From R House.

then there was my love and adoration of abraham and sarah in the old testament.

dear sarah who must have felt so many of the same feelings i have felt. she and abraham waiting decades and decades and decades for their little boy. sarah watching hagar become pregnant and bear ishmael. that must have been so hard for her. how her heart must have hurt.

then, the news that isaac was on his way.

abraham fell on his face and rejoiced. we know that feeling.

isaac means, "he laugheth."

the child of promise and heir of the promises made to his parents.

after all those years of waiting for their dream to come true. here he was.

only to be asked to sacrifice isaac a few years later.

sarah must have known.

she let abraham and isaac go.

oh, her faith! she knew the Lord would remember her.

can you imagine after all that waiting and pain, then to be asked to sacrifice your miracle, your son?

no.

however, the Lord already knew that abraham would obey. he already knew abraham's heart. but the Lord needed abraham to know that abraham would do whatever He needed him to do. i think there must not have been much harder for abraham than this moment.

the Lord needed me to give up my old dream. He took the thing that was the hardest and most dear to me. the thing that i wanted more than anything else and He asked me to sacrifice it. He needs me to know that i can give up my dream for His.

i suppose this is what takes faith. to know that the Lord has a plan for you, knows you and loves you. sometimes we do not know the good gift that we'll be given. it may not be what we were thinking. but, we can have faith that there is a good gift out there for us.

i am reminded of "the infertility" talk in conference by elder spencer j. condie called "Claim the Exceeding Great and Precious Promises."

the Lord will remember us.

here is my favorite section from the end of his talk:

The Apostle Peter testified that “the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering” toward us (2 Peter 3:9). In this age of one-hour dry cleaning and one-minute fast-food franchises, it may at times seem to us as though a loving Heavenly Father has misplaced our precious promises or He has put them on hold or filed them under the wrong name. Such were the feelings of Rachel.

But with the passage of time, we encounter four of the most beautiful words in holy writ: “And God remembered Rachel” (Genesis 30:22). And she was blessed with the birth of Joseph and later the birth of Benjamin. There are millions on earth today who are descendants of Joseph who have embraced the Abrahamic promise that through their efforts “shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal” (Abraham 2:11).

When heaven’s promises sometimes seem afar off, I pray that each of us will embrace these exceeding great and precious promises and never let go. And just as God remembered Rachel, God will remember you.

the Lord suffers with us. He is in the trenches of our despair and tears with us. He's not telling us to be patient, He wraps us in His arms and whispers, "I know. I know."