This book began as a sermon. It was one of those messages that you do not choose so much as it chooses you. I had been praying over a congregation of women in our church at Mpraeso, women who were carrying enormous loads: single mothers, widows, abandoned wives, daughters bearing responsibilities that were never meant to be theirs alone. And as I sat with their stories, God kept returning me to one name in Scripture. Hagar.

Hagar was not a queen. She was not a prophetess with a platform. She was a servant girl, a foreigner, a woman whose name appears in the margins of someone else's story. And yet God met her. Not once, but twice. He found her in the wilderness, spoke to her, called her by name, and made a promise over the child she was carrying.

I began to see that Hagar's story was not an ancient footnote. It is the story of millions of people today. People whose lives have not gone according to plan. People who find themselves in terrain did not choose, raising children they must raise alone, facing futures that look nothing like the one they imagined.