The God Who Sees

The God Who Sees

Hagar is not the centre of the story she finds herself in. She is a secondary character in someone else's narrative — used, dismissed, sent away with a child and very little else. She is in the wilderness, her water exhausted, certain that she and her son are going to die.

And there, in that specific abandonment, God meets her.

She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, 'You are a God of seeing,' for she said, 'Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.' (Genesis 16:13)

El Roi. The God who sees.

This is the only place in all of scripture where this name is used. And it is given — not by a patriarch, not by a prophet — by a foreign slave woman sitting alone in the desert, convinced she has been forgotten.

The theology here is quietly profound. The God who sees is not the God who watches from a distance, noting what is happening without involvement. He is the God who looks after — the Hebrew carries the sense of attention that cares for its object. To be seen by this God is to be attended to.

I have been thinking about the women who feel most like Hagar in their current season. The ones who are in someone else's story, playing a supporting role in a narrative that does not seem to care much about their own experience. The ones who have run out of the obvious resources and are sitting quietly in their own kind of wilderness.

El Roi sees them. Not despite the wilderness — in it. The seeing is happening right there, in the place where visibility feels furthest away.

You are not invisible to Him. He is the God who looks after the ones no one else is watching.