The God Who Sees Me

Context

Hagar is the woman almost nobody talks about, which is strange because God speaks to her twice and she ends up naming him. She's an Egyptian slave in Sarah's household, no protection and no exit. When the promised child never comes, Sarah hands her to Abraham as a surrogate. Hagar doesn't get a vote.

Story

She gets pregnant, the household turns on her, and Sarah deals harshly enough that a pregnant woman would rather walk into the desert than stay one more night. By a spring in the middle of nowhere, the angel of the Lord finds her and asks where she's come from and where she's going. She can only answer the first.

He sends her back, but not empty-handed: a son named Ishmael, which means God hears, and a promise of descendants too many to count. Then she does something no one in the Bible has done yet. She gives God a name.

"El Roi — the God who sees me."

Fourteen years later it happens again. Cast out for good, out of water, she puts her son under a bush so she won't watch him die. And God hears the boy. Her eyes open, and there's a well, like it had been there the whole time.

What We Learn

God didn't pull Hagar out of her circumstances. He sent her back the first time and let her run dry the second before showing her the well that was already there. But he saw her, by name, twice, in a place where she was invisible to everyone else.

Sometimes being seen by God doesn't change your situation. It changes whether you can walk back into it.