“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.'” – Genesis 16:13 (NIV)
Hagar had no right, by any cultural or social measure, to expect that God would speak to her personally.
She was a slave, an Egyptian, a foreigner, a woman in a world that granted women very little standing, and she had been used by Sarai and Abram to solve a problem of their own making before being mistreated and driven away. She was sitting alone in the wilderness, with no resources and no destination, when the angel of the Lord found her. Not the angel found a Hebrew patriarch. Not the angel appeared in the temple to a priest. The angel found a runaway slave in a desert and called her by name.
The name she gave God in response is one of the most theologically significant names in the entire Old Testament: El Roi. The God who sees me. This was not a name given in a moment of triumph or gratitude for a spectacular deliverance. It was a name given by a woman who had just discovered, in the middle of her particular wilderness, that she had not been invisible after all. That the God of Abram was also, apparently, the God of Hagar. That the God who made covenants with patriarchs also noticed runaway slaves in the desert.
The second wilderness encounter, in Genesis 21, is even more desperate. Hagar and her son Ishmael have been sent away a second time, now with Abraham’s blessing but still with nothing adequate for the journey. The water runs out. She puts the boy under a bush, moves a distance away because she cannot bear to watch him die, and sits down weeping. God heard the boy crying. He opened Hagar’s eyes and she saw a well of water that was already there. The water did not miraculously appear. It was there all along. What God provided was not the water but the ability to see what she had been too overwhelmed to notice.
Think about the person in your life, or the version of yourself in your most desperate season, who has felt genuinely invisible. The single parent managing everything alone with no one asking how they are doing. The immigrant in a foreign country with no network and no safety net. The person in a crowd who feels entirely unseen. The worker who has given everything to an organisation and been passed over as though they were not there. Hagar’s story is God’s permanent declaration that invisibility is a human category, not a divine one. He does not have a blind spot. He sees everyone the crowd overlooks, calls them by name, and shows them the water that was always nearby.
Today, bring before God the specific area of your life where you have felt most invisible, most overlooked, most unnoticed. Say the name Hagar gave: El Roi. The God who sees me. And ask Him to open your eyes to the well of provision that may already be present in your situation, waiting only for the clarity that His presence brings.
Prayer
El Roi, the God who sees me, I bring you the parts of my life where I have felt most invisible. Where the crowd has looked past me, where my need has gone unnoticed, where I have felt forgotten by the people and systems around me. Thank you that invisibility is a human category, not yours. Open my eyes to the well that is already here. In Jesus’ name, amen.
