It's a lot easier for me to relate to Sarah than to Hagar. Even now, when I am pulling myself together after a pretty big Not-Getting of something I wanted, badly, I have to -- feel committed to -- acknowledging my privilege. I'm bad at that. I forget that, of the worries I've had and the things that I have lost, I've never had the same kind of desperate Hagar is having, here. I'm starving and I can't feed my child; I'm in the desert, about to die of thirst, and I can't even ask for help. She doesn't even ask to be relieved, or for her son to be saved. She just cries.
So I get torn, here, and start thinking about the mothers and children who I could be helping. I could do God's work and help these hungry, thirsty, homeless, traumatized people. Isn't that what He wants? Instead of feeling sorry for myself, shouldn't I be grateful for the things I have and recognize how much better than everyone else I have it?
I don't think that's what God wants, no. Because how hard is it, really, for God to fix this seeming Deep Shit, right? He "opens her eyes" and there the water is. He seemed to handle it without me running an after school program or giving them a shelter or finding water for them.
That's not to say that we shouldn't do more to help those in need -- that I, in particular, shouldn't get over the disappointment of losing this baby and look for where I can love others, where I can be of use. But I think it is to say that actual service, the kind tat makes life better and brings you closer to God, to those you serve, shouldn't beging with a socioeconomic analysis of whose life is harder and whose privilege is more significant. It should begin with this: the recognition that I am broken, that me, in relation to other with more or fewer concrete benefits, matters less than me in relation to God. And that, with respect to God, I am infinitely broken. I can't even ask for what I need; I don't even know. It's larger than water or a job or peace. In the moment where the thing you need is keeping you from living, that thing becomes a universal signifier -- it's everything. And, unable to proprose a solution to God, you can only turn your head up and cry.
I don't need a new job or a new attitude or to serve more or to care for myself more. I need to recognize that I am lost and broken. That the act of restoring me is no less a miracle than that of restoring a homeless person, a refugee, a cancer patient. That I deserve to be healed as much, and need healing as badly. That my role isn't actually to fix the world's problems for God -- aren't You proud of me? Didn't I do good? -- but to recognize that every single thing I do, I do because of His grace. To experience that grace, and to allow that experience to diret my life, so that I'm not serving because I have and others don't have; I am serving because I have been given so much and the logical conclusion is to give as abundantly as I have been given to. Recognizing that everything I have and am now, also points to everything I had done, and was, before.
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