Wounded by God's People (7 page)

Wherever you are, whoever you are, David's God — the God of Hagar — is right there. If you can still the racing beat of your heart, quiet your frantic thoughts, silence those imaginary conversations, listen carefully with the ears of your spirit, then you will begin to hear His voice. I think I can hear Him now, calling you by name …

“I'm running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered
.

Then the angel of the L
ORD
told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel added, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count …”

She gave this name to the L
ORD
who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered
.

So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael
.

Genesis 16:8–10, 13–16

B
oth of my parents have suffered from macular degeneration, a disease that blurs vision by causing a blind spot. My mother used to look at me with her characteristic twinkle and exclaim, “Anne, I can't see your face. All I can see is a blank spot framed with hair.” In the end, she couldn't even see my hair! And in spite of the latest medical treatments, including frequent injections directly into his eye, my father has lost the ability to focus. He can no longer read his Bible or the daily newspapers that still come to the house. His wonderful staff has improvised so that they pull up a large flat-screen television within three feet of where he is sitting, but he still has difficulty seeing the picture. One of my joys when I visit is to watch TV with him, explaining what I see. Or to read the newspaper headlines to him, commenting on what I read and asking him what he thinks. I can't imagine how hard it is for my father, whose mind is still alert and active, to have blind spots that hinder him from seeing clearly.

Having witnessed the effects of this disease up close, I see it as the perfect metaphor for Hagar's spiritual condition when she fled from Abraham and Sarah. She suffered from a significant blind spot of her own, a kind of spiritual macular degeneration. There were some things she just could not see clearly. So the Angel of the Lord gently questioned her. Not for information, since He already knew what had happened. He questioned Hagar for her own benefit, to help her focus. He wanted Hagar to talk things through with Him because she may have thought that she was just a victim, not responsible for what
had happened. That the mess she was in was someone else's fault. She may have been bitterly focused on
them —
God's people who had wronged her — while remaining blind to her own failures.

The Angel of the Lord gently probed her blindness: “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
¹
Reading between the lines, I can imagine a whole host of additional questions:
Hagar, will you talk with Me for a moment about what you're doing and where you belong? You are Sarah's servant; don't you think you belong with her? Are you sure this is what you want to do with your life and where you want to go? Is this really wise? Will this course of action make you happy? Hagar, I know you've been deeply hurt by people who call themselves by My name. You're rejecting them. Are you also rejecting Me? Let's think this through carefully. Together
.

When wounded, you and I also need to think things through very carefully. Could the wounding we've received be in response to wounds we've inflicted? It would be beneficial to talk things over with God because, if you're like me, it's easy to develop spiritual macular degeneration. When I'm hurt, it's so much easier to focus on the faults of others. It seems to be almost an instinctive reaction to wounding and a convenient defense mechanism:
It's not me. It's them! And even if it were me, what I did to them wasn't as hurtful as what they did to me. So it's still them!

Like Hagar, we need help in focusing on ourselves. So I've paraphrased the questions that the Angel of the Lord used to probe her heart to make them more relevant and personal for us. Prayerfully consider answering them one by one …

• Where are you in your healing journey?
  
• Do you remember what your life was like before you were wounded?
  
• How did you get to this place?
  
• How is the way you are reacting today going to help you tomorrow?
  
• Do you want your life characterized by the result of remaining focused on “them” while being blind to your own pride, arrogance, anger, resentment, name-calling, vengeful digs, schemes for revenge, or vicious gossip disguised as prayer requests?
  
• Are these attitudes working for you and making you happy?
  
• Do they give you a temporary sense of satisfaction but then disintegrate into a desire for even more revenge? And more misery?
  
• What are you living for? Instead of living your life to the glory of God, are you driven by a desire to get even, vindicate your actions, prove someone else wrong, justify your opinion, expose the other person, get your own way?
  
• Consider carefully … do any of these desires truly honor God?
  
• When was the last time you put your head on the pillow conscious of God's sweet peace and joy flooding your heart? If you can't remember, could it be time for you to give your attention to considering your own part in the wounding?
  

Some of those questions hurt. I know because I have asked them of myself before sharing them with you. It can seem less uncomfortable to keep our eyes shut when the light of truth reveals our blind spot than to open our eyes and allow the light to penetrate into the deep recesses of our hearts where we rarely go. It takes courage to endure that kind of pain and just open our eyes.

Hagar didn't open her eyes. Her response to the Lord's questions, while being honest, reveals that she was still out of focus. Her
attention seemed to be more on Sarah than herself: “I'm running away from my mistress Sarai.”
²
I can almost hear the unspoken subtext behind her words:
It's not my fault. Sarah is the cause of this. She's mean
.

While ignoring her own sin of arrogance, I wonder if Hagar's life then flashed before her mind's eye as she indulged in a full-scale pity party. Did all the old wounds pop up like boils on her heart? How Pharaoh had given her as chattel to Abraham and Sarah; how frightened and alone she had felt in the Canaanite wilderness; how she had tried but seemingly failed to please Sarah or fit into her new life; how unfair it was that she would never have her own husband and children; how she had been robbed of her innocence when Sarah commanded her to sleep with Abraham; how surreal it had been to discover she was carrying his baby; how she had taken advantage of the situation, knowing she was carrying Abraham's treasured heir; how she had despised and rebelled against Sarah for forcing her into motherhood before she was a wife; how Abraham, after impregnating her, had shown her such indifference and looked the other way when Sarah abused her; how Sarah had stripped her of her privileges, slapped her, and sent her back to the servants' quarters.

I'm sure that the more she thought about it, the more blurred her vision became. Reliving what Sarah had done to her kept Hagar blinded to what she had done to Sarah.

Are your spiritual eyes also squeezed tightly shut as you relive over and over again the hurtful actions or words that have wounded you? The memory of one impossible expectation or one infuriating expression, one unfair decision or one unreasonable demand, one injustice or one insult, one wound or one wrong, can bring back to our minds another one and another one until we are smothered in
a nasty heap of ugliness that hardens our hearts and embitters our spirit and blinds us to the obvious — our own faults and sin.

It's both interesting and sad to think how easily you and I can see the faults in others while absolving ourselves of responsibility for what our actions or words may have provoked. Although Sarah's behavior could indeed have been characterized as mean, Hagar failed to acknowledge how her contempt and scorn had provoked Sarah.
³
When we are wounded, hurt feelings and injured pride can distort our perspective and our focus. In self-defense, we want to explain and excuse and blame the ones who wounded us. We want to prove our point —
I
was right; they were wrong. How dare they treat me this way!
We tend to rationalize our own behavior while holding others to a standard we don't apply to ourselves. It's revealing to note that when we point a finger at someone else, we literally have three fingers pointing back at ourselves!

Jesus addressed this spiritual blindness in the Sermon on the Mount when He admonished the crowd: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.”
⁴

When you and I focus on the speck of sin in the other person's life while paying no attention to the plank in our own, God will begin to get our attention. He may use a lack of peace, an absence of joy, an agitation of spirit, a knot in the pit of our stomachs, a dullness or depression in our emotions, or something else to alert us that we are not all right. Because God truly loves you and me, He won't let us get
by with excuses, rationalizations, and self-defense. A spiritual blind spot is something He will seek to correct.

The correction can be hard to take when it comes through someone else. For myself, I want to give the Angel of the Lord my full attention in order for the correction to come from Him, not another person. In my experience, when it does come from Him, although it is specifically pinpointed, He opens my eyes of self-awareness quite gently and lovingly, yet firmly. There is no blame or condemnation. Just truth and light and assurance that as I confess and submit to His correction I am right with Him, and I have the hope that one day I will be right with others. He taught me this in a fresh way not too long ago …

A lovely and longtime friend emailed me one day to set up a time when she could talk with me about something on her mind. She didn't tell me what it was, just that she needed some time to talk. I knew she was aware that I was going through a difficult time, both personally and in ministry. She had helped me with some ministry initiatives in the past, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps she wanted to offer her assistance once again.

When we met, I embraced her warmly, and we spent twenty minutes or so just catching up as friends. She described a broken relationship between her siblings and how grieved she was at their unwillingness to forgive one another. I assured her I would pray for healing in her family relationships. Then I asked why she had wanted to meet with me. In tears, she explained that because I had hurt her in the past, she had made the decision not to help me with the ministry challenges I was currently facing. In fact, she said she could no longer help me in any way again. I was so caught off guard that I was stunned. She was effectively severing our relationship. At the
moment I was incapable of doing anything except just sitting and staring at her, utterly speechless. While I had no words to respond, I was truly amazed by the irony. Because my friend could clearly see the sin of unforgiveness at work in the lives of her siblings, yet she seemed totally blind to her own unwillingness to forgive me for what she felt were past hurts. My mind reeled in confusion and consternation as I wondered what sin in my life I was blind to that had hurt her to such an extreme that she would take this action.

If my friend's purpose in meeting with me was to wound me as she felt I had wounded her, she succeeded. But what was really accomplished? Instead of continuing our conversation and seeking reconciliation, she broke our relationship, an action that I believe grieved the heart of God. And it was carried out within moments of requesting prayer for reconciliation in her own family. That's blindness. Spiritual macular degeneration.

I came away from that meeting more determined than ever to have my own eyes opened to the plank that must have been there. I couldn't help but wonder what I had done to wound her, and if I had wounded her so deeply, could it be I was also wounding others without knowing it? I did not, and do not, want to suffer from spiritual macular degeneration. Especially when it results in hurting someone else.

In spite of the fact that I want to “see,” I've found it difficult, if not impossible, to open my own eyes. I know I have blind spots, but I just can't see them. Actually, that's why they are called blind spots. So this past year, following the meeting with my friend and in preparation for leading a revival, I decided to ask God to do for me what the Angel of the Lord did for Hagar. I asked Him to show me my blind
spots. And He did. At least He showed me some of them. I am quite sure there are more.

When I asked God to shine the light of His truth deep into my heart, I had to make the time for Him to do so. Practically, this meant that I spent a significant portion of each and every day for about two months searching for anything that was not pleasing to Him. To help me focus, I used a spiral-bound book that had been given to me by a friend and was developed to deepen and enrich a believer's prayer life.
⁵
In the book were several lists: Names of sins. Categories of sins. Definitions of sins. Antidotes to sins. Confessions of sins. Forgiveness for sins with hundreds of Scripture references. It was exactly what I needed to help me see.

Because God is faithful and able to open the eyes of the blind, He answered my prayer. He opened my eyes as I read through the lists of sins … meditating on just a few every day. When I worked my way through all of the lists, I went back and worked my way through them again. Then I did it for a third time. I can tell you it was not pleasant. It was not comfortable. In fact, it was painful and required courage even to look at myself the way God was revealing me to be in His eyes. But it was also deeply cleansing. And corrective. And very freeing.

While I won't share with you the various sins that God pinpointed in my life, I will share one, because I had been so totally blind to it. It was listed in the category of “control,” which is sin that dishonors God's sovereignty. And there is was
: perfectionism
. It stopped me cold. I froze when my eyes came to it in my first reading of the list. I didn't need to read the list three times to know that was me. I'm a perfectionist. But I had never considered that to be a sin. In fact, I had thought it was a strength as it challenges me to strive for excellence,
and in turn, I have challenged my family and those I work with to strive for excellence also. But what I had never seen is that my perfectionism, taken to the extreme, had been used to control others. While focused on the speck in the eyes of others, I had ignored the plank in my own. As my sin came clearly into focus, I immediately, earnestly confessed it and told the Lord how very sorry I was for having dishonored His sovereignty in such a manner. Then I humbly asked Him to heal those I had unconsciously wounded as a result.