On the way to sure

One of the reasons why I love listening to the Bible (rather than only reading it) is because it can result in some pretty cool wordplay.

Case in point: this week, my devotional reading (listening) has taken me and The B99 through the story of Hagar and her trials at the hands of Sarai. You can catch the whole thing in the 16th and 21st chapters of Genesis, but to make sure we’re all on the same page for this post, let me sum it up for you…

• Sarai can’t have children
• Sarai has a mistress named Hagar
• Hagar can have children
• Sarai persuades her husband, Abram, to sleep with Hagar so that Sarai can have a child
• Hagar gets pregnant
• Sarai gets angry
• Abram gets confused
• Hagar gets abused by Sarai
• Hagar runs away from Sarai carrying the child who came from Sarai’s plan
• Hagar needs long-term counseling

If you ever wondered whether the Bible is relevant to today’s culture, the fact that this story sounds like a modern drama should convince you that it is. God doesn’t hide the ridiculously messy situations that we find ourselves in, even messes created by his people.

You can imagine how Hagar’s head must have been spinning as she fled from Abram and Sarai, which is what made the devotional’s wordplay so powerful. It began in verse seven, and I heard it as soon as it began.

Now the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur. (Genesis‬ ‭16‬:‭7, emphasis mine)

The woman who had been used, abused, and rejected was on her way to Shur, which is pronounced exactly like “sure.” When I heard it, I thought, “Of course she was, and aren’t we all from time to time?”

Relationships change. Companies downsize. Promises are broken, and people are left broken as a result.

So often, life can leave us dazed and confused, and like Hagar, we don’t know where we’re going. We know where we’ve come from, but we’re not quite all the way to sure, and we can feel stuck. Ever been there?

The angel had asked her where she was coming from and where she was going, and she was only able to answer the first question. Trauma can leave us with a clear view of the pain in the past, and a cloudy view of anything beyond it. We’re on the way to sure, but aren’t really sure how to get there.

I love what the angel did for an unsure Hagar because it’s such a beautiful picture of what God does for us: he didn’t leave her in that confused and broken place. Instead, he spoke to her future, and then sent her back to the same place she’d been hurt.

Admittedly, that can be difficult to wrap our heads around, especially when trauma is such a hot topic in our culture. Nowadays, it can seem as if everyone has trauma that has derailed them, and our first instinct is to never go anywhere near anything that remotely looks like what we ran away from. Triggers, it seems, are everywhere, and it would seem wise to avoid them and mean to send someone back into them.

But while that may keep us safe in the moment, it can also keep us stuck in the moment. Hagar needed more than an escape from where she was; she needed a transformation of who she was, and that’s what God gave her. He told her who she was and what she was carrying. He brought clarity to her identity before he sent her back to Sarai.

In other words, when we don’t know where we’re going, it may be because God wants to send us back to where we came from as a new person. Instead of sending us somewhere different, God often sends us back to the same place as a different person.

The gospels are full of stories about Jesus healing people and then telling them to go back to their towns and villages. Why? So the people who know them can see them in a new light. Often the greatest miracle isn’t that we were saved from a place, but that we were saved for it, and if you’re on the way to sure with more questions than answers, it may just be that God is getting ready to send you back differently as a testimony of his redemptive power.

You’re not the same person you were, and that’s the greatest testimony of the gospel’s power.

I’m sure of it.

Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

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