And God remembered Rachel... Genesis 30:22

I sometimes feel that God does not remember me, that He would just as soon forget me, because so often I have forgotten Him.  It took 16 years before I was aware that God had remembered me.  I had things that I needed to go through.  And now when I think of those 16 years, I can sum them up with a few brief flashes of memory.  Jacob was angry with Rachel for wanting her own children so badly.  He couldn’t fix it, and so he blamed her for being too emotional. She was so desperate for children that she was willing to let Jacob go “in unto” her maid so that she could have a surrogate.  

Dan and Naphtali were her “adopted” step-children.  But it did not satisfy.  Perhaps she tried to make it satisfy.  Perhaps she even loved them, but it was not enough.  She wanted her own.  And then when her own son was born she wanted another, because she wasn’t satisfied with just one.  I understand.  I know Rachel’s heart.  The second son killed her, but still she wanted him.  Rachel never knew her grandchildren, Manasseh and Ephraim.  I’m sure she would have loved them so.  Little bald Manasseh and Ephraim with the weird little locks of hair sticking out of the sides of their heads.  Would she have approved Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On?   Not her God.  But Joseph chose her after all.  Rachel had gone from stealing idols and pretending she was on her period to crying out to Jehovah for a child.  She had some stuff to go through, and then when it was all done, she died.  

But Rachel is remembered. For what? For her cry and her grief for her children, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. Matthew 2:18