrew it is Yitzhak, which means he laughs. Genesis keeps returning to that word. Abraham laughed when God first told him about the son. Sarah laughed behind the tent. And at the birth, Sarah says God has made laughter for her. So every time someone called the boy's name, they were saying: he laughs. The laugh of doubt had become a name of joy.

You'll find this story in Genesis chapter eighteen, verses one to fifteen, and chapter twenty-one, verses one to seven. Many centuries later, an angel would tell another woman, Mary, that with God nothing is impossible. So here is a question to carry with you. What feels too hard in your life right now, and what would it look like to bring it to the God for whom nothing is too hard?