The God Who Sees Me in My Mental Health
Behind the scenes of publishing an article, all about Hagar, and debunking the myth that Divine love is demonstrated by our wellbeing
Too many Christians have believed that with enough faith, we can just make every type of suffering, including mental illness, miraculously dissipate. This misconception then makes God’s goodness dependent on answered prayers and our own freedom from pain. But that is a limited perspective on Divine love.
Recently, one of my articles went up in U.S. Catholic, The Biblical Story of Hagar can Give Hope in Times of Anxiety: Amidst our worry, even our despair, God is present with us. That wasn’t what it was named when I pitched it, but magazine editors do what they do to get eyes on it. And there are no shortage of eyes available—With 5.5 billion adherents to Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the stories of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham are familiar to much of the global population. Or more likely, these names might not be entirely unfamiliar.
Editing Hagar
It surprised me how much back-and-forth it took to get my article up once it was accepted. I wrote it last summer (only months after my most recent hospitalization) and was ready to move on from it. But the editor I was working with continued to go back-and-forth with me.
Why? Mainly, we disagreed on how to add in Hagar’s story. My original article was written for a different story-based magazine, where Hagar was only a brief mention in the middle of a larger focus on my own narrative. For U.S. Catholic, the goal was to exchange paragraphs from my story with Hagar’s story (according to Genesis 16 and 21). This I was fine with. But we struggled to get on the same page in the story’s details. Here are a few examples:
Was Hagar Abraham’s slave or Sarah’s?
What do I do about the fact that Abram’s and Sarai’s names change in the middle of Hagar’s story?
Which time did Hagar run away and which time was she sent away?
Was it an angel who met Hagar? Or was it actually God as Jesus?
How exactly should I frame Hagar going back into an abusive situation, when I wouldn’t want anyone reading this to do the same?
How much of a parallel could I pull on when comparing her slavery to my slavery “of mental health” without minimizing her very real external circumstances?
Anytime I would push back on the wording, I’d ask myself, “Does this detail really matter? This is just one article in a sea of content.” But for my integrity, it felt like it did matter. If God gave Hagar dignity, surely I too should represent her well.
Much Ado About Hagar
It turns out a lot of people have opinions about Hagar. For example, my dad, an ESL teacher, spends a lot of time with Muslims. As my article came up, he had some intriguing conversations about the Islamic perspective of Hagar, the mother of a nation. Muslims believe Hagar’s son, Ishmael, was the son Abraham was preparing to sacrifice, and the mountain they were at was in Saudi Arabia. This story is actually a pretty significant part of one of the Hajj, one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
A designer I know then shared an intriguing post about the similarities between Sarah and Hagar, both as victims of the patriarchy. A totally unique perspective I hadn’t considered.
Then, while chatting with someone else, they pointed out how God’s first prophesy about Hagar’s son was anything but charming:
This son of yours will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey! He will raise his fist against everyone, and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live in open hostility against all his relatives.” Genesis 16:12 NLT
Was this one of those prescriptive prophesies, or one that a mother could change through her prayers? From a Judeo-Christian vantage-point, it is all too easy to consider this as prophetically continuing to unfold, with the hostility between Arabs and Israelis. Both people groups have descended from Abraham, and yet I still believe that these relatives can become one people.
Here’s another example: I have a spiritual leader who often brings up the New Testament passage, Galatians 4. Here, Paul’s purpose was to convince us to not live under the law, but to be free. And although this is wonderful, it always irks me that Hagar (slave) and Sarah (free) are contrasted for this illustration. The are discussed without an ounce of empathy, stripped of humanity, as if they weren’t real people. I have to remind myself that Paul himself was the biggest advocate for the freedom of all! Without his ministry, neither I nor the children of Ishmael would have freedom from legalism. Even so, the illustration makes me feel gross, glossing over the fact Hagar had no choice but to be the slave woman. I wouldn’t want to be the global example of spiritual slavery.
Lastly, I mentioned writing this article to a working group I am in, which includes a fair amount of seminary students and writers. One of the seminary students began telling me about different theories of what happened to Hagar after Sarah died. Another writer there,
, sent me a whole file of pages about Hagar, including a bunch of content from Wilda Gafney’s Womanist Midrash. Jenai has been studying Hagar for a chapter in her soon-to-release book, Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. I can’t wait to see how Hagar is intertwined into her book.I am not sure how much I actually learned about Hagar while writing my article besides the fact that everyone has something to say about her. Maybe I simply learned that an obscure and heartbreaking story in Genesis appeals to many.
Weakness
Personally, I think that one of the reasons we are drawn to Hagar is because she debunks the myth that God's love is demonstrated through our wellbeing. It is true that Hagar did have her needs provided for, but her experience fell far short of what I’d consider ideal circumstances. Notably, she had no promise of safety, but she trusted God anyway. For her to keep going, she needed the assurance that she was seen by him.
She didn’t earn the right to be seen. She just was—both seen and loved. If anything, by the standards of the day she was a low-life: a woman, a minority, a slave. But thankfully, God doesn’t judge by the standards of the day. His character is evident through the story—the God who sees us as we cry out in our oppression, in our failings, in our sickness, in our poverty, in our weakness. We cannot forget Hagar’s story, because in some ways, we’ve all been her.
Speaking of weakness, do you want to read the part of the article that we cut to make room for Hagar?
PTSD and Hypervigilance
The knife was in his mouth pirate style; the serrated blade was facing inward. “No, no, no!” I cried, dropping my coaching call. I gently pulled the sharp object from my toddler’s lips, relieved not to see any blood. I was appalled. Shame washed over me as I tried to remember leaving the knife out so carelessly.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, whether by nicking himself with a razor, or trying to drink poisonous cleaning agents. My vigilance always returns in horrified waves of, “How did I forget he was there?” or “I checked out!” What follows is a string of self-loathing mom-guilt, coupled with the whispers of the greatest fear of all: “What if he died?”
As all toddlers seem to have a death wish, heightened awareness can be a gift that comes with parenthood. That is familiar to me, for this is my fourth child. But this round of toddlerhood is a different story, and not because my son is more troublesome than average.
While I was pregnant, my body began shutting down and attacking itself as if my baby and I were enemies to be destroyed. I was diagnosed with systemic lupus and continued to go through life-threatening crisis after crisis until last March. In case the postpartum period wasn’t challenging enough, this time I was facing it with a severely sick and disabled body. My mental health was shorting out like spark plugs and I was easily diagnosed with PTSD.
My therapist tells me that hypervigilance is a common presentation of PTSD. My body is always assessing, thinking an emergency is about to happen and that life-threatening danger is real and present. Ironically, this alleviated state has the opposite effect of keeping things safe. I’m exhausted by subconsciously looking for imaginary threats. When I can’t keep up, part of my brain shuts down and then I miss actual dangers.
I’m finding it hard to accept grace when I’ve unintentionally put my child at risk. But I’m reaching for God’s goodness. I have hope, for I’ve known the God who has walked with me through mental illness before.
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE
The God Who Sees
You know when I first became really intrigued by Hagar? It was while reading The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong by Karen Gonzales. I was just diagnosed with systemic lupus and so fatigued that I was sleeping eighteen to twenty-hours a day. But when I could, I’d pull out on my phone, which was the heaviest thing I could hold. I’d open my book app and read immigration stories to distract me from my own pain. Then when I’d remember how shaky my baby and my intertwined fates were, I’d beg the God who saw Hagar, immigrants, and others who suffered to see us, too.
I didn’t add this story to my article in U.S. Catholic, but it sets the stage for it. I also talk about the God Who See here, in Ghosts, reflecting on church hurt. I believe once you meet God in a particular way, or through a particular character, they show up everywhere. They become dear, even if not exclusively yours.
I can’t wait to hear how Hagar’s story has become important to you, reminding you how loved you are even in your circumstances.
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Please comment with any random thoughts about Hagar’s story or if the God Who Sees means something to you, too!