Wounded by God's People Read Online Free PDF

innocent childhood;
    The bitterness of your parents’ ugly divorce just when you needed them the most;
    The unexpected death of a parent or sibling that left you feeling abandoned … permanently;
    Relocating from place to place as a parent kept looking for a better position, or traveled to another military base;
    Embarking on the adventure of a new career that turned out to be very different than what you had anticipated. And very unpleasant.
    Did your big break turn into a big bust? Sometimes a great escape from a wounded past can turn into something worse as we discover the wounds were not just from without, but they were within. Soregardless of where we go, what we do, who we are with, we carry those wounds with us.
    Life can be hard, can’t it? From the moment we leave the comfort of our mother’s womb and the doctor or midwife slaps our little bottoms to make us cry our first deep breath, we are hurt. Everyone who lives longer than a day experiences a variety of hurts. Life hurts! Because life
is
hard.
    Hagar’s life with Abraham and Sarah may not have been hard initially. She appears to have lived comfortably and happily in Abraham’s household for about ten years after leaving Egypt. She may have felt she had left her hard way of life behind her for good. With her youth, I expect she learned their language quickly, adapted to their nomadic lifestyle easily, and became accustomed to their ways without any difficulty. If she had not fit in well, Sarah would never have thought of recommending her to Abraham, as we will see she did in the next chapter. So while Hagar could have been homesick for Egypt and all that had been familiar, there is no indication that she was. The impression is that Hagar must have embraced her new home, her new family, her new way of life, and her new future without resentment, but with acceptance and flexibility.
    I wonder what she thought the first time she observed Abraham building an altar and heard him calling on the name of his God. 3 Did she ask him or Sarah or one of the other servants for an explanation? Surely she was given the answer that Abraham was worshiping the one true living God, the Lord God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth. 4 As she cleaned up after the evening meal and attended to Sarah’s needs, did her mistress explain to her how God had spoken to Abraham when he was living in Ur? That God had told Abraham if he would follow Him in a life of obedient faith, he would be blessedto be a blessing to the world. 5 Did Sarah tell Hagar that one primary aspect of God’s blessing to Abraham was the promise of a “seed”? A son? 6 There was no need for Sarah to tell Hagar that she had been unable to conceive that seed and bear a child. That would have been obvious. Not just by the fact that there was no son, but by the pained, empty look on Sarah’s face when she spoke of the longing … and the promise.
    Hagar’s masters were surely kind and good to her, and she must have related their treatment of her to their “God.” The contrast between the way they lived and the way the Canaanites around them lived must have made her take their God and their faith in Him seriously. With her Egyptian background, Hagar must have recognized the Canaanites for what they were … obscene, pornographic, selfish and self-centered, greedy, cruel … yet wealthy and attractive. While not as sophisticated as the Egyptians, the Canaanites were very much like the culture in which she had been raised. But Abraham’s family was different.
    She had witnessed firsthand the difference when fighting broke out between Abraham’s servants and those of his nephew Lot. 7 Abraham immediately acted to resolve the tension, while Lot used the crisis for his own advancement, seizing the best of the prime pasture-land for his flocks and herds. Lot walked out with what appeared to be everything, leaving Abraham to live in a tent under the trees.