The Line He Could Not Fill In

The delivery comes before the shutters are all the way up, the way it always does, and Youssef is on the sidewalk to meet it, the way he always is. Crates of dates from the wholesaler, tins of olive oil, sacks of bulgur, forty kilos of it, and the boy from the bakery two doors down already leaning in the doorway with the first tray of bread for the counter. It is a good hour. The street smells of diesel and warm sesame and the sky over the flats is going from gray to gold. Youssef has stood on this sidewalk at this hour for fourteen years and there is a part of him that loves it.

His uncle is upstairs asleep. His uncle owns the shop and the flat above it and, in a way that has never been said out loud, Youssef. He came from the village at nineteen to help out for a summer. The summer became a year, the year became the storeroom at the back with a mattress in it, and somewhere in there the question of wages became a question nobody asked, because family does not ask, and there was always food, and where else was he going to go. He works seven days. He has not been to a wedding that was not in this street since he was twenty two. If you asked him whether he was happy he would say, honestly, that this is just his life. He stopped thinking of it as anything else years ago.

Today the driver is new. He does not know the routine, so he does what the form tells him to do, which is to hold out the clipboard and the pen. Received by. Name. Youssef writes his name. Position.

And the pen stops.

He is standing on the sidewalk with the bakery boy watching and the driver waiting and the bread going cold on its tray, and there is no word. Not employee, he has never been paid. Not partner, he owns nothing. Not son. He has been here fourteen years and there is no word for what he is, and he has never noticed there was no word until a form asked for one. He writes shop in the box, which is not a position, and hands the pen back, and carries the dates in, and the morning goes on. But something has been seen, and it was seen by him.

You have a line like that. Something you are inside that you stopped calling by its name so long ago that when a stranger asks the plain question, the pen stops. It is not a secret. It is worse than a secret. It is the weather. It is just how things are.

The word that went missing

Let me tell you first what I am not going to do, because the bracing started at the first line.

I am not going to tell you what your situation is. I cannot see it from here and I would be a liar to pretend I could. It might be a job, a house, a family arrangement, a debt, a role you took on at nineteen that nobody has released you from. It might be a thing that has a name and a thing that does not. I am not going to hand you a word for it, and I am not going to tell you what to do about it, and I am not going to say, even gently, that you should have noticed sooner. Nobody notices the water. That is not a fault in the fish.

What I am going to do is show you a woman at a spring, because what happened to her at that spring is what is happening to you on this sidewalk.

Her name is Hagar. She was a servant in another woman's house, in an arrangement she did not choose, and when the arrangement turned hard she ran. Genesis 16 finds her in the wilderness, by a spring of water on the road to Shur, and it does not find her alone. The angel of the Lord finds her there. And the first thing He does is not to fix anything. He asks her a question.

Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?Genesis 16:8

Hear what that question is doing. He knows where she has come from. He is not asking for information; He is asking her to say it. And she does. I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai. It is the first time in the story she has said out loud what she is inside. And then He speaks, and the word He uses for her situation is not the word she has been using. He says the Lord has listened to your affliction. Not your life. Not your lot. Not how things are for people like you. Affliction. He looked at the thing she had stopped naming and He named it.

You are seen in the arrangement you stopped naming, right now, by the same God who found a runaway servant by a spring. That is Scripture, not my sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries the seeing off the page and into the room where you are reading. I want you to feel the weight of seen, because it is the whole of this stage of the road. Nothing has moved yet. Nothing has to have moved yet. Before the water, before the leaving, before any of it, there is a God who looks at what you have been calling ordinary and does not call it ordinary.

This is the pattern of the whole exodus, and it is worth noticing that it starts the same way. Four hundred years in Egypt. Long enough that slavery was simply what the world was; nobody alive remembered otherwise. And Exodus 3:7 records God saying I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, I know their sufferings. Seen. Known. Named as affliction, by Him, before a single brick was laid down. You have not been overlooked in the years you stopped keeping count of, and His Spirit is bearing witness to that as you read. The seeing came first. It always comes first. He moves before you move.

And what Hagar does next is the loveliest thing in the chapter. She names Him back. You are the God who sees me. El Roi. She, who had no name for what she was, gives Him one. And the well was called after it, so that people drawing water there for generations would say the name of a God who saw a servant girl in a hard arrangement and called it what it was.

I know the two things that stand between you and this. The first says that was for Hagar and Israel and not for a man on a sidewalk with a clipboard. The second says it may be for people in general but your years are too many and your thing too ordinary. Hear me plainly. His word does not expire and Jesus said the Spirit He sends stays with His people for ever, which is long enough to reach this morning. And a God who called a servant girl's arrangement by its true name is not embarrassed by the ordinariness of yours. Ordinary is exactly what He came to see through.

You have not been disqualified by the plainness of your situation, and Scripture is where that gets settled rather than in anybody's opinion of you. Genesis 16 chooses a servant girl at a spring on a road nobody famous was traveling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary life exactly the size of thing He deals with.

One more thing, and I say it because I would rather say it and not be needed than stay silent and be needed. If any part of the arrangement has stopped being hard and started being unsafe, that is not something to sit with alone or to sort out from a page. Tell somebody tonight. A person you trust, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you to do anything about your arrangement. That is me not being willing to leave you unaccompanied.