One morning---we had not lived there very long, in the wilderness of the Negev—I woke up alone. It was the middle of the night, freezing. Where was Sarai? Fear gripped me-- I stumbled out of the tent into the frosty air.

The sky was a race of stars firing across the purple veldt in ecstasy, stumbling gypsy sparks, wasting the energy that makes God. I stood in the great, august shadow of the oak of Moreh, at Shechem, where we had encamped. The watch fires of the city of Ai glimmered faintly in the distance to the west.

Hoarsely, whispering, I called the name of my bride, but there was no answered. Fear coursed through me. Forgetting decorum I yelled her name. Then a star shone low in the sky, and I followed it.

She lay crumpled at the foot of a smaller tree. As I put my hand beside her head, I felt her breath on it, and I knew she was not badly hurt. I realized how quickly my heart had been pounding only when it slowed—though I had had over four decades on this Earth, it is not possible to grow soft in the wilderness. In a moment she stirred, and I, uncertain, simply waited for her to come around.

When she did she told me her vision, and I learned why God had not asked me to leave her behind.

As a young girl, Sarai was considered wild. I knew that, her father had told me when we made the contract. She was inattentive at her tasks, and often she would be found out in the fields when she should have been somewhere else. She never seemed to have a reason for being there, and she never explained herself.

She told me that night that she had had visions. Long before I had. Of the God whom I follow.

She remembered them first as a terror. A little girl, lying on the rich brown, life-giving Earth, Enki’s earth, watching the birds wheel and call. Then the world exploded.

Her father was a rich man in Ur, and she was the eldest daughter. What was she doing in the fields, strange among the birds and Earth. She was 13 when she fell in the field and heard the voices. The angels calling and wheedling, sharp like a knife in her side.

And then a desert place, with a tree whose branches were like a roof above her, and He would come to her there. Always, it returned to Him. The voice. The God.

She never saw Him, nor his face, nor his form. But she knew what she felt, and it was not reverence or adoration. It was love.

He was not always kind. Sometimes the world turned red. Blood poured forth from her womb. A vision of the angels arising in blood, laughing. Above the towering gray walls of Ur she opened her hand and death flew from it. You will be the seed of nations, the voice said, and those nations will exhaust themselves upon each other, and destroy each other. He said there will be no cause to it, and rarely an end. Because she would speak. And she would be heard as ears chose to hear her.

In that case, she begged Him to cease speaking, and she asked Him to leave her, if that was all He would bring. He said that was not all He would bring, and that she did not understand the pain of silence. But she would.

Because the voice’s last whisper was the day before she met me. It said, he is coming, and he will take you away. Then she saw the tree with its branches like a roof holding the sky. Then nothing.

Her life became a round, white tower of silence where there were no voices, and no comfort. She thought, more than once, of death. For could death match the pain of the sudden silence?

But then the man came from the wilderness and spoke to me, and she understood. She was no longer a girl. She had been placed here, in my hands, to bring what she had been given. She knew then that the voice was coming back.

And she knew that the only hope for this world was to hear the voice speaking, though many would hear it falsely, because an empty world is a death already.

She smiled, and she came with me. She had hated the angels, they were so cruel. But she said she cried when they left, they were so beautiful. She was a girl. And now she was a woman. She knew now that I would speak the words of the one who came to her. But she knew that I would not live Him, as she did. That was something I did not understand for a long, long time.

This night she had seen the tree with its branches like a pillar holding up heaven, and she had reached for him in her heart. Because she knew that only love could make the words I was given to speak worth hearing. Silently she prayed, a moment unstilled, a quiet space out of time. She moved here, beneath the tree, and knelt, and prayed, and tried to rmeember. She reached deep, deep down, past the pain and horror past the guilt to where it began a young girl watching the birds wheel and call over a green field and no voices and no emptiness and no need.

And then, at last, God’s great face reached through the terrifying dull blueness of the void and said Sarai little Sarai, I miss you.

There, beneath the tree which loves the sky, we built our first altar to the God Most High, the voice in the wilderness, voice of the sky. And the only thing holding the world up was the two of us and the two of them.