and Hagar fled to the wilderness...(v.6,7)
She's young, I'm...not.
She's a slave, I'm...not.
She's pregnant, I'm... NOT.
She has a hard nomadic existence, and I have a North American lifestyle.
And yet. When I see her there, stumbling in the wilderness, I can identify with her lost loneliness. Some days, my own wilderness is bleak. While the fabric of spring landscape unfolds around me in layered greens and splashes of blooming, feathered yellow, my soul wilderness can seem gray and foggy, rocky, thorny and brown.
The angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness(v. 7)
"Where have you come from and where are you going?"
And I sigh.
Well, if I could rightly answer those two simple queries, perhaps I wouldn't be here in this wasteland of weariness. Hagar cannot answer both questions and neither can I.
And He said…"Where have you come from?"(v.8)
"And where are you going?" (v. 8)
Return to …her…(v. 9)
I pause and Hagar nudges me; she points me to a different perspective of God's questions and His answers.
So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her,
You are a God who sees me.(v.13)
Where have I come from? He was there with me in it.
Where am I going? I still can't answer this.
Where am I now? I am right here, present in the presence of the One who sees (me?!) even here in my own wilderness. It's not where I want to be, not necessarily what I had in mind when I left "there." Not a destination. But here I am. Again. And I ask the question Hagar asked.
Would I have looked here for the One who sees me? (v.13 footnote,ESV.)
Anywhere but here (or there!)
And yet, here You are.
You were and are looking for me.
Hagar is right in her conclusion:
Truly, here I have seen Him who looks after me. (v.14)
I turn, return, to face another day. I'm more like Hagar than I'd realized. I too am going back, back there. But I do not go alone, uncared for, unseen. I go, I stay, I live in the Presence of Him who looks after me, for He is the God who sees. Me.