What Can We Learn From Sarah’s Laughter? — Tileston on Hope Deferred
⏱ 15 min read
You have known, perhaps for a long time, what hope deferred feels like in the body. The proverb that names it — hope deferred maketh the heart sick — does not exaggerate. The sickness is real. The hope that has been postponed for years, or decades, takes up residence in the chest and the throat and the small of the back, and the body becomes its carrier whether the mind agrees to be or not. The thing that was supposed to arrive has not arrived. The thing you have been asking for, quietly and persistently, has not been given. The waiting has begun to feel like its own sentence.
This is the part of Sarah’s story the bright Sunday-school version skips. Sarah was sixty-five when she left Ur with Abraham. She was eighty-nine when the three visitors arrived at the tent at Mamre and announced that she would conceive within the year. She had been waiting twenty-five years between the call and the announcement, and she had been waiting since her own girlhood for the children that simply did not come. The famous detail of the story is her laughing inside the tent when she overheard the visitors at the door, and the laughter the text records is not the bright laughter of joy. It is the small bitter laughter of a woman in her late eighties hearing, again, the promise that has been spoken so many times across her life that the body cannot believe it any more. The Stilling Waves Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built for women whose own hope has had to bear weight across a long stretch, and Sarah’s tent-door laughter is one of the holiest small sounds in scripture for the woman whose own hope has gone quiet. For now — read slowly. (If you are at a stage where the Bible itself feels like too much, an easy Bible for the beginner woman walks the first thirty days; bible study tools for women walks the five tools you actually need; and a modern bible study method for the reader trained on skim walks the pace itself.)
Mary Wilder Tileston, the New England Quaker who compiled Daily Strength for Daily Needs in 1884, wrote a devotional that is itself a long meditation on the kind of hope that has had to learn to hold across the long stretches. Tileston did not write essays. She gathered, on each day of the year, a short scripture and two or three devotional passages from older fathers and mothers — Fénelon, Pusey, Faber, William Law, Christina Rossetti — and let the gathered pieces do their work in the slow rhythm of one short page a morning. What Tileston understood about hope was that it does not survive on the strength of dramatic interventions. It survives on the strength of small daily returns to trust, repeated quietly across years that nobody photographs. Sarah’s story is the Old Testament’s longest example of this kind of hope, and Tileston’s gathered passages name the inward weather of it more precisely than most of the contemporary devotional language manages.
The first episode: the tent door, and the small bitter laughter
The scene in Genesis 18 is one of the quietest in the Pentateuch. Three travellers arrive at Abraham’s tent at Mamre in the heat of the day. Abraham — gracious, hospitable, eighty-nine years old himself — runs to greet them, prepares a meal, and stands beside the tree under which they eat. Sarah is inside the tent, preparing cakes. The visitors ask after her by name. Where is Sarah thy wife? The intimacy of the question is its own thing. Sarah is not on the guest list. Sarah is not visible. The visitors ask after her anyway. Abraham answers from outside the tent: behold, in the tent.
Then the announcement. I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. The text records, with no commentary, what Sarah does next. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. Therefore Sarah laughed within herself.
Read it twice. The detail that the text refuses to soften is therefore Sarah laughed within herself. The laughter is not the laughter of belief. It is the small interior laughter of a body that has stopped expecting this particular promise. Sarah was not a frivolous woman. She had not laughed lightly at God’s promises in her younger years. The laughter at the tent door is the laughter of a woman whose body has been telling her, for at least two decades, that the season for this particular hope is over, and who is now overhearing a stranger at the door announce, again, that the season has not in fact closed.
Tileston, who collected pieces about hope deferred more sensitively than most, gathered a passage from George Matheson into the daily rhythm of her book that names the inward landscape of Sarah’s laughter exactly:
“O Lord God gracious and merciful, give us, I entreat Thee, a humble trust in Thy mercy, and suffer not our heart to fail us. Though our sins be seven, though our sins be seventy times seven, though our sins be more in number than the hairs of our head, yet give us grace in loving penitence to cast ourselves down into the depth of Thy compassion. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord.”
— Christina Rossetti, gathered in Daily Strength for Daily Needs (Mary Tileston)
Sit with the prayer. Suffer not our heart to fail us. The phrase is exact for the woman at the tent door. Sarah’s heart had not failed in the catastrophic sense. She had walked the twenty-five years. She had kept the household. She had not abandoned the God who had spoken in Ur. But the small failing of the heart — the laughter inside the tent, the bitter interior recognition that the body had outlived the promise — was the kind of partial failure that hope-deferred eventually produces, even in the saints, even in the women whose larger faith has not collapsed.
Tileston’s gathered prayer is the small daily petition that holds the partial failing in front of the Lord without pretending it is not there. Give us grace in loving penitence to cast ourselves down into the depth of Thy compassion. The casting-down is not a performance of optimism. It is the honest small surrender of the laughter itself into the hand of the One who is, gently, going to do the thing the laughter had stopped expecting.
The first lesson, then, on what can we learn from Sarah in the Bible: the laughter is not the disqualification. Sarah laughed at the tent door, and the Lord asked Abraham, gently, wherefore did Sarah laugh, and Sarah denied it from inside the tent, for she was afraid, and the Lord said, nay, but thou didst laugh. The exchange ends without rebuke. The Lord names the laughter; Sarah denies it; the Lord notes the denial; and the announcement stands. The promise is not withdrawn because Sarah’s heart has been honest about its weariness. The promise simply continues. Is any thing too hard for the LORD? The question is the only theology the moment requires.
The second episode: the long stretch behind the tent door
To understand Sarah’s laughter, the modern reader has to sit, for a moment, inside the years that produced it. Sarah was at least sixty-five when she left Ur. She had been married to Abraham since at least her twenties. She had spent forty years before the call hoping, in the ordinary way, for the children that did not come. Then the call. Then the leaving. Then the promise in Genesis 12, that Abraham would be made into a great nation. Then ten more years of waiting. Then the Hagar episode — Sarah’s own attempt to engineer the promise, which produced Ishmael but did not produce the answer. Then fourteen more years of watching Ishmael grow up as the son who had been her idea and not God’s.
Eighty-nine years of hoping. Forty of them in ordinary childlessness before any call had been spoken. Twenty-five of them in promised childlessness, with the promise spoken but not fulfilled. The Hagar misstep in the middle. Ishmael as the visible answer that turned out not to be the answer. The body, by the tent door at Mamre, was a body that had not expected this hope for a very long time, and the body’s laughter was the truthful report of the years.
Tileston gathered, on a different page of the daily devotional, a passage from François Fénelon — the seventeenth-century French archbishop and contemplative who wrote letters to women in the court of Louis XIV about exactly this kind of long inner endurance:
“And we shall steer safely through every storm, so long as our heart is right, our intention fervent, our courage steadfast, and our trust fixed on God. If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness which are sometimes produced by the multiplicity of your domestic worries. No indeed, dearest child, all these are but opportunities of strengthening yourself in the loving, forbearing graces which our dear Lord sets before us.”
— François Fénelon, gathered in Daily Strength for Daily Needs (Mary Tileston)
Read it twice. If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. The line is the pastoral instruction for the long stretch behind the tent door. The tempest in Sarah’s life had not been a single storm; it had been the steady rain of decades of hope-deferred. The being-stunned was real. The taking-breath-and-going-on-afresh was the daily small recovery the body learned to do after each fresh disappointment. Fénelon does not promise that the disappointment will stop. He promises that the heart that takes breath and goes on afresh will find that the fits of vexation and uneasiness turn out to be opportunities of strengthening.
This is the second lesson on what can we learn from Sarah in the Bible. The long stretch behind the tent door is not wasted. The strengthening is happening, slowly, inside the small daily recoveries from each fresh disappointment. Sarah at sixty-five was not the Sarah who would name her son Isaac. Sarah at eighty-nine, at the tent door, was. The twenty-five years had done the slow work of making her ready to receive what she had been asking for, in a way that the younger Sarah, less stunned and less strengthened, would not have been ready for.
You may be in your own twenty-five-year stretch. The being-stunned may have been the pattern of more years than you can count. The taking-breath-and-going-on-afresh may have become so habitual that you no longer notice you are doing it. Fénelon — and Tileston, gathering him into her daily — would say that the small recoveries have not been invisible to God. They have been the slow strengthening of a heart that will, in its own season, be ready for the answer when it comes.
A pause for the body
The teaching has been long enough that the body has begun to brace again. Pause, here, in the middle of the essay.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by a small amount — not by trying to relax, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the chest, which the long hope-deferred has tightened, soften by a small amount. Let the jaw unclench. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale, until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own. Repeat once more. Then continue reading.
The hope-deferred body is the tight-body. The chest pulled in around the place the disappointment lives. The shoulders held up against the next possible blow. The breath shallow because the deep breath has begun to feel risky. The small lowering of the shoulders and the slow exhale are the body’s first small refusals of the long defensive posture. The body learning, gently, that it does not have to hold itself against the possibility that the answer will not come. The body learning that the rest is available even before the answer arrives.
The Stilling Waves Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built around this kind of slow daily softening. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. No demand to perform. The kind of small daily companion the woman at the tent door would have used, if Tileston’s form had existed in her century.
The third episode: she named him laughter
The promise is fulfilled. And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as he had spoken. For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him. Sarah is ninety. Abraham is one hundred. The son is born. And Sarah does the thing that turns the whole story.
She names him Isaac. The Hebrew word means laughter. The name is the woman’s own redemption of the small bitter laughter at the tent door. The same word that was the body’s report of unbelief becomes, in her hands, the public name of the answer. Sarah does not pretend the laughter at the door did not happen. She redeems it. She makes the laughter the name of the child. Every time anybody in the household calls the boy by his given name, the word laughter is spoken aloud — the laughter of disbelief turned into the laughter of fulfilment, the small bitter sound at the door turned into the public daily naming of the son who proved the promise true.
And then Sarah says the line that Tileston gathered her whole devotional around. God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me. The laughter has changed register. It is no longer bitter. It is no longer interior. It is no longer denied. It is the laughter of a ninety-year-old woman whose body has been visited by the God who is not constrained by the calendar, and the whole household can hear it, and the laughter is large enough to be shared with everyone who hears the story afterwards — including, four thousand years later, the woman reading this essay in her own long stretch of hope-deferred.
Tileston, gathering a small line of verse for the day, included this:
“In the heart’s depths a peace serene and holy / Abides, and when pain seems to have its will, / Or we despair,—oh, may that peace rise slowly, / Stronger than agony, and we be still.”
— gathered in Daily Strength for Daily Needs (Mary Tileston)
Sit with the line. May that peace rise slowly, stronger than agony, and we be still. This is the inward weather of Sarah at the moment of Isaac’s birth. The peace did not arrive in a flash. It rose slowly, across the twenty-five years and the tent-door laughter and the small daily recoveries. The peace was, by the time the boy was placed in her arms, stronger than the agony of the long wait, because the rising had been quiet and continuous through every year of the stretch. The being-still that the verse names is the being-still of a woman who has, at last, been given the answer her body had stopped expecting.
The line worth keeping near the page is the second half. Stronger than agony, and we be still. That is the gift Sarah’s whole story is pointing toward. Not the absence of agony. Not the avoidance of the long wait. The slow rising, underneath the agony, of a peace that finally exceeds it — and the stillness that follows, in which the laughter that had been bitter becomes the public name of the child who proved God’s faithfulness.
What Sarah’s laughter teaches across a life
The famous line of Sarah’s story — is any thing too hard for the LORD? — is not spoken by Sarah. It is spoken by the Lord Himself at the tent door, in response to Sarah’s interior laughter. The question is rhetorical and patient. The Lord is not rebuking the laughter; He is asking the question that the laughter requires. The laughter was the body’s report of the impossibility. The question is the Lord’s response to the impossibility. Is any thing too hard for the LORD? And the question stands, four thousand years later, beside every laughter at every tent door of every woman whose body has stopped expecting the answer her younger self had been asking for.
What we can actually learn from Sarah in the Bible, for the lives most of us are living, is not that hope-deferred eventually produces fulfilment. Sarah’s story does not promise that the specific answer you have been asking for will come in this life in the form you have been picturing. Many of the saints’ answers did not come on this side of the grave. What Sarah’s story promises is that the laughter at the tent door is not the disqualification. The body’s report of weariness is heard by the Lord without rebuke. The promise continues. The question stands. The slow rising of the peace — stronger than agony, and we be still — is happening underneath the long stretch whether your mind can detect it on any given Tuesday or not.
That is the slow secret of what can we learn from Sarah in the Bible. The laughter is honest. The wait is real. The strengthening is happening. The peace is rising. The naming, when it comes, may yet turn your own bitter sound into the public name of an answer you have stopped expecting. Is any thing too hard for the LORD? The question is the only theology the long stretch requires. (For the sibling slow reads in this series, what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus walks Tileston on the Magnificat at the same contemplative pace, and what can we learn from Hannah’s prayer walks Spurgeon on another woman whose body had stopped expecting the answer.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor for the woman whose own laughter at the tent door has happened more than once, and who is ready, slowly, to let the peace rise underneath the long wait.
The Stilling Waves Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Tileston’s slow vocabulary — the suffering-not-our-heart-to-fail, the taking-breath-and-going-on-afresh, the peace that rises slowly stronger than agony — into a daily companion built for the woman whose own hope-deferred has been carrying her body for years, and who is ready to let the slow strengthening continue.
