“And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.”
Sarai takes her Egyptian slave Hagar and gives her to Abram as a wife. Abram had been living in Canaan for ten years. The ten-year mark is a crucial detail: one decade of waiting for the promised son. Ten years of holding the promise, of building the altar at Bethel, of refusing Sodom's wealth, of being credited with righteousness — and still no son. The patience of faith has a long discipline behind it, and Sarai's plan emerges not from impulsivity but from a decade of deferred hope. Psalm 40:1 begins with 'I waited patiently for the LORD' — the word for patient waiting carries the sense of strained, prolonged expectation. The application: most failures of faith do not come at the beginning of the wait but in the middle, when patience has been sustained for so long that a human solution feels like release rather than compromise.
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