The finest snippets of life are those in which laughter is at the core—events meaningful enough to be etched into our brains. Such times bring deep healing and shape who we become. They’re the kind we frame and display in a place of prominence, the ones we bring up around campfires for years to come, reliving the hilarity and the rapture.

Once in a while laughter simply overcomes you, coming from deep in your belly, the sound filled with joy and hope and enduring love. One of those times that I will never forget was the spring of 1997, when I was twenty-two years old. I had just gotten off work at Channel Islands, which I loved so much—the surf shop belonging to my then-boyfriend’s (now-husband’s) parents. It had been a long, hot day of folding T-shirts, hanging bikinis, making cute displays, and chatting up all the locals. Surf shops tend to be something of a hub for people who share a love for the greatest sport on earth. No, I’m not biased.

My boyfriend had called me on the landline at work and asked me to come down to the beach to watch the sunset with him. Sweet, but not entirely the usual. Our evenings normally consisted of surfing then gorging on burritos and ice cream. But no matter, it sounded fun! So I went.

On the beach we held hands, we chatted, he chased me around with a dead jellyfish on a stick, and we were caught up in the bliss belonging to two young people who didn’t have a whole lot of life under their belts yet. Unaware of what the future would bring, we were completely in the moment. We got to where the waves began to break, and he suggested we sit down in the sand.

At the moment the sun sank below the horizon, he turned to me and said, “Katie, you know I love you, and I want you to be my girl. Will you marry me?” Oh, my heart. I knew something was up his sleeve! That’s when it happened.

The laughter began deep in my belly and bubbled out of me. It spilled over my lips and down the front of my shirt and all over the sand. It flowed so freely, as if there were an endless supply of joyful noise all bound up inside me. More and more and more came, and soon tears came with it—giving motion and texture to the joy, the abandon of relishing in another’s love, the realization that someone wanted to give me his name, give me a home, give me a diamond ring to seal the whole delicious deal.

I laughed so much, so thoroughly, that my soon-to-be fiancé confusedly asked, “So? Will you?” I loudly proclaimed, “Yes! A thousand yeses!” No joke. If you need to throw up, do it now. But I loved it, every second of it. The pure laughter of freedom and love and happiness and the anticipation of more good to come. Sigh.

Then there are other times, when laughter seems completely inappropriate. I was at the funeral of a dear woman from our church about eight or nine months after Daisy died. She was a wonderful woman, very loved, a feisty little thing with a great sense of humor, which is why I don’t feel so bad about what comes next. During the service one of her daughters spoke about how being a mom sometimes requires doing the difficult thing. She shared a story about how excruciating it was to give her own young daughter painful treatments for leukemia, then linked the idea to a time when her mother had helped her off a ski lift the hard way in order to save her from further danger.

Right at that moment, my husband leaned over and whispered into my ear, “Thanks a lot, Mom, for shoving me off the lift.” I was struck with the funny stick so hard, there was no hope. I yukked and yukked with shoulders shaking and tears streaming, all the while praying to remain unnoticed—which is virtually impossible in a setting like that. I hid my head in my husband’s shoulder while we both had an absolute letdown of emotion in the form of uncontrollable laughter.

Apparently we hid this fact well. A close friend of mine brought over a box of tissues, thinking the leukemia thing was dredging up grim thoughts from our own daughter’s treatment. Honestly, that had passed me right by, and I believe God allowed us to find humor in an impossible situation for the good of our hearts.

By the way—super sorry, dear deceased friend, for cracking up at your funeral. And to any friends who were at the same funeral and are just now discovering the truth about my “breakdown”? Well, I hope you still love me. Survival mode, y’all.

Laughter is the strangest thing. It can be healing, literally. It can inject an impossibly terrible situation with a whoosh of fresh air. Sharing laughter fosters a bond between humans. In its purest form it brings life. When a baby laughs, it’s like no other sound. I’m sure 99 percent of you have watched the YouTube video of all those babies strewn over their sweet mama, laughing simultaneously. Put that on repeat, please.

I even pay money to laugh. (Thank you, Tim Hawkins, for getting me through cancer, my firstborn’s puberty, and having a toddler at age forty—I own all your DVDs.) Sometimes laughter seems inappropriate, but it is the only thing that can get you through a rough patch. Many times I found myself making jokes about vomit and edema in the hospital with seven-year-old Daisy. Pranking the nurses and doctors became the highlight of some pretty miserable days. I mean, what else are you going to do? I’m convinced laughter is key to survival.

I’ve laughed a lot in my life, lots of happy and free laughter, throwing my head back and busting a gut. But as the years have gone by and I’ve experienced more tough times, the lighthearted atmosphere has shifted. I have seen myself spewing a different kind of laughter: a bitter, hardened laughter, like a waste product of a sick heart. And it’s ugly. It came poking its head out when I was unaware it was even there. Like termites hidden in wood that was once healthy.

For the past six years I’ve dwelt in ashes, the acrid smoke of desolation all around, and in dark times of reflection I have seen myself mocking the very idea of finding joy through all the sorrow. Bitter laughter has been sneaky, has hidden itself, and like spiderwebs appearing stealthily in the corners of your closet, it has come to inhabit the corners of my heart. Slowly but surely, this fractious and unwelcome guest has settled down deep. It caught me by surprise and threatened to become a way of life for me—one of cynical unbelief in God’s goodness, of rancor at the horrors I’ve suffered.

Sometimes seeing ourselves clearly in the mirror is a bummer experience. If the last time you looked in the mirror your makeup was fresh and your hair was rocking, you feel pretty good about yourself. But if the reality is that you looked like a raccoon and had cilantro in your teeth, well then, you have a problem. And it takes either a close-up mirror or a true friend to let you know when there’s a bat in the cave (girlfriend’s code for “check your nose”).

Recently I got a little spiritual mirror check. At first glance, I was generally doing pretty well—cruising right along, loving Jesus, raising babies. My faith in God, for the most part, hadn’t wavered; I still worshipped with a sincere heart and desire to hear him speak. But the barely there niggling feelings of bitterness had lingered in my subconscious. Little grudges had formed, jokes indulgently made only to myself. I had thrown away joy because of something I didn’t understand, because the answer to my most fervent prayer was a heavy, unalterable, ghastly no.

I realized I was living life with the limp of one who has been injured but not correctly healed. All my nasty, grievous attitudes were feeding the bitter beast in me, and it manifested itself in snappish humor. I took everything personally, was easily offended, and used dry humor as my shield.

Every time I received “comfort” that turned out to be hurtful, it fed the secret monster just a bit, the monster that hid behind a veil of wisecracks. When my temper flared at other women who complained about their children, I made jealous jokes. My conversations at home often turned snarky, bringing morale a few notches down, allowing my beastly burden to swell. My husband wondered aloud where his wife had gone, and God began to show me the truth. I was playing the victim—the very thing I can’t stand in others—and I had been blind to it all along. Sin always looks better on us than on everyone else.

Slowly, gently, I awakened to this repulsive and sinister thing growing inside me. The mocking laughter, the defense mechanism, the vice for dealing with life. I thought, If I don’t believe God’s goodness for me personally, then I can’t be disappointed in him. If I don’t ask him for anything, then he can’t slam the door in my face again. It’s almost as if I was trying to save face, but whose face was I trying to save? That’s a question between me and the Creator, one that requires surrender and the flaying open of the heart. Give me some time on that one.

But God. Two of the greatest words. In Ephesians 2:4–5 (ESV), we are given the beautiful words of the good news: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us . . . made us alive together with Christ.”

But God has not seen fit to let me wallow in my sadness.

But God has been bringing my darkness into the light.

But God has not been quiet to me, even after all the hidden places, the flippant jokes about my rotten lot in life.

But God has been generously offering to trade my sorrow for gladness, my confusion for peace.

God is gently, lovingly teaching me about laughter, about himself, about life and death and goodness and pain and the future. He’s giving me ways to walk in peace, to be rid of bitterness, to be strengthened. Ways that have carried me through murky times and changed my days. He’s using human experience and biblical women to show me truth in a new light, and it makes me want to laugh, makes me feel loved all over again. It reminds me that he is caring for my soul, and he is inviting me into deeper relationship.

I love reading about women in ages past—what they were like and what they did—and it’s funny because nothing is new under the sun. Women will always be women. Like Miriam, we sing and dance. We throw girls-only parties like Vashti, laugh too loudly like Elizabeth, and love perfume like Mary of Bethany. We favor the dramatic and the beautiful and, like Esther, we are stronger than we let on.

But of all the extraordinary women in the Bible, I find Sarah, wife of Abraham, to be the most unpredictably relatable. Sarah, an extolled woman of faith and example to Jews and Christians throughout millennia. On the surface, she had it all. She was beautiful, married to a rich and godly man, and even had servants. She bravely obeyed God’s will for her life and traveled to a foreign but promised land, and I just know she was covered in swanky accessories while she did it. She was living the dream, and it sounds sexy!

But take a closer look, and you’ll see she was also a woman who experienced much disappointment. Her perfect veneer of beauty and travel and wealth was just that: a veneer. It concealed her heartbreak neatly beneath the surface. Dig a little deeper, and we find out she suffered a lifetime of infertility—which was a very big deal in ancient Middle Eastern culture, when a woman’s ability to have children, and scads of them, dictated her worth.

Her heart’s desire was to have her empty arms filled, to lay love on a child, to nurse and nurture and raise up a tiny human she could call her own. Year after year went by, desolate and dry. I know what it is to ache to hold the small one you love, to have that reality unfulfilled, unreachable. The feminine heart thirsts for intimacy, and the motherly soul longs to provide nourishment, attention, affection, life.

Yet Sarah, this exotic and noble woman, hid deep in her heart a hope for the future. You see, God had promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation. So Sarah waited and waited for God to make good, but the years went by and she grew very old and quite discouraged. I’m sure she was ready to throw in the towel on the whole “follow God to Canaan” and “you’ll be the mother of a great nation” thing.

Sometime around Genesis 16, when Sarah was in her seventies, she tried to take matters into her own hands and manipulate the situation. (I’ve never done that.) Desperate times call for desperate measures. So, out of desperation, she gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to her husband in hopes of having a baby by proxy. Let’s read Genesis 16:2:

So Sarai said to Abram, “The LORD has prevented me from having children. Go and sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have children through her.” And Abram agreed with Sarai’s proposal.

Really, dude? Abe, it seems like it didn’t take you very long to make the decision. Just sayin’.

Can you imagine lending your husband out for the night to your maidservant? I mean, what do you say to them? “Good luck, guys!” Or “Please go to the farthest tent down!” Or maybe you just plug your ears and say, “Lalalalalalalala!” Those were different days.

Then when Hagar became pregnant, her relationship with Sarah turned sketchy—surprise, surprise!—and there was contempt and fighting. Aside from the fact that God had promised Sarah, not Hagar, that she would be the mother of nations and even kings of nations, not much good could come from finding an “easy” fix, from manipulation. We cannot bend and twist God’s Word to suit our desires. No matter how badly we thirst, it’s never a good idea. The rift in Sarah and Hagar’s relationship was immediate proof.

But we can’t judge her for this, can we? Raise your hand if you’ve tried to “help” God along, if you’ve ever been so single-minded that all else went out of focus. If you’ve mowed over other people in a scramble to see God’s promise come to fruition. We are all so much like Sarah, yearning for our hearts’ desire—hoping, believing, waiting, and getting frustrated with God’s timing and trying to fix the situation on our own. Sarah’s world became filled with tension, hostility, and sadness, and it was all because she took matters into her own hands.

More years went by after this epic fail, and when Sarah was ninety years old, she was again reminded of God’s promise. This brings us to the event I want us to camp out on.

Picture an arid, Middle Eastern landscape, date palms burgeoning with fruit in the distance, sun smoldering in a pale sky, donkeys mournfully braying in the heat of the day. Dudes in long robes with copious amounts of facial hair, camels bearing brightly colored blankets and trinkets jangling and swinging in time with their unhurried stride. Inside the sun-bleached tent are rugs for lounging, embroidered pillows, and stunning, richly colored, expensive tapestries draped excessively all around the cavernous space. Ornate silver pitchers and cups sit on trays, beckoning one to sip thick, mysterious drinks. Candles housed in bronze with gorgeous perforated designs cast an enigmatic glow on the substantial yet temporary walls.

Abraham was resting in the door of his tent in the heat of the day, when he looked up and noticed three men nearby. He jumped up, bowed before them, and, after washing their feet, invited the men to stay for a bite to eat. This gesture of respect was so lovely, so honorable. As he rushed back to the tent he told Sarah, “Hurry! Bake some bread for our guests!” A servant prepared a calf, Abraham spread out a sumptuous feast, and he served his guests in the shade of the trees. There is nothing like Middle Eastern hospitality.

One of these men was “the angel of the Lord.” Many scholars believe this is one of several theophanies in the Old Testament, also known as a pre-incarnate visit from Jesus. This makes my heart jump! Here Jesus was, personally paying Abraham and Sarah a visit, about to deliver good news, and enjoying an intimate meal. I like his style.

Here’s what comes next in Genesis 18:9–10:

“Where is Sarah, your wife?” the visitors asked.

“She’s inside the tent,” Abraham replied.

Then one of them said, “I will return to you about this time next year, and your wife, Sarah, will have a son!”

How sublime is this incredible promise—this loving delivery of impossibly good news. Note that he said Sarah will have the son, not through Hagar; and it’s not simply a spiritual son, but one of flesh and blood. He would share Sarah’s DNA and come from Sarah’s womb the old-fashioned way. He reiterated the literal promise made so long ago under a dusting of stars and revealed his plans to flesh it out his way—not the way Sarah tried to finagle it.

This was not new information to either Abraham or Sarah, but it likely resurrected conflicting feelings of hope rising and excitement building, alongside fear and disillusionment. Sarah was afraid to feel, to accept, to believe God’s goodness to them.

Check out her response after hearing those words, this prophecy aimed like an arrow directly at Sarah’s threadbare heart:

Sarah was listening to this conversation from the tent. Abraham and Sarah were both very old by this time, and Sarah was long past the age of having children. So she laughed silently to herself and said, “How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master—my husband—is also so old?” (Gen. 18:10–12)

Sarah laughed, although I’m guessing it was more of a snort. Or one of those tch sounds, psshhh, “I’m so sure,” or any other appropriate accompaniment to a sneer—whatever exits our mouths when we hear something that sounds ridiculous, or sounds like someone trying to pass off a lie. Some saliva probably landed on the tent wall.

Sarah laughed, not joyfully but bitterly. How could she possibly be blessed with a child, considering her life’s circumstances? They’d loomed large and cast a shadow on every corner of her life. She had a hardened and tired heart, which once held on to hope but had gradually let it go like the fine desert sand through her fingers. It was from this dry soil, this weary place, that her scoffing laughter sprang.

I know this bitterness well. I have endured the empty exhaustion of being denied my heart’s desire. The despair and weariness that come from absorbing the punches life throws at you. You feel like you’re in the corner of a boxing ring with blood running down your lopsided swollen eye. There are sweat and tears and no hope of victory against the heaving hulk in the opposite corner. There is no seeing straight, no thinking straight—only agony. You feel the hot breath, the shouting of encouragement, the screaming of those who want to help you get back up, to help you live, but it all gets drowned out by bleak circumstances, the endless jabs to the face, the gut, the heart. I know what it’s like, when all you see is what or who is against you. There appears to be no way to fight back, no way to win, no way to catch a breath, much less overcome.

Maybe that’s how Sarah felt as she hid inside the tent. Past menopause. Married to a one-hundred-year-old husband. Botched surrogacy. Homeless. It was not looking very probable, much less possible. It had been twenty-four years since she first heard the promise of a baby boy, the promise that she would birth the beginning of a great nation. Or was it a fairy tale? A figment of her imagination? Had the desert heat gotten to her that day? Had she downed one too many gorgeous goblets of Mediterranean wine? Did she hear correctly? Because God should have shown up by now. But instead he had let her womb dry up, and now it was too late to conceive a baby, too late to hang on to the fulfillment of an aging promise.

Sarah was up against an impossible wall, and so the spiteful chuckle tumbled forth. She just couldn’t see past the immediate impossible circumstances and into the eternal unseen reality. At least not yet . . .

After this, in his kindness, God asked Abraham an unexpected question: “Why did Sarah laugh?” He called her out for harboring sour thoughts and small-mindedness toward God’s abilities, toward his very word. Even though she had laughed silently and asked the question only to herself, God heard her loud and clear. He heard her silent bitterness, her unbelief, her mockery of his goodness. He heard her inwardly focused misery and witnessed the rolling of her eyes. And he hears mine.

This is something God does even now, as I allow him to perform heart surgery on me. He has totally convicted me about my decision to focus on the terrible rather than the wonderful. I have too often chosen a lack of faith, chosen to squeeze my eyes shut and wallow in the reeking funk of self-pity. I have too often made the decision to let sharp, resentful words reside in my inner dialogue.

Snarky thoughts and cranky commentary have been sneaking around in my head and heart for some time. I have brushed them off as humor. I have given myself a break because, after all, my kid died, you know. I have compared myself with others who are grieving for various reasons and have graded myself on the curve, believing that if anyone deserves a self-indulgent attitude, it’s me.

I have welcomed those ugly little phrases to hover around the recesses of my brain. I’ve kept feelings of rancor in a bowl by the door, ready to be passed out like Halloween candy. I’ve nurtured them. I have given them space, made their beds, and fluffed their pillows. Probably the worst thing about it is that I have felt justified through it all. God, forgive me.

You know when we say, “God knows my heart”? Well, he actually does, and it should freak us out. I’m pretty positive that’s usually not what we want it to mean. We most often say it to defend our sloppy, selfish actions, using it as a flimsy excuse one can’t argue with. We can do or say the most ridiculous of things and feel completely justified . . . “It’s cool, God knows my heart.”

The prophet Jeremiah said the heart is desperately wicked. Oh Lord, don’t I know it. I may be a pastor’s wife, but my heart is as wicked as the next girl’s. I am filled up with selfishness, contempt, impatience, pride, entitlement, and, honestly, the list goes on.

When God asked why Sarah laughed, he had already seen her heart, and it was not pretty. He wasn’t about to let her off the hook, not because he wanted to point out a flaw or because he’d taken offense. He wasn’t angling to feel smart or look good in front of the others. No, God cared about how Sarah received the promise he gave to her. That’s why he exposed her reaction. He wanted more for her than bitter resignation, so he confronted her with her hidden sin. Desiring to swap out what was corroding Sarah’s soul for what can bring life and wholeness, he asked, “Why did Sarah laugh? Abe, I heard your wife snorting in the next tent over. What gives?” (See Gen. 18:13–14.)

In these sticky, messy hearts of ours, there’s never just one little sin; there’s a whole string of them. Like when you think you’ve found the mouse in your kitchen that’s been snacking on the granola, and the thought crosses your mind that by itself it’s actually kind of cute and maybe you should let it live. Adorable little fella with the pink ears and tail, he’s not so bad. But soon you discover that there’s a whole nasty nest full of them, and they’ve been pooping and reproducing in your lingerie drawer.

Sarah had another “mouse” following on the tail of her first snafu of chagrined laughter—a big fat fib. When confronted, Sarah lied, straight to God’s face! She was afraid, we read, so she denied it all.

“Wasn’t me. Don’t know what you’re talking about!” (See Genesis 18:15.)

I’m so thankful my worst moments aren’t canonized in Scripture for all to read! But honestly, thank you, Sarah, for letting us learn from you. Thank you for your candor.

Sarah laughed—yikes. God asked her why she did so—yikes. But now, in my opinion, this is the pièce de résistance. This part of the story is so funny, but at the same time totally fear inducing. After the fib Sarah throws down, the Lord said to her, “No, you did laugh.”

Wouldn’t you be mortified? I can see his face, displaying a parental look that says, “Don’t even try to pull a fast one. I’ve got your number, sweetie pie.” He didn’t let it go but made a point, and the point was a beautiful thing: God heard her bitter laughter, and he wanted her to know that nothing was too marvelous for him. He had exciting news for her and wanted to present it to his beloved daughter. She could have taken it in her hands with joy and wonder, opened the gift with glee. But instead she received it with folded arms, with pursed lips, with rejection.

Oh Sarah, I get it. Me too. How foreign good news sounds when the heart is pulsing sorrow with every beat, when all around is opposition, when life completely stinks. How many of us are there right now? We are tired; our faith is stretched thin; we thought we knew what our place was on this earth. We thought we knew what we believed.

Maybe we’ve failed to obey God in certain areas, or we’ve been let down by someone we were counting on. Or maybe the one thing we wanted and were convinced God would give us still dangles in the distance—unreachable, taunting, tormenting. We feel like Sarah, old and tired and sad and beaten down. We secretly laugh in mockery when we think of blessings coming our way. We laugh in disbelief. We have begun the unraveling of faith, working the pile of loose thread into a picture of despair.

But God hears us laughing. He hears the sound of our bitter scoffing and wants to call us out on it, wants us to come out of our inward-focused pity party.

I’m so convicted by this. My tendency is toward self-preservation, but true to the counterintuitive way God often works, it has been a tremendous encouragement and blessing to lift my head and listen hard through the tent wall, to receive the rebuke, to be reminded that nothing is too marvelous for my Lord.

You know how, in the book of John, Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it can’t live? That’s what I’m talking about. Doing what you think will save yourself actually works against you. Think about your body. When our tendency is toward self-preservation, we figure lying curled up in bed after a birth or a hard workout is the best thing we can do for our bodies—to protect them from further injury or strain. It feels good in the moment. But in the long run, it works against us. Muscles atrophy and we become sick and weak because various parts of our bodies begin to shut down from lack of use.

Or it’s like a marriage in which one or both spouses are merely concerned with protecting themselves, as if marriage were a contract, not a covenant. They think getting their own way, whether by physically, emotionally, or even financially withholding themselves from the other, will result in personal happiness and satisfaction. The marriage inevitably crumbles when it’s fueled by self-protection, but that same sickly relationship becomes strong and begins to shine when one spouse is brave enough to step out of the way of self-preservation and choose the way of death to self—whether in the form of respect, service, or forgiveness. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. It’s another way we exercise our faith, because it takes faith to come out of the self-defensiveness of grief and disappointment.

There are still bitter parts in me he wants to mine out. He wants to completely free me from self-pity, free me from immobilizing melancholy, free me from brooding about terrible memories that push me deeper into the stink. I can feel them being chipped away, sometimes with the finesse of a tool meant for uncovering precious gems. Minute movements expose bits of precious beauty: realizations of biblical truth and gentle reminders of Jesus’ love for me and my place as his adopted daughter. Other parts are being excavated with a big old grubby pickax, hard chunks flying, inducing sweat, tears, and piles of waste that were getting in the way of the good stuff. Inside there is a vein of gold, the gleaming slash that brightens the surrounding dullness of the hard-packed earth. It’s never a neat or clean affair when your self-righteous pity party is brought into the light.

“Life is hard, then you die.”

Why did you laugh?

“Apparently God doesn’t hear my prayers, so I’ll be sitting this one out.”

Why did you laugh?

“Sure would be fun to have more kids. Too bad mine keep dying.”

Why did you laugh?

“The dance recital sounds fun. But it’s for people whose kids are alive, and, well, mine’s dead, so . . .”

Why did you laugh?

I make snide comments in my mind, flimsy attempts at humor that only serve to showcase my emotional desperation. I sometimes behave as if I’m the only one on earth who has had her heart ripped out, but I’ve been busted. I’m stepping into Sarah’s place right now, busted for eavesdropping with disregard for keeping my eyes on that which is unseen, busted for staying in a place of stony heart and inflexible vision, busted for laughing at God’s promised goodness with mockery.

God wants not only to free me from what comes between us but also to give me a hope that draws me nearer to himself. Nearness to God results in a banquet of peace beyond understanding, with a heaping side of joy. He wants to give me laughter—hilarious, sidesplitting, tears-running-down-my-face, can’t-get-a-breath, bladder-busting laughter. The kind you can only find amid the plans of the Maker, amid the anticipation of present and coming glory.

Thank you, Jesus, for not letting us continue in our flesh when we feel so entitled to it. We feel like we are only human and “just trying to survive here, people”; but he disciplines those he loves. Instead of being vindicated by a heavenly visitor because life had been so sad in so many ways, Sarah got set straight.

God didn’t give her a break and say, “Yeah, I’d laugh too. It’s cool. You’re old, and life is hard.” No, he said, “Why did you laugh? I’ve got this. And don’t lie. I heard you.” He saw something Sarah wasn’t humanly able to, and he sees something that’s beyond my vision as well.

He was planning to turn Sarah’s mourning to joy. He’s planning to turn my mourning and your mourning to joy, the kind of joy we can’t drum up on our own. The kind of joy that requires faith in his goodness for an awesome future. Because when I woke up on a Monday morning and put my bathing suit on underneath my clothes for a surf date with my husband but landed instead at the hospital, it took faith to survive the impossible, nightmarish days that followed.

When I’m choking on memories of my lifeless darling girl, of her limp body in my arms, of how I handed her over to the men in suits waiting to carry her out my front door in the predawn hours, when every sunrise for the rest of my life will remind me of that night of radical loss, it takes faith to see past the inky blackness. When my skin aches to feel Daisy’s face on mine again, when I remember what it felt like to kiss her lifeless forehead, growing colder by the minute, it takes faith to process the longing. When I see my daughter’s best friends playing together and growing up without her, when I know by experience that life changes in the blink of an eye, when I’m left bleeding out from watching cancer slay my daughter bit by bit, when I set the table for three, not four, it takes faith to see beyond the present sadness.

It takes faith to get out of bed in the morning, faith to let my guard down. It takes faith to love someone new, faith to face another day with a destroyed and suspicious heart. It takes faith to move forward in life, and, truly, it takes faith to not laugh in bitterness, dwelling on hostile circumstances.

Here is why Sarah’s shenanigans in the tent encourage me, reminding me of something that allows the smile to creep slowly across my face. The only way to get that essential faith, to experience the healing truth, is to go straight to the mouth of God. Straight to the Lord who came up Sarah’s driveway and had a cheeseburger at her tent, straight to the Maker of the universe, the Master Designer.

It’s true—faith comes by hearing the Word of God. It’s necessary to continually make the choice to open my ears. Sarah eavesdropped through the tent, straining to hear what God had to say to her family, but I have the whole Scripture bound in leather. I have about twenty-five copies in my home, in any translation, size, or color I fancy that day. Oh, how thick-skulled can we be, when the tools we need to survive and thrive have been lavished on us but we choose to ignore them. Oh, the crazy fun, the electric anticipation of when we set our eyes on Jesus, when we swap burdens for freedom, when we give attention to the Word of God speaking love over us.

Through the Word we have the honor of seeing the other side of Sarah’s encounter in the tent that day, what happened at the end of the story. Though Sarah couldn’t, we can already feel baby Isaac’s downy head snuggled in Sarah’s wrinkled neck. We hear the stirring and hilarious laughter that follows the bitter. But we get to laugh too. We have heaven promised; we have redemption and joy and comfort coming our way! We have peace and freedom and the realization of every deep desire, the unfolding of the future of the world all laid out for us.

Can we, just for a second, imagine this as it pertains to us—twenty-first-century women with modern heartaches and modern problems? Can we, just as Sarah’s womb and arms were filled with goodness, believe our own hearts will be also? Shall we just linger in this thought, in this picture of what’s possible when we aren’t homing in on the difficult, on the bitter? Can we peek in the back of the Book; can we go back over all the sure words of prophecy; can we read of the life of our Savior and scoop it all into our chests like a mound of warm sand on the beach and scream, “Yes! I’ll take it! It’s mine! It’s mine because of the goodness of the Lord, the grace he poured out, because he is love!”

And, nestling in that pile of warmth, we can in sweet surrender lay down our heads, feel the sun radiating comfort on our tired backs, hear the echo of our newly resuscitated heartbeat, and bask in the tenderness of a Father who loves us enough to get in our business.