Have you ever traded a part of yourself for something just because you thought other people wanted you to do it?

I remember about twenty years ago I made a fateful, stupid decision. I decided that everything I loved was a bunch of garbage. That was a tragic mistake. Some people tell me that right and wrong don't mean much anymore, but I will tell you one thing; if you sell yourself out to the world, you get a really horrible rate of exchange. It is only in the last few years that I have begun to put my life together again, praise God. When we make bad choices, wrong choices, we suffer, just like Abraham when he went down into Egypt. Because Abraham was faithless, he saw his wife taken into another man's harem. Can you imagine how this must have hurt him? I can't even being to speculate how Sarah must have felt.

"Sarah, for a sixty year-old chick, you're quite the babe. The Egyptian men will kill me and take you as their own personal cupcake if they think I'm your husband. If you love me tell them you are my sister. That way they wont kill me."

What a horrible thing to ask of someone. What a horrible message that is - I would rather see you in another man's arms than trust in God to protect us.

Yeah, Abraham was quite the jerk in this case. Needless to say, Pharaoh takes a shine to Sarah. He snatches her up for the harem. My guess is that Abraham is starting to see that his little ploy wasn't such a great idea now that his wife has been torn from him.

Get ready for fire and brimstone, you would think. Surely God wont tolerate this, especially in the man he chose to from an everlasting covenant with, right? Instead, God looks at this pitiful old man too scared to protect his wife and he saves him. That isn't what I would have done if I were God. I would have unleashed a lighting bolt on his ass. Or at least boils. Instead God rescues him and Sarah. Good thing I'm not God, eh?

In the next chapter Abraham and his nephew Lot run into a resource conflict. Apparently there just wasn't enough room for Lot's flocks and Abraham's flocks to graze. Abraham says to Lot - "You pick whatever land you want and you can go that way and I will go the other way." Lot, like most of us, chooses to head for the best looking, most fertile land leaving his uncle Abraham with the table scraps of craggy, thistled land. Abraham, I guess, had learned something. You don't screw over those close to you out of fear. Whatever Lot chose, Abraham knew that God would bless him because Abraham had put others first and put his trust in God.

Somehow, seeing his wife snatched away from him and returned only by God's intervention taught him a thing or two about trust. It is at this point that God appears again to Abraham and re-establishes the covenant using much more concrete language because Abraham has shown that he was ready to hear more details of the promise.

Reading A Tale of Two Cities
Wishing I wasn't quite so preachy in this post
Plotting something a little funnier for next time