Genesis 16:5, New International Version

“…’You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.’…”

Let’s start with a question: “What if I am in the same situation of Sarai?”

The situation requires you to leave your homeland, your family, your beliefs, the comfort of the culture and community you felt that you belong to and go with your husband who can only tell you that you both are going to a promised land. Yet, he does not know where it is or how to find it.

The situation requires you to have complete trust in your husband, who is relying upon a God whom you have never heard of, nor have any understanding about. (God called Abram and Sarai out of the gentile land called Ur Kasdim to establish the nation Israel)

On the journey to this unknown promised land, two times your husband denied you as his wife for his own safety and as a result placed you in a helpless situation – as an offering to a foreign king.

Regardless of all these situations, you then faithfully follow him, serve him, and submit to him. The love that you have for him helps you to endure, but the only thing you desire is to provide an inheritance for him, but you are unable to. Year after year, you hear him saying that the Lord will give you a son, however, it sounds to you like this is an empty promise. Morning after morning you get up from bed thinking that maybe today is the day, and yet nothing happens again.

You come to a place of desperation, you accept that there is no other option but to sacrifice and share your husband with another woman. In those moments, you know the man who you love with all your heart is being intimate with another woman. You are waiting alone, and your heart is breaking with sorrow and pain.

Then the other woman becomes pregnant and despises you …

“What if I am in the same situation as Sarai?” Will you leave your husband and choose to stay behind? Will you leave him when he fails to protect you? Will you stop loving him along the journey? Or will you choose to be like Sarai and compromise believing it is the only option?

Jesus told us that we will have troubles in this fallen world. Paul told us that the path from earth to heaven requires long-suffering. The sorrow, the grief, the hardship Sarai went through along her journey is real. Abram waits for the promise, his son Issac, from God. Israel waits for their Savior, Jesus, to rescue them. Even after the promised son came, there was another sacrifice that was required. Do you have faith just like Abraham in the requirement to sacrifice his only son? Do you have faith that God will keep the promise He made to you? Do you have faith even if it requires a long wait and long suffering?

It is not an easy task. If you desire to follow Jesus it means that you must count the cost. Do you have faith to pay the cost?