Where Have You Come From, and Where Are You Going?

The first thing anybody said to her in the desert was her name, and the second thing was her job.

She had stopped at a spring on the road to Shur, a long way from the tents she'd left. Nobody was looking for her. That was the point of being out there. Then someone was standing at the water, and he spoke to her.

Hagar, servant of Sarai, he said, where have you come from, and where are you going?

She had walked away from the household. The household's name came along anyway, fastened to hers.

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Her life up to that spring had mostly been arranged by other people.

She was an Egyptian, a servant to Sarai, the wife of a man named Abram. They had been waiting a long time for a child that hadn't come. The text counts it: ten years in Canaan. So Sarai did something that was ordinary in that world. She gave Hagar to her husband, so that a child born to the servant could be counted as the mistress's own.

Nobody asked Hagar. She has no line of dialogue in the arrangement. And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

Then the household came apart the way households do. Once Hagar knew she was pregnant, the text says, she began to despise her mistress, and Sarai felt it. Sarai went to Abram. Abram stepped out of it. Your servant is in your hands. Do whatever you want with her. Sarai was hard on her, and Hagar ran.

Nobody in that tent behaved well, and the record doesn't pretend otherwise about any of them, including her. It just reports that a servant with a child coming went out into the wilderness on foot, and stopped at a spring.

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She answered the first question without any trouble.

I am running away from my mistress Sarai.

That was the whole answer. Where have you come from: from her. Even the way she described herself ran through the woman she'd left. My mistress. She had walked out of the role, and the role was still how she said who she was.

The second question she didn't answer at all.

Where are you going. She had no idea. The road to Shur ran toward Egypt, and she was Egyptian, so it's a fair guess she was heading home without knowing what home would make of her. But that's a guess. What the record shows is that she was asked two questions and could only answer one.

Most people who have just walked out a door can answer the first one in their sleep. Where have you come from. Thirty-one years at the plant. The practice. The pulpit. The business with the family name on the trucks. The house where the kids grew up. It's the second one that goes quiet.

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What the angel said next is hard. Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. The text doesn't explain it, and this chapter won't try to make it sound easy. A woman alone and pregnant in that desert had very few ways to stay alive, and the tents were one of them. That's as far as the record goes.

But he kept talking, and everything else he said was for her.

She would have a son. She was to call him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction. The name means God hears. She would carry the reason for it in her arms every day of his life.

And then she did the thing she's remembered for. She answered back, not to the angel's questions, but with a name of her own for the one who had spoken to her.

You are the God who sees me.

Nothing had been fixed. She was going back to the same tents and the same mistress. But she had been seen, by name, at a spring nobody else knew she'd reached. That came first. Everything else came later, and some of it took years.

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There's a detail after that, easy to pass over because it's only a line long.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne.

Abram named him Ishmael. That was the name from the spring, the one the angel gave to a servant alone in the desert. Abram wasn't there. The text doesn't say how he heard it, but the plain inference is that she told him. She came back and told the man who had said do whatever you want with her what had happened at the water, and he gave his son the name. God hears.

She went back as a servant. She went back carrying something the household didn't have.

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The record keeps going, and it gets harder.

Years later Sarai, by then called Sarah, had a son of her own, Isaac. At the feast when Isaac was weaned, Sarah saw Ishmael mocking and told Abraham to send the servant and her son away. Abraham was distressed, because Ishmael was his son. He sent them anyway. Early in the morning, Abraham got up, took bread and a skin of water, put them on Hagar's shoulders, and sent her away with the boy.

This time there was no role to go back to. No mistress, no tents, no household. She wandered in the wilderness until the water ran out, and she put the boy under a bush and sat down a distance away and wept.

And the angel spoke to her again, and asked her another question.

What is wrong, Hagar?

Read the two greetings side by side. At the first spring he called her Hagar, servant of Sarai. Here she was nobody's servant anymore. The household had put her out with bread and a waterskin, and the title was gone with it. He called her Hagar.

The role had ended. Her name hadn't.

He told her the boy had been heard where he lies. He knew the exact bush. Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She filled the skin and gave the boy a drink. He grew up in the wilderness and became an archer, and when it came time, his mother found him a wife from Egypt. It's the last thing the text says she did, and she did it herself.

Being seen came before being rescued, both times. And the second time, the one who saw her didn't need the title to know who she was.

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Where this meets your week

When the old title comes out first. Somebody at a wedding asks what you do, and the answer that comes out is what you did. Former. Used to be. Retired from. Hagar's first answer at the spring ran straight through the woman she'd left, and nobody held it against her. It takes a while for a name to come loose from a job. So write a new introduction before you need it, and keep it to two sentences: your name, and one true thing about your life now. "I'm Lee. These days I'm teaching my grandson to fish and learning to cook for two." If someone asks what you did, answer it plainly, in one sentence, and then go back to the present: "I ran a dental practice for thirty years. Right now I'm mostly figuring out mornings." Say it once this week, out loud, to a real person. It'll feel thin the first time. It gets easier by the third.

The phone that went quiet. The calls used to come all day, and now the ones that come are from the pharmacy. The angel found Hagar at a spring where nobody else knew she was. Being found by people takes being somewhere they can find you. Pick one place, a diner, a bench, a gym, the back row of something, and one hour, and be there at that hour every week for a month. Same table if you can get it. Learn one name there each week, and use it the next time. Don't wait for it to matter, and don't judge it before the fourth week. Just be findable.

The second question. People keep asking what's next, kindly, as if there should be an answer by now. Hagar didn't have one, and the record doesn't scold her for it. If you don't know where you're going, that's a true answer. Practice saying it in a plain voice, without an apology or a joke attached: "I don't know yet. I'm giving it some time." If they push, you can add, "I'll know more by spring," or whatever is honest. Then ask them a question back. Say it to the next person who asks, and notice that nothing bad happens.

Someone else at the spring. Somebody you know just walked out of a role. A coworker who was let go, a neighbor whose spouse died, a friend whose business closed. They're sitting somewhere nobody's looking. Call or text this week: "I've been thinking about you. Coffee Thursday?" When you sit down, before you offer a plan or a contact, ask them the two questions the way the angel did. Where have you come from. Where are you going. Then listen to the first answer all the way to the end, and don't fill the silence after the second one.

With someone you trust. This one works better across a table. A spouse, an old friend, a few people who have each lost a role in the same year. Each of you answers the two questions out loud, five minutes apiece, while the others only listen. No advice, no "have you thought about," no fixing. When everyone has gone, each person says one thing they heard someone else say that they want to remember. That's the whole evening. Hagar was asked, and she answered, and the one who asked didn't argue with her.

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Answer both questions on paper.

Pick a time when nobody will need you for half an hour. Early morning works for a lot of people, before the day has a shape. Sit somewhere you won't be interrupted: the kitchen table, the car in the driveway, a bench. Bring a pen and one sheet of paper, not a screen.

Write where have you come from at the top of the page, and answer it as specifically as you like. Names, years, the building, what the work was, who you worked beside, what you were good at. That half is usually easy, and it's worth letting it be long. Give it fifteen minutes if it wants them.

Then write where are you going, and answer it only as far as you honestly know. If that's one line, it's one line. If it's I don't know, write that. She couldn't answer it either, and she was the one who walked away from that spring having named God.

If the first half brings up more than you expected, anger or grief or a name you'd rather not write, stop there. Put the page in a drawer. That half is finished for today, and the second question will keep. Come back to it in a week.

When you're done, look at your own name at the top of the page, with no title after it. Keep the page. You'll want to read it again in a month.

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There's one last time Ishmael shows up in the record. Abraham lived a long life and died, and two sons buried him.

His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah.

The boy who was sent away with a waterskin came back for his father's funeral, and stood at the grave beside his brother.