When God Keeps His Promise: Genesis 21 Devotional
There is a particular kind of news that arrives too late to feel like pure joy. Sarah knew it well. But God had not forgotten the date.
The News You Already Grieved
There is a particular kind of news that arrives too late to feel like pure joy. The call you stopped waiting for. The reversal of a diagnosis you had already begun to mourn. The door that opens after you finally made peace with it being closed. When it comes, the first thing you feel is not celebration but a strange vertigo. You stand there holding good news in your hands, and something in you hesitates. Because you already did the grieving. You already learned how to live without it.
That is exactly where Genesis 21 finds Sarah. This is not the quiet, quickly-denied laugh at the tent door in Genesis 18, the laugh of a woman who had stopped daring to hope. This is something stranger. A laugh that has nowhere to put itself, spilling out in questions because words are not quite enough. But the passage does not begin with Sarah's feelings. It begins, stubbornly, with God.
Take a moment to read Genesis 21:1-7. Read it on Bible Gateway if you'd like.