A Hagar mistake

Ever heard the expression "A Hagar mistake"? Well it means a grievous error, a misjudgement of God's work in our lives. I first came across it some years ago when I read the story of Abram and Sarai in the Old Testament book of Genesis.  Basically, after choosing Abram from whom He was to create His people, God told Abram that he would have more descendents than the stars in the sky.  His wife Sarai was hiding behind a curtain and on hearing this laughed at the impossibility of it all. Both she and Abram were old people and she was more than sterile from old age. How could she give birth to a nation?

The story goes that God heard her laugh and told Abram that he would have a son .  But on being convinced that God had really spoken and made a pact, Sarai decided to take the situation into her own hands, believing that God had ignored an important fact of this situation....she was unable to concieve. So she directed Abram to her own Egyptian maid servant Hagar, basically pushing her husband into another woman's arms so that she would conceive the promised child that Sarai couldn't.  The resultant child was Ishmael but with him were equally born doses of jealously and contempt between the two women for years. Sarai did not realise how God works and that the impossible was not impossible for Him.  In fact she did eventuallybecome pregnant from Abram and gave birth to a son whom God said should be called Isaac, that is, the laugh (in fact he did end up being a laughing stock in the social circles of his time). From that line eventually came Jesus.  It is claimed by the Muslims that they descend from Ishmael, Abram's son through Hagar.  And the rest of the "battle of the brothers" is history, as they say.  

But the point of this post is to highlight how easily we too can commit a Hagar mistake ourselves, by taking the law into our own hands and pushing God into the back seat of our car.  We tell Him that in reality we are driving and that we are in control.  He can be our consultant and give advice on how or where to go....but He is not allowed to interfere in  how we get there.  Our own GPS is far better that Him. We want to do it our way,  as Frank Sinatra sang for us so many years back.

Next time you're out and around in the world, faced by the worldly opinions from friends and colleagues abouthow to look at things, and think about who is in control.  Because when you are in control, the pressure and the stress are directly on you and there is no one else by yourself who has to somehow find the solution/s to cope.  But when you allow someone else with more experience to take over then we can really taste the sweeter side of life.  So it is with us when we manage to allow our Great God to take over and run our lives.