“Then one said, 'I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.' And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age, it had ceased to be with Sara after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself...” Genesis 18:9-12a.
I've always thought it was fairly reasonable for Sarah to laugh here. As the narrator points out, what was promised was a biological impossibility; she was asked to believe something that is in many ways absurd.
I've been doing a lot of reflection on absurdity during my time between Semester 1 (of 6) and Semester 2 of seminary. It has been a huge struggle, and hasn't involved a lot of laughing. I've mentioned before that after the honeymoon wore off last semester I've been questioning following this path. Here's the essence of the struggle: Commuting to seminary as I am doing, being away from my family most of the week every week, has been harder than I expected. It's the only way for us to do it for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely difficult and no fun whatsoever. Seminary is also expensive; I will spend between 70 and 100K of our own money by the time this is done. Seminary can also only be so much. While I have learned and grown during the past semester, the learning and growth has not (and probably, reasonably, cannot) match the cost to me for doing it. Put in business terms, it is a poor return on investment. Not a horrible return, but perhaps more than a bit absurd.
So, the question I have had to ask myself is, “should I keep doing this absurd thing?” I could quit right now, cut my losses, and all would be just fine. It hasn't been fun to reopen this can of worms. To date, I have followed the feelings of joy that put me on this path, and they have in many ways evaporated as I face the realities of the sacrifice itself; as I write each multi thousand dollar check and get ready to get back on the plane, leave my wife and daughter (what kind of fool does this??) and head back for what will undoubtedly be another semester of a few good classes, a few mediocre classes, a few worthless classes, and another incremental bit of formation and growth.
In the end, I have returned over and over again to an inexplicable but unshakable feeling that this absurd path is, still, the one I should follow even if I can't exactly find a good intellectual justification. It is a path, not an investment. I felt strongly called to start on it. It was absurd when I started, nothing substantial has changed. I knew it would be a sacrifice, now I can point to the details of the sacrifice. So, I'm going to laugh a bit at the absurdity and try, again, to trust a bit; not so much in a divine promise but in the absurd possibility of a divine call.
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