Hagar

The desert sun has no mercy.

Ishmael had swallowed the last of their drinking water miles ago. Now, faint with thirst, he began wailing with pain.

Hagar couldn’t go another step. Like thousands of desert mothers before her - and since - she was desperate, but spent.

This story will end well, but not yet. She and her son will survive, but their story must be told so we can understand.


Hagar is about to experience God and re-gain her footing in life, but the path to personal growth is often discovered through bewildering grief, loss, turmoil or despair.

Hagar was alone, desperate and afraid, but God meets us where we are. The Genesis narrator says that God called her by name, “Hagar, don’t be afraid, ... and God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.”

Exhausted though she was, her maternal instincts responded: ‘water ... life ... Ishmael, drink! Mother and son are rescued by a Voice and a well of water – a Voice from above and water from below. There's something universal about this story. We all need these same critical resources. Without water we die – and without the voice of God, we fill the silence with siren songs.

But Hagar recognized the Voice that called her. She had heard it years before when God had met her at another well and re-directed her path. Read Genesis 16.

Village wells are communal meeting places – and wells in the Bible are often places where God meets thirsty people and provides much more than water, because Thirst comes in many forms. Just as wells bring to the surface a life-sustaining gift from the earth, so God surfaces spiritual needs and satisfies them.

So it was with Hagar.

Her story is the only account in ancient Near Eastern literature where a deity calls a woman by name. She is an outsider, but God knows her intimately and treats her like family. God becomes father to her orphaned son and, as the narrator says – for the first time in all of scripture – ‘God was with the boy’ as he grew in the desert.

This story underscores how critical water is for physical survival – and reminds us that every day on our planet 4,000 children die from unsafe water. God is the ultimate provider who models for us consummate care for those in need. No one is outside God’s span of attention, but if we ignore that, we become as merciless as the desert sun.

---

Genesis 21:14-20
Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba.
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes.
Then she went off and sat down nearby, about a bowshot away, for she thought, "I cannot watch the boy die." And as she sat there nearby, she began to sob.
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, "What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there.
Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation."
Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer.
New International Version