Between the Promise and Fulfillment

When Abram and Sarai were told to move from Ur of the Chaldeans and travel to a land called Canaan they were challenged to leave behind the familiar surroundings of the community they had lived in all their lives to venture into the unknown. They obeyed God because He commanded them to, and because the Lord promised to make them 'fathers' of a multitude of nations. Notwithstanding, Sarai's condition of barrenness, they set out to see God's promise fulfilled. However, obedience to the lord's command would not result in seeing what they had envisioned as soon as they would have liked. And so, when God delayed in bringing His promise to pass, Sarai decided to take matters into her own hands and help it along. This came to pass when she proposed to Abram that he take her Egyptian servant as a wife in order to produce the offspring God suggested He would bring forth supernaturally. Regrettably, in using Hagar as a 'surrogate mom' Sarai unknowingly made matters worse. She not only created a rival in her household who would compete with her for Abram's affection, her decision also resulted in the conception of a rival heir to the promise, in the son that would later be born to her slave. See the wide-ranging responses of each character to one promise, how God dealt with each one respectively, and how the Lord developed their distinct stories within the general narrative, while simultaneously reinforcing the faith of this aging couple, Abram and Sarai, as they moved about from place to place in faith, facing challenges to their faith and threats to their destiny, until they ultimately saw God fulfill their desire after a twenty five year long delay, under conditions where all hopes of realization had all but vanquished.