Laughter, at last

Three visitors come to the tent in the heat of the day, and Abraham feeds them. One of them says that within a year Sarah will have a son. Sarah, listening at the tent door, laughs — she is ninety, and the laugh is not joy but the bitter kind, the sound a person makes when hope has been disappointed for so long that it has become embarrassing. The visitor hears it and asks the question the whole passage turns on: is anything too hard for the LORD? She denies laughing. She was afraid. The child comes, and they name him Isaac, which means he laughs. The same word, turned inside out. God did not scold her laugh; he answered it, and gave her a new one to keep for the rest of her life.