Eyes to See

In less than three weeks now, Glennon Doyle Melton, creator of Momastery.com will be speaking at our church. I am the lucky (terrified) duck who will be on stage interviewing her. Glennon is remarkable because she has a way of making room for people, a way of inviting them into love. Her blog is like a church itself (or what a church should be) -- a place of community and growth and service and love.

Recently she wrote a blog post entitled Cool Ashes Don't Burn about being a witness to others' pain. She talks about how we all need to be seen and heard and that we all need acknowledgment that our pain is real. This idea resounded with me because it's something we do naturally for our own friends and it's something we sometimes need to have done for us. But I wondered why. What makes this so powerful? And then I thought of Hagar.

Genesis 16 tells the painful story of Hagar, slave to Sarah, and ultimately a second wife to Abraham. Sarah could not conceive, and she was tired of waiting for God's promise to be fulfilled, so she let Abraham take Hagar so that a family could be built that way. But once Hagar was pregnant, she began to despise Sarah, and ultimately Sarah mistreated her. What a mess.

Hagar ran away, and when she was on the run, she ran into God himself. God told Hagar to return to her mistress, but he also gave her some promises about the boy she was carrying in her belly. Hagar obeyed the Lord and returned to Sarah, and she also gave a new name to God: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”

God saw Hagar's situation -- she was a woman without choices. She was a slave, and she was commanded into a bad situation in which the only possible result would be even worse for her. I find it difficult that God didn't really change things for Hagar -- she was to remain a slave. But God did "see" her, and he did give her a son and promise that her descendants would be too numerous to count.

Sometimes we want God to do more than see, don't we? We want him to DO. To FIX. To CHANGE. I am fairly certain he does that too, just rarely as quickly as we want. He is the God who transforms. The God who transfigures. The God who wastes nothing. The God who makes the bad good. The God who gives us beauty for ashes. But first... First he sees. Glennon's post is a great reminder that we can participate with God in this great thing he does: we can see too.