The Traveler Series

Good evening. My name is Sarah, and I'm Noah's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter [8 greats] and I'm married to Abraham. I came to talk to you because there's no better story than mine to show what a terrific adventure following God can be. Mind you, when it all began, I didn't have the slightest idea where we were going to end up; but then, I suppose no one ever does.

My name was Sarai when I was younger. It means "my princess" and I expect I was rather spoiled. I was awfully pretty, and dozens of young men went to my father to ask for my hand in marriage. I expected to marry the handsomest and richest and kindest one of all, and we'd live in a big house in Ur and I'd have ten beautiful and well-behaved children, and wear expensive clothes made of silk from Cathay and linen from Egypt and have lots and lots of friends and go to parties at the palace and spend the summer in the mountains where it's cool.

By the way - do any of you know where Ur is? How about Iraq? Well, Ur is just about where Baghdad the capital of Iraq is, only a little closer to what you call the Persian Gulf. That's where I was born, where my home was. It's an awfully nice place to live, at least it was then, and I never expected to live anywhere else. But that's not what happened. At the beginning it was just as I expected. I married the most wonderfully handsome and kind man you could possibly ask for. Abram was my hero, my half-brother (I know you all don't marry half-brothers nowadays but back then nobody thought anything of it), and he was so charming. You couldn't stay mad at him for more than half an hour no matter what he did, and he could talk you into anything. He talked me into lending him my best shawl for a fishnet, once. But then later when I cried he got me an even nicer one, so you see? He was just as nice as he was charming. He was different, too. He used to talk about things that nobody else seemed to care about, like the meaning of life, and what God was really like, and things like that. He was always my favorite, so I was really glad when Father decided that we should get married. He wasn't exactly rich when we started, but we had enough, and it didn't seem to matter very much as long as it was Abram I was marrying instead of someone I didn't know.

Well, we settled down in Ur just the way I thought we would, in one wing of the big family house. I kept expecting to get pregnant but I never did. I was pretty disappointed and so was Abram; I was sure he was going to go out and get another wife, but he didn't. I finally got up the courage to ask him about it, since most of his friends had more than one wife even if they already had children, and he said God told him to stick to just one. So you see? That was the kind of man he was. They just don't come any better. But of course without children to raise I had to figure out something to do with my life, so I set out to become the best hostess in Ur. I got so involved in giving terrific parties and trying out new fashions and recipes and so on that I never noticed how restless Abram was getting until one day he came to me in my dressing room. I listened to what he was saying with only half an ear because I was trying on some new make-up until what he was saying began to sink in.

"We're what? Abram, you're crazy. Leave Ur? Move? Why?"

"Whaddaya mean, God told you to move?"

"He just said, 'Get up and go.'"

"We need an inheritance for our children? Abram, have you noticed, we don't have any children."

"Oh - we will. Right. Abram, do you know how old I am? We've been trying for over 15 years. What makes you think things are going to change?"

"God said so. Right."

"Abram, why doesn't God tell me these things directly instead of sending me messages through you?"

"Oh, right. I never listen. Abram, that's not fair, I'm listening right now."

"Okay okay okay. Where did you say we're going?"

"You don't KNOW? We're just going to load everything we've got onto oxcarts and take off and keep walking until God says STOP? Abram, have you been drinking?"

"Abram, why don't we just take a nice vacation. We'll go up into the mountains for a month, just the two of us, and have a sort of second honeymoon. You'll forget about all this nonsense."