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It was that unique time, just beyond twilight, when the blue of night is brilliant and not dark. Sarah stood listening to the softness of the dark earth, her shawl gently moving with the airy breeze. Somewhere a wild animal howled and another animal answered as the first bright stars appeared overhead. “They are already three days away, or perhaps they are on their way home,” she thought. 
“Where was her husband?” 
“Where was Isaac?” she wondered.
 He usually elaborated on their adventures when he and Isaac took off. “But not this time,” she murmured out loud. 
“He was stony silent and evasive,” she thought. 

Sarah often came out side her tent in the evening and just stood looking at the stars, wondering. For one thing, she was aging and thinking of what it would mean to lie down and be quiet forever. She dug her toe into the dirt, and wiggled it around feeling the warmth that still lingered there. Some nights she thought about the pleasures she had experienced. The first time she held Isaac’s small soft mouth against her nipple and experienced the pleasure of his sucking. And there were the sounds of a small boy’s laughter at the tiny desert animals he found and his squeals of delight the first time Abraham placed him on the back of one of the pack animals. 
“Isaac’s first experience at being a young man and helping the servants with the cattle pleased both his father and I,” Sarah thought. 
“Although he is only twelve,” she murmured again. 
But there were other thoughts. Grief, anger, guilt, fear and loneliness, the emotions of the years never died. 

There was Hagar. 
“How I hated her when she lay in Abraham’s arms,” she told the darkening sky. 

She remembered the long walks Hagar and Abraham use to take in the evening until Ishmael was conceived. 
“The pain of not having my own child and then watching the intimacy between them,” she complained to the rising wind. 
“Who could bear such loneliness and be kind?”

But with these thoughts the guilt that was never resolved came back. Sarah remembered the look on Hagar’s face when she struck her. She remembered hearing Hagar cry in the night when she withheld food from her. And that final look Hagar gave her, as she left with only bread and water and her son Ishmael.  The loud cries of Ishmael pleading with his father as they walked away would stay with her forever.

Sarah only remembered one close intimate time with Hagar after she had returned from running away.  Sarah was depressed. She would never have a child. God had promised, but Sarah had given up. At least that day she had. She was crying. Hagar came over to her and put her arms around her. 
“God is a God who sees,” she said. “He sees your tears, he will remember his promise to you,” she added. 
Then Hagar attempted to tell her about what had happened when she ran away. But, Sarah would have none of it. “Why would God speak to a run away slave?” 
“What was she talking about; Hagar would have many descendents?” 
“Too many to count!” Really!

The wind began to blow against the side of the tent making a whining sound like some complaining spirit. Sarah hurried inside. Lying on her pallet she reached for a cup of wine hoping to drown out her final thoughts, the ones that always came. Ishmael was dead. He must have died in the wilderness. She had killed Abraham’s other son.

Sarah was just falling asleep when she heard Abraham and Isaac return. They both were silent as they entered the tent. Sarah drifted into sleep feeling secure in their presence. 

The next morning Abraham slipped out while Sarah and Isaac were eating the sheep’s milk curd and using the whey as a drink. A servant had set a plate of dried dates between them as an after thought. Isaac set facing Sarah. He spoke some strange mystery with his eyes, some grief; yet hope and awe flickered there. 
“Mother,” he finally said. “Father,” said I could tell you about our trip. His face was intense. “I have reason to hate father.” Isaac’s lips quivered. “But, still I love him, and that is hard to explain.” 
“Isaac!” Sarah spoke. How could you say such a thing?” Yet, as she said this she remembered just such feelings. 

“Father attempted to sacrifice me to our God!” Isaac hurried with his words, gasping for breath at the end. Trembling, he gave out bits of information piece by piece, the memories of the load of wood on his back, the rocky red dirt of the mountain path, the tight ropes that bound him, the horror of his father’s knife lifted above him. The awful sense of separation from his father’s love.

 “But you are here,” whispered Sarah. Sarah jumped to her feet, although the story was not finished. She ran from the tent calling out Abraham’s name. She pierced the warming desert sand with her cries.

“Abraham, Abraham,” she screamed over and over, her entire past gathering into this one hurt. Finding him she did the unthinkable. Hitting and scratching, spitting and kicking she attacked him with all the pain of her life. 

Abraham just stood looking into her face, not speaking, allowing tears to mingle with small trickles of blood on his face. 

“How could you?” 
“You are just like the other men in this place, giving your children over to their gods!” 

“Next you will want to burn him alive!” she continued on her voice rising higher and higher. 

At last Sarah dropped to the ground sobbing. Finally she stood up looking at him with contempt, “So what were you doing playing a game with him to see how frightened you could make him?” 
“Did you wait until he was so afraid he would hate God?” she screamed again. A hand gently touched her arm. 

“Mother,” Isaac said. “Our God provided a sacrifice, there was a ram caught in the bushes.” “God told Father not to harm me,” Isaac continued, “Father was promised so many sons and daughters they could not be counted.” Isaac quietly stammered, “Because Father was faithful.”

Sarah walked slowly back to the tent. Part of her was filled with rage, part with questions, but a kind of numb quietness was shaping itself inside of her heart. The numbness put her to sleep. She slept through the morning and into the early afternoon. The servants tiptoed around her. A stranger came to the tent door looking for Abraham. He was sent off to the shepherds with his questions. When she awoke Isaac was sitting by her.

“Mother,” he said, “I have never known such terror, and yet when God spoke to Father about the real sacrifice something different happened inside of me that is hard to explain.” 
“I am not sure about trusting Father again, but I will always trust our God.” 

Sarah put her arms around Isaac and hugged him for a long time. They sat quietly together watching the sun lower itself behind the distant hills. A reddish glow filled the tent and for some reason Sarah found a real kind of peace creeping into her being. She got up and went about the tasks of preparing the evening meal. She sent the servant girl, Dilka, to get meal for cakes from the grain vessels. As Dilka’s receding form dropped a shadow on the floor, another person stopped beside the door blocking the shadow as well as the waning light. 

“Hello”, he said. “I was looking for Abraham and my lost ram and your servants sent me to the shepherds.” 
“I am still looking for Abraham, he wasn’t with the shepherds, and they haven’t seen a lost ram.” 

The stranger was dressed as one of the desert peoples who live in the wilderness of Egypt.  Sarah thought there was something familiar about him.

“I am a long way from home,” he said. “I was driving some of my herds north and lost several of them.” 

“But that ram is important,” he continued. Then he stopped, looking quizzically into Sarah’s face.  “I won’t stay if Abraham isn’t here, but I thought I would see him one more time.”

Sarah felt the presence of her God, her and Abraham’s God, as she became aware that Ishmael was standing, alive, at her tent door.