The God Who Saw the Girl Nobody Wanted

Her name was Hagar.

And no one ever asked her what she wanted.

Hagar was a servant. She belonged to a woman named Sarai, and Sarai belonged to a man named Abram, the same Abram who had stood beneath the uncountable stars and heard God's promise. Hagar stood at the very bottom, where the smallest people stand. When Sarai wanted something, Hagar had to do it. That was her life, every day of it.

One day Sarai wanted a baby so badly that she gave Hagar to Abram, and soon Hagar was going to have a child. You might think that would make everyone glad. But it made Sarai jealous and angry, and she was unkind to Hagar. So unkind that Hagar could not bear it one more day.

So she ran.

She ran out past the tents, out past the last well anyone knew, out into the wide and empty desert, where the sand goes on and on and the sun never blinks. She had no plan. She had no home. She only knew she could not go back.

And there, by a little spring of water in the middle of nowhere, Hagar sat down all alone.

She was sure that nobody saw her. She thought, if I disappeared, no one would even come looking. She felt used up and run off, a girl nobody wanted, in a place nobody goes.

But God goes there.

God had followed her all the way into the empty places, and by that little spring, a voice called her name.

"Hagar."

Her name. Not "servant," not "you there," but her own name, spoken soft, as if she mattered.

And God spoke to her gently. He told her she would have a son, and that one day her son would have so many children no one could count them. He had not forgotten her. He had never once stopped watching over her, all the long miles of her running.

Then Hagar did a wonderful thing. She gave God a name back. She had heard people call him many things, but Hagar made a name all her own, because of what had happened to her there.

She called him the God Who Sees Me.

"You are the One who sees me," she whispered. "Out here, where I thought I was all alone, I have seen the God who looks after me."

She thought she was hidden. And all along, she was held.

Hagar was the very first person in the whole Bible to give God a name. Not a king or a hero, but a runaway slave-girl crying by a spring, the smallest one of all. That is the kind of person God runs after first.

And even then, that seeing God was on his way to us. One day he would step down into the desert of our own world wearing skin, with a face and kind eyes. Jesus. He came looking for the forgotten ones, the left-out ones, the ones who were sure no one would ever come. He had been looking for them all along.

And the eyes that found Hagar by that little spring see you too.