Quiet Time

When Hagar flees after Abram and Sarai, wary of God’s unrealized promise to make their descendants as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5), take matters of procreation into their own hands and take advantage of her in the process, she finds herself in both a literal and physical desert.

Hot, tired, thirsty—not to mention pregnant—she was no doubt attempting to make sense of how she could have been walking faithfully and wandered into such a place at the same time.

While Hagar’s plight was the product of a kind of exploitation that most of us will never experience, I resonate in some sense with the idea that in dutifully living out our callings as practitioners of medicine, our good intentions can sometimes be exploited (even unintentionally). And in our attempt to flee, we may look down and find that our feet have wandered into a desert of sorts.

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