Genesis 16
The Shortcut and Its Consequences
"She gave him Hagar the Egyptian slave to be his wife." (Genesis 16:3)
Sarai got tired of waiting. She had a plan. It was culturally acceptable and seemed practical. And it created a mess that is still playing out in the Middle East thousands of years later.
Hagar conceived, Sarai resented her, Hagar despised Sarai and Abraham, who said yes to the plan he should have said no to, stepped back and let Sarai deal with it. As a result, Hagar, the one with the least power in all of this, ended up driven into the desert.
God met her there as she was alone in the wilderness. The God who sees, she called Him. El Roi.
The shortcut produced real harm to a real person who had no say in any of it. And God was present in the consequences, tending to the one who had been used and discarded.
In this story, Hagar is so easy to overlook. She’s not the main character but rather, she’s the instrument of someone else’s impatience. And yet God sees her specifically, calls her by name, and gives her a promise of her own.
Nobody is a minor character to God. Not even the person caught in the middle of someone else’s impatience.
