The Gospel According to the Women Who Waited – Hagar: The Runaway Mother Who Named God

Before Mary ever sang her song of defiance, a woman named Hagar cried out in the wilderness. Long before Elizabeth rejoiced over a long-awaited child, Hagar wept over one she feared would die.

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Before Advent promised salvation wrapped in holy anticipation, Hagar taught the world what divine sight looks like from the margins.

Hagar’s story is one of waiting—but not the quiet, reverent waiting we often romanticize. Hers is a waiting forged in fear, displacement, and survival. It is the waiting of a woman whose body was used, whose voice was ignored, and whose life was treated as disposable.

And yet, hers is one of the most radical theological moments in all of scripture.

Hagar enters the biblical story not as a free person, but as property—an Egyptian slave woman owned by Sarah, the wife of Abraham. When Sarah is unable to conceive, she instructs Abraham to sleep with Hagar, turning Hagar’s body into an instrument for someone else’s promise. There is no consent recorded, no agency acknowledged. Hagar’s womb becomes a solution to a problem she did not create.

When Hagar becomes pregnant, the fragile power dynamics inside the household collapse. Sarah, once powerless, becomes jealous and abusive. The text says she “dealt harshly” with Hagar—language that implies cruelty, domination, and harm. And so Hagar does the only thing a desperate woman can do: she runs.

Pregnant, alone, and without resources, Hagar flees into the desert. She is the first recorded single mother on the run. No community, no protection, no promise of safety—just heat, hunger, fear, and the terrifying uncertainty of survival.

It is there, in the wilderness, that something astonishing happens. God finds her.

“The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring beside the road to Shur” (Genesis 16:7). God does not send a message back to Abraham’s tent. God does not negotiate with Sarah. God meets a runaway enslaved woman where she is and speaks to her directly.

Hagar is told that her child will live. That her son will be named Ishmael—God hears. And then Hagar does something no one else in scripture ever does. She names God.

“You are El Roi,” she says, “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13).

Pause there. A woman whose name meant nothing to her masters becomes the theologian who names the divine. A woman erased by power becomes the one who defines God by sight—not judgment, not punishment, but seeing. She does not encounter an abstract deity. She encounters a God who notices her, locates her, and refuses to look away.

When we talk about Advent, we often speak of waiting for God to appear. But Hagar’s story flips the script. In her wilderness, God appears to her. Not in a palace. Not in a temple. Not to the powerful or the chosen. But to a single mother in exile.

God does not erase her suffering, but God sanctifies her survival by seeing it. And that—seeing without denying pain—is the heart of Advent from the margins. A faith born not in sanctuaries, but in deserts, shelters, jail cells, halfway houses, and all the places people are told God does not go.

Hagar’s story, however, does not end neatly. After Ishmael is born, Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and the household’s tolerance for Hagar evaporates. Once again, Hagar and her son are cast out. Once again, they wander the desert. This time, the water runs out.

Hagar lays Ishmael under a bush and walks away, sobbing. “Do not let me look upon the death of the child,” she cries (Genesis 21:16). It is a moment of unbearable maternal grief—the kind that knows there are no options left.

And once again, God hears.

“God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven… ‘Do not be afraid… for God has heard’” (Genesis 21:17). God opens her eyes, and she sees a well of water. The story does not erase her pain, but it ends in provision. Survival, not sentimentality, is the miracle.

Hagar’s story belongs to every woman the world has used and discarded. Every mother surviving on resilience instead of resources. Every woman navigating systems that claim ownership over her body and her choices.

She is the migrant mother separated from her child at the border.She is the mother in prison praying for her child’s safety on the outside.She is the survivor rebuilding a life after exploitation, carrying both trauma and faith in her bones.

Like Hagar, these women are prophets of endurance. They do theology with their lives. They name God not from pulpits, but from deserts.

Hagar did not wait in a cathedral. She waited in a wasteland. And yet, God found her there—twice.

Her story reminds us that holy waiting is not clean or pretty. It is desperate, sweaty, tear-streaked, and real. It happens when the world gives up on you, and you dare to believe that someone greater still sees you.

Hagar was never a side character in Abraham’s story. She was the first to name the divine. The first to be promised survival for her child. The first to experience God not as an abstraction, but as a presence.

In a book obsessed with lineage and inheritance, she becomes the mother of Nations. With a faith obsessed with purity, she becomes the blueprint for being seen.

Hagar teaches us that when the world casts you out, that is often where God shows up.

This Advent, we honor the God who sees—and the women who still see each other. The peer navigators, mothers, mentors, and organizers who find wells in the wilderness. The ones who keep others alive until justice arrives.

Hagar’s waiting gave birth to a lineage of vision. And every time a woman says, “I am still here, and I am still seen,” her story continues.

✍️ This post is part of SWOP Behind Bars’ December series, “Women Who Waited – Advent from the Margins,” reimagining sacred waiting as endurance, survival, and resistance.