The God Who Sees Us in the Middle Place
Some of the things we carry never fully go away. A calling, a relationship, a role in someone's life — what was described this Friday night as a "tether." Not every tether is bad. Some are God's design, His way of keeping us connected to people and purposes He's placed in our lives. But some tethers bring real pain, and this week's message was an honest, tender look at what to do when we're bound to something — or someone — that hurts.
Naming what we carry
The message opened with a simple but costly exercise: naming the hats we wear and the weight that comes with them — daughter, mother, teacher, leader, friend — and admitting that some of those roles feel heavy in ways we don't always say out loud. Rather than rushing past that weight, we were invited to sit with it: "I don't want to rush to closure... I just needed to let those things be unsolved, just be named, and just hold them before the Lord." That kind of honesty with God, we were reminded, isn't a detour from faith. It's often where real encounter begins.
Hagar, and the God who sees
The heart of the teaching came from Genesis 16 and 21 — the story of Hagar, an Egyptian servant tethered to a household that mistreated her, pregnant and alone in the wilderness. When the angel of the Lord found her by a spring, He didn't scold her or rush her along. He asked her a question — "Where have you come from, and where are you going?" — and He saw her. Hagar became the first person in Scripture to give God a name: El Roi, "the God who sees." As it was put Friday night, "our God is not blind. He's not absent. He's not distant, but He is a witness to every grief that we experience."
Hagar's story didn't end with one encounter in the desert. Years later, sent away again with her son Ishmael, she ran out of water and prepared for the worst — and God met her again, opened her eyes, and showed her a well that had been there the whole time. Twice, in two different seasons, God saw her right where she was.
Learning to live in the middle
Between those two encounters, Hagar lived in what the message called "the middle place" — that liminal space where you know what God said but haven't yet seen it come to pass. We were invited to name what that middle feels like, and the room offered words like *hopeless, uncertain, dry, lonely, desperate.* It's a place where it's tempting to draw conclusions about who God is — or isn't — simply because we can't yet see how the story ends.
Grief is something to feel, not just something to name
A distinction was drawn between grief as a noun — the loss itself — and grief as a verb — actually feeling the weight of it with God rather than around Him. We heard a personal story of walking through years of infertility and two miscarriages, and of one honest, half-formed prayer in the middle of an ordinary workday that finally let go of a hidden question: is God really a good Father? In that moment of naming the doubt instead of burying it, the doubt lost its grip. That's often how it works — not because naming pain makes it disappear, but because it stops being something we hide from God and starts being something we bring to Him.
Where He wants to meet us
The invitation Friday night wasn't to rush toward resolution, but to let God into the places we've tucked away — the grief that's inconvenient, the questions that feel too big, the middle we haven't figured out yet. He isn't waiting for us to arrive somewhere before He'll show up. Like He did for Hagar, He finds us exactly where we are.
Something to sit with this week
Is there a tether in your life that's brought you more pain than you've let yourself admit? What would it look like this week to bring that grief to God honestly, instead of pushing it down — and to trust that He sees you in the middle of it, the same way He saw Hagar?
Catch The Fire Boulder meets Sundays at 10:00 AM at 700 W South Boulder Rd, Lafayette, CO. We'd love to have you join us. Watch the full message or plan your visit.
