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?”
Perhaps you know what it is like to be talked about as if you were not there, while you are standing in the room. The people around you settled the plan without ever needing your name.
Read Genesis 16 and listen for who says Hagar's name. Sarai calls her "my maid." Abram calls her "thy maid," and says, "Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee." Hagar is an Egyptian slave, and she is pregnant by Abram. She is being handed back and forth between two people who are arguing about her. So she runs, and she gets as far as a spring of water on the road to Shur.
The first words spoken to her out there use her name and her place: "Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?" The first instruction is the hard one: "Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands." Only then does the angel of the LORD tell her to call her son Ishmael, which means God hears, and gives the reason: "because the LORD hath heard thy affliction." That language turns up again centuries later. At the burning bush God tells Moses, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry." The same words that will bring a whole nation out of Egypt are spent here on one Egyptian woman running away from Abram's tent. Hagar answers by doing something nobody else in Scripture is said to do. She gives the LORD a name: "she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me."
So she goes back to the same work, and nothing in that household has been fixed. What she carries back is a name for God, and a well that was named after that meeting, Beerlahairoi. Would that be enough for you, on a morning when you must walk into a situation that is not going to change? It was enough for Hagar, because the God who saw her at the spring went on seeing her in Abram's tent, and He sees you in yours.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 265 is Peaceful Sleep (Psalm 4:8).