The gap between what God will do and what God has done.

That gap between God’s word and God’s fulfilment of that word is called faith. It can be one of the most difficult times of your life, especially if all that you can see is impossibility.

“God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. ¹⁶ I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” ¹⁷ Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” ¹⁸ And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” (Genesis 17 v 15-18)

Abraham is again on his face. He’s back down on the floor, lying before the presence of God. He is laughing, not out of joy but out of sheer disbelief. He’s 100 years old, and Sarah (God changed her name) is 90 years old. We understand that, don’t we? It is the most ridiculous thought. Abraham probably had many reasons running through his mind, all connected to one big question: how?

Maybe you are asking that simple question today: how?

If you are, then it could be that you are also thinking the same thought that Abraham had next. How can I help God out?

“God, we have sorted it already, we have a boy, he is my son, Ishmael, that was a miracle in itself, let’s work with what we have got.”

Maybe the math doesn’t work for you either? But you have a backup plan. It’s as if God has forgotten. He must be impressed with our wisdom!

Thousands of years later, nothing much has changed, in that we still struggle to live between promise and fulfilment.

And like Abraham, we too wrestle with the impossibility, and we too come up with plan B, C and sometimes the whole alphabet, and yes, our imagination can cause us to disbelieve that we find the whole thing humorous.

God seems very gracious, and we see His response tomorrow.

Perhaps the lesson is that faith isn’t the absence of doubt, the thoughts of trying to get to fulfilment with human wisdom, or even the act of laughter. But faith may be holding those responses, but doing so, face down on the floor, prostrate in worship to God.

That’s the gap of faith. It can be challenging. The way forward is to fall before God and to keep talking to Him. He is patient, and He will speak.