Meredith Flynn
I imagine Hagar was a woman at the absolute end of her rope. Any mother who has sent her child away because she can’t stand to watch him die would be utterly and ultimately without hope. And that’s exactly where she is in Genesis 21, sitting apart from her son in the desert, waiting for their anguish to finally end.
I imagine that Hagar felt completely alone. Cast aside, invisible at this desperate point of her life, and soon to be forgotten in death.
Until God heard. Not Hagar herself, according to Scripture, but the voice of her child. “What troubles you, Hagar?” God’s angel asked her. “Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is” (Gen. 21:17). God heard, and he lifted Hagar and Ishmael up from their dire circumstances into the promise he’d already made—and intended to keep.
It’s not unlike a few chapters earlier in Genesis, the first time Hagar ran from Abraham and Sarah’s tangled web of family dynamics. Except that time, Scriptures uses a different sense to describe how God rescued with Hagar. He saw her. He met her at another moment of despair and loneliness, this time at a well. After Hagar’s encounter with God, the well came to be named Beer-lahai-roi—“the well of the Living One who sees me.”
The older I get, the more often I have this sobering thought: most of the pain we carry is felt in isolation. Yes, we have families and friends and communities that ideally help bear our burdens. But they also have burdens. None of us is capable of seeing and hearing anyone else’s every hurt and grief, even those we love the most.
Even when we do see and hear another’s struggles, our efforts to soothe or solve are like drops in a bucket. We are so limited in how we can help.
But Hagar’s story is a reminder that our God hears and sees and responds. He is not limited in his ability to comfort us. Even when fear threatens to paralyze us, or grief overwhelms, or pain of any kind pushes us into isolation, we can echo her words in Genesis 16 because we have lived them too.
“You are a God of seeing. Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”
Meredith Flynn is a wife, mother of two, and writer living in Springfield. She and her family are active members of Delta Church.