“If the Lord wanted to speak to me, Rebekah, he could have done it a thousand times before now. Including this morning when I prayed to him about exactly this matter.”

“In every crisis before now, your father was head of the household and the Lord spoke to him. Now you’re the patriarch. Expect to be answered, clearly. It’s your right to be led by the Lord.”

“As I recall, you’ve had more actual visions than I have,” said Isaac. “Maybe you should pray.”

“I once received a vision about the babies in my womb,” said Rebekah. “And it was in answer to your prayers. You have responsibility for all these people. The Lord answers you all the time when you pray for them.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then it only means that the choice is up to you, and whatever you choose will please the Lord.”

Isaac grinned at her. “Now you’re sounding like the kind of believer you said your mother was—you’ve set a test for the Lord that the Lord can’t fail.”

“But we’re not testing the Lord,” said Rebekah. “We already know that the Lord is God. We’re seeking to know his will. And he will answer.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we need him, and he won’t fail us.”

“No. But I might fail us.”

“The only way you could fail us, Isaac, is if you heard the Lord’s answer and disobeyed it. Or if you refused to ask him, because you didn’t believe he loved us enough to answer.”

So Isaac, full of self-doubt and clinging to his faith in God, went to pray. In the morning he awoke Rebekah by coming into her tent and whispering in her ear. “I dreamed a dream,” he said.

She came out of the fog of sleep to hear him telling of how he saw himself among dying cattle, and dipping down into a well only to come up with jars full of sand. In his dream he said what he had been saying in his prayers—I see nothing for us to do but to go down into Egypt. “And then there was a voice in my dream telling me not to go to Egypt, but to stay in Canaan. The wells our family used to control near the cities of the coast are no longer used, with Eliezer gone. If I go to Abimelech, the king of Gerar, he’ll let us use the wells as long as we need them.”

“Let us use them? They’re ours by right. Your father dug them!”

“Let him think he rules, let him think the wells are his to share with us,” said Isaac. “I have the Lord’s promise—the same one he gave to Father, only now he has sworn to fulfill the oath with me. My children will multiply as the stars of heaven, he said, and they’ll be given all these countries, and through my seed all nations of the earth will be blessed.”