Laugh. That was all I could do. It wasn't hysterical laughter, more like a nervous laughter, but not quite that either. My wife had just told me that we are expecting our fourth child. I was content with two, but she had wanted a third. No problem, and the third has been wonderful. But neither of us felt that our lives were lacking without a fourth. In fact, we had been filling out our mental checklist, putting a check beside each phase that we would never have to go through again: middle-of-the-night feedings, diapers, sleep schedules. The usual things. Now, we would be doing all of it again. How to fathom it all? All I could do was laugh.

I was not the first to laugh at such news. Another couple, living more than two millennia ago, burst out in laughter when they discovered they were pregnant. Abraham and his wife Sarah were well along in years, and she beyond the age of childbearing. And yet, despite all odds, God announced to them that she would bear a son. Abraham heard it first and "fell on his face and laughed," as it says in Genesis 17:17. Sarah later overhears the news through the tent wall, while cleaning up after baking food for some surprise visitors. She too bursts out laughing so loudly that all can hear. She couldn't believe it. It was too impossible to believe. So, God's word comes to her as a question, "Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?" (Genesis 18:13).

We laugh at things that strike us as improbable or absurd, trying to make sense of them or at least come to terms with them. I laughed at the distance between my expectations of the future and the new reality that was thrust upon me. Sarah and Abraham were provoked to laughter from the absurd disproportion between God's promise and human possibilities. We don't often think about laughing as an appropriate response to God, or at least I don't. But laughter shows that you understand just how improbable God's ways are. God is not like a human, only just a little bit bigger and more powerful. God's ways are orders of magnitude larger than ours. When Sarah laughed, she truly recognized just how big the difference was. She had been living in the world constrained by human possibilities until God revealed to her how much wider world looks when seen in light of his power. God's ways, love, and power are always far more expansive than we could ask or imagine. Grasping that should provoke us to laughter. And who couldn't use more laughter?