Sacred Minutes

Meet Hagar: A servant. A foreigner. A woman with little power over her own life. She obeyed her owner’s orders and yet found herself caught in a family conflict she didn’t create. As a result, she was driven into the wilderness alone, pregnant, and afraid. (Genesis 16:6-13)

Until God sent His angel to her because He saw her and recognized her pain.

She returns to her owners, and life returns to normal for a while. Then she is cast out a second time, this time with a son in tow. No way to fend for herself. No food. No water. No escape plan. Nothing in sight. Hopeless. But God saw her again, saved her and her son, and delivered their lives. (Genesis 21:9-10, 15-19)

Same girl. Two different deserts. Same “all is lost” fears. Same God promising a future anyway.

Sometimes we imagine our deliverance is permanent and we will never face another desert circumstance. Hagar’s story reminds us that faith does not exempt us from hardship. She encountered God in one desert and, years later, found herself in another.

The second wilderness must have felt painfully familiar. Fearful. Uncertain. Lost. Hopeless. Afraid.

And yet the same God met her there.

In Genesis 21, the most striking detail is that the story doesn’t say that God created the well at that moment. Scripture says He opened Hagar’s eyes, and she saw it. The provision had already been prepared.

Her distress wasn’t evidence that God had abandoned her, but it kept her from seeing the solution He had already provided.

Hagar named God out of her distress, not out of her blessings or comfort. We can feel God on a whole new level when we are at the end of our ropes. We can see the threads of his workings anew when we reach His deliverance.

Because deliverance will come. If we walk with Him, God will make a way through, even when it doesn’t look the way we want. He may not remove every wilderness immediately, but He never abandons us in it.

Ponder:

In both deserts, what was Hagar’s fear?

In both deserts, what was God’s promise?

What does this suggest to us about God meeting us in our deserts?