Biblical interpreters have long been interested in what characters do. They ask whether a character acted faithfully. Did they trust God? Did they respond wisely? Did they obey? Such questions are central to both theological interpretation and moral formation.
Chaplains are also interested in what people do. Yet their concern is assessment, not instruction, and intervention rather than formation. I enter the room not as a teacher, theologian, or ethicist, but as a shepherd of souls. My work begins with listening. With the same attention the biblical scholar gives to the text, I give to a patient’s words, relationships, questions, and behaviors.
As the biblical scholar offers an interpretation, the chaplain offers an assessment. A spiritual assessment is not a description of vice. Spiritual distress and sin are not the same thing. In fact, as a chaplain, I am rarely concerned with determining the precise boundary between them. My attention is directed elsewhere. It is directed upstream.
A spiritual assessment is an attempt to discern which unmet spiritual needs are most active beneath a person’s experience and how those concerns are shaping their thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behavior. The focus is not primarily on the symptom, nor even on the behavior itself, but on the deeper spiritual needs that appear threatened, frustrated, wounded, or distorted.
This begins with a particular understanding of what it means to be human. Human beings are relational creatures. We are created for meaningful connection with others, with ourselves, and ultimately with God. Because we reflect the relational life of our Creator, our need for love, purpose, belonging, direction, and reconciliation is not merely psychological or emotional. It is spiritual.
For this reason, the Spiritual Assessment and Intervention Model (Spiritual AIM) proposes that human experience is organized around three primary spiritual needs: Meaning and Direction, Self-Worth and Belonging to Community, and Reconciliation—the need to Love and Be Loved.
These are not pathologies to be overcome. They are dimensions of human flourishing. Every person requires meaning. Every person requires belonging. Every person requires love. Spiritual distress emerges when these goods become threatened. Spiritual distortions emerge in the ways we attempt to secure them.
If these needs are truly fundamental to human experience, we should expect to find them wherever human beings are found, including within Scripture. This raises the central question of this essay: What happens when biblical characters are approached with the attentiveness a chaplain brings to a patient?
The question has obvious limitations. Spiritual AIM was developed for conversation. A chaplain listens, asks questions, tests assumptions, and refines assessments in real time with the patient. None of that is possible with biblical characters.
Yet it does not make the inquiry speculative. In fact, the limitation may not be as severe as it first appears. Spiritual AIM is not built on guesswork. It attends to patterns. Words matter. Questions matter. Relational posture matters. Blame matters. Withdrawal, conflict, silence, pleading, laughter, accusation, and flight are not random narrative details. They are the visible shape of spiritual distress. Biblical narratives are filled with precisely these things.
This matters because moral readings often stop at the visible act. They tell us what to imitate or avoid, but they can overlook the spiritual distress from which the act emerges. Spiritual AIM asks a different question. What primary unmet spiritual need appears most prominent in this person’s experience? The goal is not to replace moral evaluation. It is to understand the spiritual concern around which the person’s thoughts, relationships, emotions, and behavior appear to organize.
The story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Genesis 15–21 provides an opportunity to explore the question. The narrative begins with a problem. Years earlier, God had promised Abraham descendants and a future beyond anything he could have imagined. Yet as the years passed, the promise remained unfulfilled. Abraham and Sarah grew older. Sarah remained unable to conceive. What God had spoken seemed increasingly disconnected from what they experienced.
The tension created by that delay drives the narrative that follows. Sarah proposes that Abraham father a child through her servant Hagar. Abraham agrees. Hagar conceives. What begins as an attempt to resolve uncertainty quickly gives rise to conflict, resentment, humiliation, abandonment, and fractured relationships that reverberate through the household for years.
The story is often read through the lens of faith and unbelief, patience and impatience, obedience and disobedience. Such readings are neither wrong nor unimportant. Yet they can leave a different question unexplored. What spiritual concerns emerge within the lives of those caught inside the story?
The crisis is shared. The spiritual distress is not. Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar all inhabit the same narrative. They do not inhabit the same experience of that narrative. The text repeatedly draws attention to different concerns, different vulnerabilities, and different relational tensions. What appears most threatened for one character does not necessarily appear most threatened for another. (This is precisely the kind of distinction Spiritual AIM trains chaplains to notice.)
Abraham: Meaning and Direction
Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Meaning and Direction often experience distress through questioning, interpretive searching, uncertainty, and difficulty establishing a coherent path forward. Rather than directing blame toward themselves or others, they frequently seek understanding. Their attention gravitates toward purpose, future, direction, and the unresolved question of how present circumstances fit within a larger story.
Abraham’s speech throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflects this pattern. His recurring concern is not whether God will fulfill the promise but how God intends to fulfill it.
This pattern emerges immediately. After God promises protection and reward, Abraham responds, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” (Gen. 15:2, ESV). A few verses later he presses the concern further. “Behold, you have given me no offspring” (15:3). His distress is not primarily relational. He does not direct blame toward Sarah, himself, or even God. Instead, he attempts to reconcile divine promise with observable reality. The concern is directional and interpretive. How can the promise proceed if no heir exists?
Genesis 15:8 strengthens the pattern. Abraham asks, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” Again, his response emerges through questioning rather than accusation. He seeks assurance, coherence, and orientation within circumstances that remain unresolved.
The same concern continues throughout the narrative. When Sarah proposes that he father a child through Hagar, Abraham agrees (Gen. 16:2). The decision is often interpreted as a failure of faith. It may be that. Yet it also reflects an attempt to resolve covenantal uncertainty through an available human pathway. The promise remains certain. The means of fulfillment remain unclear.
Genesis 17 intensifies the pattern. When God announces that Sarah will bear a son, Abraham laughs and asks, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” (17:17). He then pleads, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” (17:18). Abraham does not reject God’s promise. He attempts to reinterpret it through the son already present.
Even Genesis 21 reflects the same orientation. After Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away, Abraham is distressed “on account of his son” (21:11). God responds by providing renewed direction, reaffirming both Isaac’s role in the covenant and Ishmael’s future.
Throughout Genesis 15–21, Abraham repeatedly seeks assurance, clarification, and direction. His recurring concern is not whether God will fulfill the promise but how God intends to fulfill it. The promise itself rarely appears in doubt. The means of fulfillment do.
Sarah: Reconciliation / To Love and Be Loved
Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Reconciliation often experience distress through blame, mistrust, relational conflict, and attempts to repair or secure relationships through control. Their attention gravitates toward questions of loyalty, injury, fairness, obligation, and relational security. Distress frequently emerges through fractured relationships rather than through interpretive questioning or self-condemnation.
Sarah’s speech and behavior throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflect this pattern.
The narrative context of Sarah’s distress is undeniably painful. Years of barrenness, covenant uncertainty, and social vulnerability shape everything that follows. Yet Spiritual AIM assessment focuses not simply upon suffering itself but upon how distress manifests. Sarah’s suffering consistently surfaces through relationships.
The pattern becomes clear after Hagar conceives. Sarah says to Abraham, “May the wrong done to me be on you!” (Gen. 16:5). The statement is significant because of its direction. Sarah’s distress immediately moves outward into accusation. Rather than questioning the promise or searching for meaning, she identifies a relational injury and assigns responsibility. She continues, “The LORD judge between you and me” (16:5). The language is relational, judicial, and conflict-oriented.
The conflict with Hagar intensifies the pattern. After Hagar conceives, she “looked with contempt on her mistress” (16:4). Sarah experiences the situation not merely as disappointment but as relational destabilization. The response is coercive. “Sarai dealt harshly with her” (16:6). Distress externalizes into domination, hostility, and fractured communion.
The same orientation appears again after Isaac’s birth. When Sarah sees Ishmael “laughing,” she immediately tells Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son” (21:10). Once again, perceived threat is managed through relational exclusion. Sarah attempts to restore security by redrawing relational boundaries.
Even her response to the promise in Genesis 18 carries this relational quality. Sarah laughs inwardly at the announcement of a son and later denies laughing when confronted (18:12–15). The exchange reveals defensiveness within a moment of vulnerability and exposure. The tension is interpersonal as much as interpretive.
Throughout Genesis 15–21, Sarah repeatedly experiences distress through the lens of relationship. Her attention returns to perceived injuries, threats, loyalties, and conflicts. Again and again, she seeks to restore stability by controlling the relational field around her. The recurring concern is not primarily how the promise will be fulfilled but who can be trusted within the struggle to receive it.
Hagar: Self-Worth and Belonging to Community
Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Self-Worth and Belonging to Community often experience distress through feelings of invisibility, abandonment, displacement, dependency, and uncertainty regarding their place within relationships and community. Their attention gravitates toward questions of worth, recognition, acceptance, and whether they truly belong. Distress frequently emerges through withdrawal, isolation, or fears of being forgotten rather than through sustained blame or interpretive questioning.
Hagar’s speech and behavior throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflect this pattern.
Genesis introduces Hagar primarily through social vulnerability. She is “an Egyptian” and Sarah’s servant (Gen. 16:1). Unlike Abraham and Sarah, she possesses little power over the decisions shaping her life. She is given to Abraham as part of another family’s attempt to secure offspring. Her story begins not with self-determination but with dependency and displacement.
The narrative becomes more complicated after conception. Genesis states that Hagar “looked with contempt on her mistress” (16:4). Yet this moment does not become the controlling pattern of her story. The narrative repeatedly returns instead to themes of vulnerability, flight, abandonment, and the search for a place within a world that continually pushes her to the margins.
After Sarah deals harshly with her, Hagar flees into the wilderness (16:6). The response is revealing. She does not attempt to seize control of the household or retaliate against Sarah. She disappears. Distress manifests through withdrawal and isolation rather than domination or accusation.
The wilderness encounter in Genesis 16 becomes the center of her story. The angel of the LORD finds her beside a spring and addresses her personally: “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” (16:8). For perhaps the first time in the narrative, Hagar is addressed not merely as a servant but as a person. The encounter culminates in her declaration, “You are a God of seeing” (16:13). The statement is remarkable because it identifies the deepest movement within her experience. Hagar’s crisis is not primarily one of direction or reconciliation. It is the experience of being unseen, forgotten, and displaced. God’s response is recognition.
The same pattern reappears in Genesis 21. Expelled from Abraham’s household, Hagar wanders in the wilderness until the water is gone. She places Ishmael at a distance because she cannot bear to watch him die (21:16). Once again, the narrative portrays vulnerability, helplessness, and abandonment rather than accusation or control. God’s response is likewise familiar. “God heard the voice of the boy” (21:17). Hagar is seen. Ishmael is heard. Their future is preserved.
Throughout Genesis 16–21, Hagar repeatedly confronts the threat of losing her place, her security, and even her visibility. The recurring concern is not how the promise will be fulfilled or who is to blame for its complications. It is whether she and her son have a place within the story at all.
What Spiritual Assessment Reveals
The significance of this exercise lies less in the individual assessments than in what they reveal about spiritual distress itself. Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar inhabit the same story, endure the same covenantal uncertainty, and experience the same unfolding events. Yet their distress does not manifest in the same way. Abraham searches for direction. Sarah struggles through fractured relationships and questions of trust. Hagar confronts abandonment, invisibility, and the threat of exclusion.
This observation suggests that spiritual distress cannot be reduced to a single pattern. Human beings do not merely sin differently. They suffer differently. The same crisis may activate different spiritual concerns, expose different vulnerabilities, and generate different distortions.
For pastors, chaplains, and spiritual caregivers, this distinction matters. Effective spiritual care requires more than identifying behavior. It requires learning to recognize the spiritual concern around which that behavior has become organized. Before guidance, correction, encouragement, or healing can occur, there must first be understanding.
Spiritual assessment offers one way of cultivating that understanding. It trains us to ask not only what a person has done, but what spiritual need appears most active within their experience. Sometimes the path toward healing begins not with a better answer, but with a better question.
I love that humans are holy texts.