Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 265 · September 22
Thou God Seest Me
“And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?”
You know what it is to be talked about in the third person while you are standing in the room, by people who did not need your name to settle the arrangement.
Read the chapter and count who uses hers. Sarai says my maid. Abram says thy maid, and then, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee. Hagar is an Egyptian slave, pregnant, being moved between two people who are arguing about her. She runs, and gets as far as a spring on the road to Shur.
The first words spoken to her out there are her name and her job. Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? Then the reason for the boy's name: because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. That phrase turns up again four hundred years later and running the other way, when God tells Moses at the bush, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. The language that will take a nation out of Egypt is spent here on one Egyptian woman running away from Abraham's tent. She answers by doing what nobody else in Scripture does. She called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.
Then he sends her back. Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands, and she goes back to the same work, with nothing in that household repaired. What she carries back is a name for God and a well that people went on calling by it. Whether that would be enough for you is the question, on a morning you have to walk into a situation that is not going to change.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 265 is Peaceful Sleep (Psalm 4:8).