Before we talk about anyone else, I want to talk about you.
I don’t know your name. I don’t know how you got here or what brought you to this moment. I don’t know if someone is standing beside you or if you are completely alone. I don’t know if you’re angry or afraid or numb or all three at once.
But God does.
He knows when you sit down and when you rise up. He understands your thoughts from afar. He is intimately acquainted with all your ways. Before there is a word on your tongue, He already knows it (Psalm 139:1-4).
You are not invisible. You have never been invisible. Even right now — in this moment that feels like no one sees you and no one understands — you are fully known by the One who made you.
I want to tell you about a woman who felt exactly the way you might be feeling right now.
Her name was Hagar.
She was a slave. She belonged to a wealthy couple named Abraham and Sarah, and she had no say in her own life. When Sarah couldn’t have children, she gave Hagar to Abraham to produce a child for them. Hagar wasn’t asked. She wasn’t consulted. She was used for someone else’s purpose, and when she became pregnant, Sarah treated her so harshly that Hagar did the only thing she could think to do.
She ran.
The Scripture says the angel of the Lord found her in the wilderness, by a spring of water (Genesis 16:7). A pregnant woman, alone, in the desert. No home to go back to. No plan. No one looking for her — at least, no one she knew about.
But God was looking for her.
He didn’t send someone to bring her back so she could be useful again. He came to her. And the first thing He did was speak her name. “Hagar, Sarai’s maid, where have you come from and where are you going?” (Genesis 16:8).
Sometimes you need to hear the question out loud before you can face it honestly.
Then He told her something about the child she was carrying. He told her the boy would be called Ishmael — a name that means God hears. He told her the child’s descendants would be too many to count (Genesis 16:10-11). She was sitting in the desert with nothing, and God was describing a future she had no reason to believe in.
But here is what Hagar did next.
She did something that no one else in all of Scripture ever did. She gave God a name.
“Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God who sees’; for she said, ‘Have I even remained alive here after seeing Him?’” (Genesis 16:13).
El Roi. The God who sees.
Not Abraham. Not Sarah. Not a prophet or a priest or a king. A slave woman, pregnant and alone in the wilderness, is the one who looked at God and said, “You are the One who sees me.”
And the story doesn’t end there. Years later, after the child was born and grew, Sarah demanded that Abraham send Hagar and the boy away — permanently. Abraham gave her bread and a skin of water and sent her into the wilderness of Beersheba (Genesis 21:14). When the water was gone, Hagar put her son under a bush and sat down a bowshot away because she said, “Do not let me see the boy die” (Genesis 21:16).
She sat there and wept.
And God heard. The Scripture says, “God heard the lad crying; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, ‘What is the matter with you, Hagar? Do not fear, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is’” (Genesis 21:17).
He came back.
The God who saw her the first time saw her again. He didn’t see her once and walk away. He didn’t save her and then forget her. When she was out of water and out of hope, sitting in the dirt waiting for her child to die, God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water that had been there the whole time (Genesis 21:19).
What she needed was already there. She just couldn’t see it yet.
I tell you Hagar’s story because I want you to hear one thing before anything else in this little book:
You are seen.
Not the situation. Not the circumstances. Not the questions or the pressure or the opinions of everyone around you. You. The woman sitting here right now. God sees you the same way He saw Hagar — not from a distance, not as a problem to be solved, but as a woman He formed with His own hands, whose name He knows, whose thoughts He already understands.
Whatever brought you to this moment, you are not alone in it. The God who found a pregnant slave in the desert and spoke her name is the same God who is present with you right now.
El Roi. The God who sees.
He sees you.