Message To A Runaway

Message To A Runaway

The angel said to her, “Hagar, Sarai’s servant, where have you come from, and where are you going?”

“I am running away from my mistress,” she replied.

Then the angel of the LORD said, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.” –Genesis 16:8-9

I’ve never seen an angel or heard the audible voice of God, but I’ve clearly heard God speak to me. In the early weeks of Hope’s life, he spoke to me the way he always does, through Scripture. I was looking at the story of Hagar, who had run away from Abram and Sarai due to Sarai’s harsh treatment. Hagar wanted to escape her difficult situation, but God spoke to her in the desert, telling her to “return and submit.” My Bible study leader seemed to be speaking right to me, asking, “What is God calling you to submit to?” And I knew. I knew God was calling me to submit to the journey we were facing with Hope—not to fight it or cry out to him to change it, but to submit to his plan and his purposes, to walk through it in a way that brought him glory, a way that exemplified what it means to trust him in the midst of sorrow and difficulty and disappointment.

For me, submission has meant a quiet, though sorrowful, acceptance of God’s plan and God’s timing. It has meant giving up the plans I had for my family and for my life and bringing them all under submission to God. And the call to submission hasn’t stopped. Every day, as I let go of my dreams and desires, I’m once again called upon to submit. And honestly, some days I do better than others. But because I believe God’s plans for me are better than what I could plan for myself, rather than running away from the path he has set before me, I want to run toward it. I want to submit.

Do you find yourself wanting to run away, and do you hear God calling you to submit? Is it a difficult situation, a demanding person, an unfulfilled dream, a separation, a limitation, a loss? Are you willing to submit? Submission frees us to embrace God’s plan for our lives, a plan he has put together with our very best interests in his heart and mind. Instead of running away from the unfair expectations, unfit authority, and unsettling situation in your life, will you listen for the Word of God speaking to your soul, asking you to trust him, calling you to submit?

God, I hear you calling to me in this desert of difficulty and I’d really like to keep running, but I don’t want to run away from you. I want to run toward you. I want to submit.

DIGGING DEEPER