The God Who Saw the Girl Nobody Wanted

Ten years after God brought Abram into Canaan, there was still no baby in his tent.

God had promised Abram a family as many as the stars. Sarai, his wife, had looked up at those same stars night after night, and she was tired of looking.

"The LORD has kept me from having children," she told Abram. "Take my servant Hagar. Maybe I can have a family through her."

(In those days a woman with no baby could give her servant to her husband as a second wife, and the servant's baby would count as hers.) It was Sarai's plan, not God's. God made marriage in the garden for one husband and one wife. And nobody asked Hagar at all.

Abram took Hagar, an Egyptian servant girl, as his second wife, and soon she was going to have a baby. Then everything went sour. Hagar began to turn up her nose at Sarai.

Sarai stormed in to Abram. "This is your fault! She knows she's having a baby, and now she looks down on me. May the LORD judge between you and me!"

Abram held up his hands. "She is your servant. Do whatever you think best." (That is what a man says when he would very much like to be somewhere else.)

So Sarai was hard on Hagar, so hard that Hagar ran away.

She went south, down the long road toward Egypt, past nothing but rocks and thornbushes. She had a baby coming, no money, and nowhere to go. At last she came to a spring of water in the desert and sank down beside it.

The angel of the LORD found her there.

"Hagar, servant of Sarai," he said. "Where have you come from? And where are you going?"

(He already knew. He asked anyway, the way a good father asks a child what happened.)

"I'm running away from my mistress, Sarai," said Hagar.

"Go back to her," said the angel, "and do as she says. I will give you a family too big to count. You are going to have a son. Name him Ishmael, which means God hears, because the LORD has heard how much you are hurting. He will be like a wild donkey. He will be against everyone, and everyone will be against him."

(A wild donkey is not what most mothers hope to hear about their baby. But no one can own a wild donkey or tie a load on its back. To a servant girl, that may have sounded like good news.)

Hagar knew the LORD himself had spoken, and she gave him a name.

"You are the God who sees me!" she said. "Out here in the desert, I have seen the One who sees me!"

So the spring got a name too: the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. Hagar walked all the way back. Abram was eighty-six when Hagar gave birth to his son, and he named the boy Ishmael.

Hagar went home to Sarai's tent, still a servant. A name at a well could not set her free.

Abram's family ended up as slaves in Egypt, and God told Moses, "I have seen how my people are suffering." Through every king and every prophet after that, the God who sees kept watching.

One day a crowd was packed around a teacher, and another woman reached out and touched his cloak. She had been bleeding for twelve years. At once she was well, and she tried to slip away. "Who touched me?" he asked, and he kept looking until he saw her. Shaking, she fell at his feet.

Hagar was called "servant of Sarai." He called this woman "Daughter," and he sent her home in peace, free. Jesus was the God who sees, come to find her himself.