The water is gone. The container is dry, and so is your hope. You have done everything you knew to do, and it has ended here, in the heat, with the child you love slipping away.

Hagar put Ishmael under a shrub. The shade is thin, the leaves brittle. She walked a bowshot away - the length of an arrow's flight, which is the exact distance of a mother's helplessness. She cannot bear to watch, but she cannot bear to leave. So she sits and weeps, and the sound of her crying mixes with the boy's weaker cry. The sand is hot. The water skin is empty. The sky is a brass lid.

The text says God heard the voice of the boy. The mother's despair was loud, but what the text records is the boy's actual cry, where he was. The angel calls to Hagar: 'What troubles you? Do not be afraid.' The Father calls you the same. He does not scold your panic or tell you to be strong. He tells you to lift the boy up and hold him - to touch the very thing you were trying to distance yourself from. Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. The water was there all along, but she could not see it through her tears. Jesus, on the cross, also cried out in abandonment, so your cry is not foreign to him. And the Spirit is the one who opens your eyes to see the well that is already in this dry place.