Who Was Sarah? The Woman Who Laughed

There is a moment in Genesis where God tells an old woman she is going to have a baby, and she laughs.

Not a polite laugh. The kind you let out when something is so far past possible that laughing is the only honest thing left. Her name was Sarah, and that laugh is the best door into her story for children, because a child understands it immediately and without any explaining.

Who she was

Sarah was Abraham's wife, and she left home when he did. If you have read our guide to Abraham, you know he was told to go without being told where, and Sarah is the person who went with him.

They were promised a family, and then the years went by. Then more of them. In Genesis 17:15 and 16, God changes her name from Sarai to Sarah, which means princess, and says she will be the mother of nations. She is old by then, and there is still no child.

The laugh

Genesis 18. Three visitors arrive. Sarah is behind the tent, listening the way you do when you are not sure you are meant to be listening, and she hears that she will have a son within the year.

She is ninety. She laughs to herself.

Then she is asked why she laughed, and she says that she did not laugh, because she was afraid. It is one of the most human exchanges in the whole book, and it is the part to read aloud slowly, because children catch it. Everybody in that room knew she had laughed.

How it turns out

The son is born, and his name is Isaac, which means he laughs.

The laugh of disbelief becomes the name of the answer, which has to be one of the kindest jokes in Scripture. Sarah's own line, in Genesis 21:6, is that God has made her laugh, and that everyone who hears about it will laugh with her. The same sound, on the other side of the wait.

Why children should meet her

Most Bible heroes get introduced through something they did. Sarah is better introduced through something she waited for, and that is exactly why she belongs in a child's hands.

Children spend most of their lives waiting for things that somebody else controls. When they get old enough to be told that God's timing is not our timing, most of them have already worked out that this is a hard thing to be told. Sarah does not skip that part. She waits badly, in the way real people wait, and she is still the mother of nations at the end of it.

Telling it in five minutes

If you have a short slot and one shot at it:

1. She and her husband left home without knowing where they were going.
2. They were promised a family, and then waited so long that it stopped seeming possible.
3. When she finally heard it was happening, she laughed, and then she said she had not laughed, which fooled nobody.
4. The baby came, and they named him he laughs.
5. Ask the room: what is something you are still waiting for?

That last question is the whole lesson, and it does better than any summary you could give them.

The figures

Sarah is available now as a Paint-Your-Own kit, and she is meant to sit beside Abraham, since half of what makes either story land is that it happened to both of them. Isaac is not ready to ship yet, and his page has a waitlist you can join for when he is. All three live in Foundations of Faith, and the figures are made for ages 3 and up, because they have small parts.