Two important questions...

Last week, during the coaching workshop, the trainees were practising their question asking skills,  and so it seemed appropriate that someone, during our after-dinner time of communion, invited us to reflect on the different questions Jesus asks in the New Testament and the way that His often life-changing questions have impacted our lives in the here and now.

It reminded me of my recent reading in Genesis chapter sixteen, when, after Abraham and Sarah's ill-fated decision to involve their servant as a surrogate mother (read here), Hagar took her son and fled into the desert. Everything seemed like a big mess, and Hagar was distraught and discouraged when God came and spoke to her, next to a spring of water. (Gen 16: 7 - 8)

God looked on her with compassion, but He also asked her two very important questions: "Where have you come from, Hagar? And where are you going?" In this first month of a new year, these are important questions for us too. Sometimes we have difficulty working out where we should be going in the future, because we've never stopped to reflect on where we have come from and what brought us to the place we find ourselves in now. 

We find ourselves sometimes in difficulties of our own making - because of our own poor choices in the past. And sometimes our difficult situations are because of the sin or selfishness of others whose lives interface with ours. When God addressed this dear Egyptian servant woman, he called her, "Hagar, slave of Sarai." He recognised her as a unique individual of value, but he also saw that she found herself in circumstances over which she had no control. Sometimes it's like that in our lives too; the circumstances that place a weight on us may not be due to our own bad decisions and therefore are not a statement of our true identity... but we nonetheless find ourselves in a family or work situation that we can't simply run away from.

God asked Hagar to do something very difficult: to go back and submit to Sarah. But He also gave her and her son an amazing promise about the reward and inheritance that He would give to them in the future.

Where have you come from… and where are you going in 2016?