Where to Find Isaac a Wife

Where To Find Isaac a Wife
Genesis 24: 1-20

When you make your short list of the things that you pray most concerning your children, their being able to marry the “right” person (and keep that marriage going) is near the top of the list. Our sons married beautiful, strong women whom we love and admire, and we were relieved to be able to entrust our sons to them in order that as wives they can do with them what we failed to do. I joke (maybe) that it was when we had gotten our sons into the arms of good women that we were able to flee the country. When they married, our sons were only a few years older than we had been, but the son with children sometimes speaks a little wistfully about not having enough energy for parenthood at his age. And he is only in his thirties! I read about men in their fifties or sixties marrying younger women and starting a family, and I wonder what it would be like to be in your sixties or seventies and be the father of teenagers. I also wonder what it would be like for the mother whose husband therefore likely dies before sons and daughters get married. It must be worrying, odd, and grievous having to arrange a marriage for your son or daughter when your spouse has already died. In a traditional society, people commonly marry as teenagers, as Rebekah is about to do, and your children would start marrying before you were middle-aged. But you might then die when you are quite young, as happened to one of Abraham’s brothers and one of his daughters-in-law. Once again, a mother or father might have to arrange a marriage without the involvement of a partner...