I watch my toddler pore over her children’s Bible, tracing the illustrations with her chubby finger and retelling herself the stories in her sweet, sing-song voice. My heart aches remembering her question from the day before: “Mommy, where are all the stories about girls in the Bible?”

By the time she was 3, and her little sister not yet 1, we had accumulated an impressive number of children’s Bibles, and in each there was a distinct lack of women’s stories. I did my best to supplement them with narratives I recalled from Scripture, or with tales of brave female saints and women in the church. But the lack of representation in Bibles for children frustrated me and hit a little too close to home in my vocational life.

I spent my days juggling a part-time graduate program in theology and a full-time role mothering my two young daughters. My aspirations for ministry work felt consistently blocked by my lack of ordination. As my classmates from other Christian denominations began making plans to preach, to enter chaplaincy programs and to take what we were learning and apply it to the world in ministry, I felt myself standing still. I felt stuck, trapped, limited by my womanhood. My faith remained strong, but my relationship with institutional religion and its patriarchal structure felt frayed.

Perhaps the church would look differently if we did a better job of highlighting women’s work in Scripture. I, too, began asking: Why aren’t there more stories about women in these children’s Bibles?

Later that year, I was registering for classes and saw a listing for a class called “Women of the Old Testament.” It felt like a trap. While I had wanted to study more stories about women in Scripture, I feared the Old Testament would be full of the limited, traditional roles for women I associated with most of the Bible. I worried that the class would emphasize the women in Scripture who merely followed orders, bore heirs and were rewarded for their obedience.

I could not have been more mistaken.

As the class explored the stories of the fiery, intelligent, brave women of the Old Testament, I saw the hand of God in these stories of bold women and individuals on the margins. God guided his people through the bravery and cunning of “outsiders” like Tamar and Ruth; God led through leaders like Deborah and Miriam; and he redeemed stories of pain through Bathsheba and Hagar.

While at times I felt as though the institutional church was watering down the role of women in the Bible, I began to see that was not the story God was telling in Scripture.

I began a journey to discover these forgotten, or ignored, perspectives in narratives that had formerly felt familiar. The stories of women in the Old Testament hold wisdom integral to our understanding of the story of faith told through Scripture, if we take the time to read more closely.

As I opened my Bible to Genesis 16, the reading for a class assignment, I recalled how this chapter was missing from my daughters’ children’s Bible. While an abbreviated version of Scripture is common in children’s Bibles, this omission was especially noticeable as the stories in the children’s version included both Genesis 15 and 17.

Genesis 16 was the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman who was given to Abraham to bear his heirs since his wife Sarah was presumed barren due to her age. After suffering abuse from Abraham and Sarah, Hagar flees to the desert and encounters a heavenly messenger.

Hagar’s story was not simply a footnote, an inconvenient detail easily erased from history, the “before” to Sarai’s “happily ever after.” Hagar was seen by and saw God. She conversed with God and was promised a dynasty in an encounter similar to Abraham’s.

I had never considered her story; I had glazed over it like so many others, believing it was a side narrative to the protagonists, Sarah and Abraham’s, story. What more had I missed? What did Hagar’s story have to teach me?

I reached for my copy of Wilda Gafney’s Womanist Midrash and thumbed through the pages quickly to find her chapter on Hagar. My eyes welled with tears as I read that “Hagar” meant “the foreigner” in Hebrew and was very likely not her given name. We do not know her true name; her name was lost to history, a footnote deemed unworthy of remembrance. This woman, whose story could strike me in a more meaningful way than so many others in the spotlight of Scripture, was only called Hagar.

Gafney notes that when Hagar flees and meets the heavenly messenger at the well in the desert, she receives “the first divine annunciation to a woman in the canon of a promised child and the promise of a dynasty.” In reply, Hagar calls God El Roi, meaning “a God of seeing,” and asks in Verse 13, “have I seen the one who sees me and lived to tell of it?”

Hagar named God; she recognized that she was seen and noticed by God. Gafney notes that in calling God by name, Hagar becomes the first female theologian in Scripture.

I slowly set the book down on my lap. I wiped the tears still streaming down my face.

The narrative of the woman called Hagar opened my eyes to why we need to consider the stories and characters on the margins of Scripture. We need to re-examine those stories that feel familiar, going further in our study and examination, because a fuller picture of the narrative grants us a fuller picture of God.

The lessons Hagar’s story taught me continue to affect my understanding of God’s love. Through Hagar, I am reminded that my savior sees us all. Regardless of our gender, age, class, status or any other facet that the world uses to condone overlooking others, we serve a God who sees us all. I am learning to rest in the peace of his sight, to call God, as Hagar did, El Roi, a God who sees me.

I wish I could say that studying these narratives created a space where all my negative feelings about the patriarchal structuring of our church dissipated, but that would not be true. I still struggle with the weight of limitations placed on women within the church, but I have learned through my years of biblical scholarship since discovering Hagar’s story that the world may operate under these limitations, but God does not. By studying the stories of women throughout Scripture, I have come to find peace and hope in the way women are seen by God.

My prayer is for a future where all the church knows and honors the stories of women in Scripture. This change begins with the small step of telling those stories. More children’s Bibles, such as The Book of Belonging, are offering a more inclusive view of race and gender in the stories they choose to spotlight and the illustrations they provide. Yet there still exists a need to include the stories of the outsiders in our repertoire.

Recently, I was snuggled up on the couch with my daughters, blankets and dolls cuddled close, when I picked up their children’s Bible and pointed to the gap between Genesis chapters 15 and 17. “Ladies,” I said, “I’d like to tell you the story of Genesis Chapter 16. And an amazing woman who we know as Hagar. She lived a complicated, difficult life, but God always saw her—just like he sees you.”

—–

Alli Bobzien is a freelance writer and mother and a graduate of Fuller Seminary, where she earned a master’s degree in theology.

Alli Bobzien is a freelance writer and a recent graduate of Fuller Seminary, where she achieved her master’s in theology.