Hagar, part 2

I am sure you have at times felt invisible. There have been times when you have felt unnoticed. You have known the wildernesses of life. You know what it is to desire to escape from everything that you know. Hagar’s story speaks to you. God gives her a promise that doesn’t take her out of her circumstances but creates a new beginning for her. No pain that you experience has the last word over your life. Let’s read.

“When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. ⁵ Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” ⁶ “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. ⁷ The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. ⁸ And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered. ⁹ Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” ¹⁰ The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” (16 v 4-10)

Hagar started to look at Sarai differently. She had been used, taken as a second wife, not for love but for reproduction. She now had something that Sarai only longed for. There was no relationship with Sarai; she was her slave, but now she was to be the mother of her husband’s child. This change affected her thinking about her mistress. She despised her. Things soon began to unravel. Sarai and Abram fall out, leaving Hagar exposed. This ancient story could be written today: the vulnerable often bear the consequences of decisions made by those with more power.

Hagar escapes and tries to go home, back to Egypt. When we are in such situations, we all want to turn back the clock. However, Hagar is different now, and more importantly, she is expecting a child.

How wonderful to know that God knows where we are. Hagar, on the road home, in a desert, pregnant, abused, feeling like she is indeed a piece of discarded property, a nothing to no one, is met by the angel of the Lord. It is even more wonderful to know that this first appearance of the angel in the Bible comes not to someone powerful, but to Hagar. That is a message all in itself.

The angel of the Lord gives to her what she has never experienced: dignity, purpose and importantly, promise. It all happened at the spring on the desert road, hope and relief in a dry place.

This is profoundly beautiful, and there have been moments like this in your life. There will be more. Like a spring in the desert, you carry joy but in a wrapping that has known huge disappointment. God will meet you, wherever you are; His eye is always on you, and what you are carrying or what you have gone through is not the end, for He is a promise-making and promise-keeping God.

There is one question He still asks you and me. “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” It is an invitation to talk to God who knows where you came from who always manages to

There’s something profoundly beautiful about the setting of this encounter: a spring in the desert, a place of life amid death. That’s what divine encounter does—it brings living water to our driest places.

Hagar came to that spring running from abuse, carrying trauma and an uncertain future. She left that spring having been addressed by God himself, holding a promise, with a new name for the Divine in her heart: El Roi, the God who sees.

In our own wilderness moments—when we feel forgotten, abused, or abandoned—the story of Hagar reminds us that we too are seen. Our names are known. Our stories matter. And sometimes, in the places we least expect it, beside the springs of our most profound need, we discover that God has been there all along, waiting to be found by those who thought they were lost.

The question that the angel asked Hagar resonates with us through the ages: “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” It invites us to share our stories with the One who already knows them, helping us realise that even in our efforts to escape, we are ultimately moving toward the God who sees us.