“ The stranger said, ‘About this time next year I will be sure to come back to you, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.’ Now Sarah was listening at the opening of the tent, and he was close beside it. Both Abraham and Sarah had grown very old, and Sarah was past the age of child-bearing. So Sarah laughed to herself and said, ‘I am past bearing children now that I am out of my time, and my husband is old.’ The LORD said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh and say, “Shall I indeed bear a child when I am old?” Is anything impossible for the LORD? In due season I will come back to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” Genesis 21:10-14 REB

Sarah and Abraham had waited a very, very, very, long time. It was past time to hope for a child. God’s promises of yesterday, of a child seem flimsy and unreal. Sarah laughs at the preposterous promise.

My younger siblings came as quite a surprise to my parents, and to us older siblings. When I was five, my brother seven, and my sister nine, my parents told us that there was a baby coming. We waited, and waited, and waited in vain for that baby to come.

My parents were of a generation who believed, you didn’t tell children sad things, if you didn’t have to. So they never talked about my mother’s tubal pregnancy, or that she’d lost the baby, or the fact she’d been told that she couldn’t have another child. My  parents thought we’d just forget about a baby coming.

Years passed and we heard nothing more of a baby, until the year I turned twelve. And the thing of it is was, when we heard that my mother was pregnant, we had a hard time believing her. My siblings reminded me, we had heard this story before, and there was no baby. We doubted. We doubted until it was obvious we no longer could. 

This pregnancy was not easy on my mother. They were frequent trips to the hospital with several days of stay. Her legs were terribly swollen. She could barely keep food down and lost a dangerous amount of weight. At one point, when she was hospitalized, her liver counts were bad. My dad came home with the somber news, her doctor’s weren’t sure if the baby would survive. We grew increasingly worried with each hospitalization, about both my mother’s health and if there ever would be this younger sibling.

My mother had just come home on Sunday afternoon, and was gone by the time I woke up the next morning. To everyone’s surprise, my parents and her doctor, two babies, instead of one arrived, just six short minutes apart.

Sarah’s pregnancy could not have been easy. Whatever her actual age, it was late in the season of childbearing for her. One can imagine a difficult pregnancy ahead, with little of the pregnancy glow, of younger moms to be. One with the high risk  complications, of a late in life first time mom, and none of today’s modern medicine to help her through it.

As she waited for the birth of her baby, she too must have wondered if her baby would be all right, and if she herself would survive a difficult pregnancy.

Eventually the day did come. The baby was healthy and Sarah had survived. At Isaac’s birth, Sarah celebrated saying, “God has given me good reason to laugh and everyone who hears will laugh with me. ” Genesis 21:6   

Sarah laughs because she has survived. She laughs because she has given birth to a living and healthy baby. She laughs because she knew it was impossible, and yet it came to be.

Today, on my younger sibling’s birthday, I celebrate them and journey that got them here. And I laugh, when I remember the story of our doubting.