El Roi: The God Who Sees You in the Wilderness

Have you ever felt invisible? Like your presence is optional and nobody's tracking what's actually going on inside you? In this episode, Jen unpacks the story of Hagar in Genesis 16, a pregnant, powerless servant girl who fled into the wilderness alone - and became the only person in the entire Bible to give God a name. That name is El Roi: "the God who sees me."

Jen digs into who the "Angel of the LORD" actually is, why God finds Hagar before she ever looks for Him, and what it means that He calls her by name in her lowest moment. Then she gets personal, sharing for the first time the six weeks she went without sleep while weaning off anti-anxiety medication and that she stopped believing God was paying attention to her at all.

This is a conversation about feeling unseen in your marriage, your motherhood, your mental health, or your own exhausted mind at 3am - and what it means to trust that God's seeing is never passive. 

Come find the Blush Revival community at blushrevival.com. If this episode speaks to you, subscribe and leave a review — it helps other women find the show 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to Bibles and Botox. I'm so happy to have you here. Uh, new listeners, welcome. Existing listeners. I have been pretty quiet the last two months or so. I had some personal things come up, and I'll get into that actually later in this podcast. Uh, but I I wanted to just address that and say I'm happy to be back online and sharing the Lord's message that he's put on my heart and giving you guys this content. So I'm happy to be back and welcome to everybody that is listening. Um, I wanted to start today with a question, and the question is this have you ever been in a room full of people and felt completely invisible? And I don't mean just ignored or pushed aside, but invisible. So, in other words, unseen. And perhaps it's a family gathering where everyone's talking over you or dismisses anything you say, or maybe it's in your own home. Maybe you are the one cooking the meals, washing the clothes, driving the carpool, carrying the mental load, uh, not just for yourself, but for everyone, and you feel unseen in your home environment and unappreciated. Or maybe you are lost in a problem. Maybe it's a marriage problem, maybe something's going on with your husband or some other kind of internal problem, and you feel completely alone in it. Uh, you could be unraveling in the next room, and no one in your family, not a single person, would even know. And more importantly, uh, and most importantly, maybe you doubt that even God sees what is going on inside or with your problem. Today we're gonna look at the book of Genesis and a woman named Hagar. This is a woman that felt completely unseen, unappreciated, and seemed to only be valued for one thing, her body. And she felt very alone. And I want to show you today what God did when nobody else was watching. Because Hagar ended up giving God a name that no one else in the entire Bible gives him. And I think it's a name that most of us need to hear. And if you remember one thing today, let it be this. God does not require you to have it together, all your problems solved, everything perfect before he will see you or pay attention to you. He does not require you to have a platform, a title, or a seat at anyone's table. In fact, God walks into the wilderness, as we will see today, for one pregnant, powerless, runaway slave girl, and he calls her by name. So let's dive in. We're in Genesis 15, and just to set some context for you on what is happening, Abram, a man who has been called by God, is being told something amazing. Verse 5 records God talking to him outside, and God tells him to look at the night sky, and he says, Abram, look now toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them. God then makes a promise after that statement and says, So shall your descendants be. So think about that. God has just made Abram an almost unthinkable promise that his descendants will outnumber the stars. Could you, you know, for a second, even imagine that? I know a woman that has eight children, and there's many women that have many more than that. And I am overwhelmed at that thought. So I cannot even fathom descendants outnumbering the stars. Uh, but this is a covenant moment, and the God of the universe binds himself to it. But there is a small problem. Sarai, Abram's wife, is barren and they are old. In fact, very old, somewhere around 86 and 76. Uh, and they have been waiting for years. They have years of hoping, praying, and wondering if God was still going to fulfill the promise he had made. So God's made this promise to them. They're waiting, they're old, they're like, come on, God, you know, what's going on here? Nothing's happening. And I think, you know, personally, many of us can relate to this. We're we always seem to be waiting on God. And sometimes things happen quickly and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they take days, weeks, months, years. And what do we do when we're waiting on God and it feels that he's not moving or working on our behalf? We get restless. We start solving a God-sized problem with a human-sized plan. And that's what Sarai does. In Genesis 16, 2, she tells Abram to sleep with Hagar, her servant, so that they could have a child, the one God had promised, and that child could be born through Hagar. So Sarai is essentially saying, I don't want to wait on God anymore. Nothing has changed. And so she takes matters into her own hands. And man, I think we can all relate to that, at least I can. And who is Hagar? So Hagar is an Egyptian slave. She was likely acquired during Abram and Sarai's time in Egypt back in Genesis 12. Uh, she basically has no power, she has no voice and no value in Abram and Sarai's household except that of a servant. Um, so Sarai makes this proposal to Abram about her servant girl, and how do we see Abram respond? Well, he agrees. He ends up sleeping with Hagar and she becomes pregnant. Now, imagine this household for a second. Talk about an awkward situation. We have the barren wife, the agreeable husband, and the pregnant servant girl. Uh, I feel like I feel like at any given moment this could turn into some kind of dateline special. Uh, but I just think of the awkwardness in that home during that time. And and Genesis 16, 4 tells us that Hagar, while she's pregnant, started to look at Sarai with contempt. It says, in fact, she looked uh with contempt on at her mistress. But why contempt? Well, when we think about the complexity of the situation, Hagar being the servant, I'm sure, has suddenly been elevated in the house because she's carrying Abram's child. And now she maybe feels a sense of significance and maybe she's got a little pride about that. Maybe the way she looks at Sarai changes. Perhaps the tension in that home becomes unbearable. I would not be surprised if it did. We we don't know, but I do know it's got to be a little weird. And verse 16 tells us that Sarai notices this and mistreats Hagar, and Hagar, it says, flees the house. So here we have a pregnant, rejected slave girl fleeing into the wilderness alone with nothing. She is a woman caught in the middle of someone else's decision carrying the consequences of a situation she did not create. But something happens. Something happens in the wilderness. God finds her. Genesis 16 7 says, The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. I want to slow down here quickly and look at that phrase, the angel of the Lord. This is not just a random messenger sent from God, the angel of the Lord. Throughout the Old Testament, the angel of the Lord speaks with God's own authority, makes promises only God can make, and receives worship and recognition in a way that points beyond just being a created angel. And you can do your own study on this, but many theologians understand these appearances as what is called a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. So that long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God was already revealing himself and moving toward people in their deepest moments of need. And notice the text does not say Hagar prayed the right prayer, cleaned herself up, or found her way into God's presence. It specifically says the angel of the Lord found her. She was not part of the covenant family. She was not the wife. She was not the one who received, received the promise. She was nothing but an Egyptian servant girl sitting alone in the wilderness with nothing to offer. And yet God came looking for her in her mess, in her aloneness, in her unseeness. And the angel of the Lord says in Genesis 16, 8, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? Now notice this: God asks a question, where are you come from and where are you going? That he already knows the answer to. So then why is he asking? Because he is inviting Hagar into conversation. Next, we see he calls Hagar by name, not slave, not servant, not the woman caught in someone else's mistake. He says, Hagar, the God who created the universe, stops in the wilderness and speaks directly to one hurting woman. Hagar responds to him in verse 8, and she says, I'm running away from my mistress Sarai. And what does the angel of the Lord God tell her to do? He tells her to return and submit to Sarai. Ouch. But he does not send her back without hope. He gives her a promise. He tells her in verse 10, I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count, that she will give birth to a son, and that she would name him Ishmael. For the Lord has heard of your misery. And then Hagar responds with one of the most beautiful declarations in all of Scripture, and this is the focus of today. She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her. In Hebrew, El Roy, that's E-L R O I means the God who sees me. El means God. Roy comes from the Hebrew word meaning to see, to look upon, to perceive. But this is not just a God who sees in the sense that he knows we exist. This is not a distant awareness. This is not God looking down from heaven with a casual glance. This is personal. And this is a God who sees not just Hagar, but a God who sees you, a God who sees your pain, a God who sees your loneliness, a God who sees your marriage problems, a God who sees your questions, a God who sees your tears, and a God who sees the parts of your story nobody else knows. And think about for a second who gave God this name? It was Hagar. It was not Abraham, not Moses, not David, not one of the patriarchs of the Bible, a foreign servant woman with no power, no status, and no place of importance in society. She encounters the God of the universe and says, I know who you are now because I have experienced what you do. You are the God who sees me. The woman that everyone else overlooked became the first person in scripture to give God a name based on her own personal encounter with him. Because guess what? When everyone else saw a servant, God saw a daughter. When everyone else saw someone useful for their own gain, God saw someone valuable. When everyone else overlooked her, God found her. And Hagar's story reminds us that God's attention is not reserved for special people or the powerful or the or the important. He is El Roy. He is the God who sees you sitting alone in your wilderness today. He is the God who sees your tears that no one else notices, even when you're just in the next room. He is the God who knows your name before you ever even think to call His. And I thought, hey, I don't need this anymore. I feel kind of good. And so I thought it was time to get off. So I did uh per the doctor's instructions wean off it uh carefully, the way I was supposed to. And as I was going, you know, initially through the process, my body completely revolted. And there's so much I could say about this. Um and and I've gotten lots of feedback about women on medications, and and it's I just realized this is this is bigger than I thought it was. Um and and we can address that at another time. But but for my situation, for about six weeks or so I did not sleep. And when I say I did not sleep, it doesn't mean I slept badly or I didn't get enough sleep. I mean I did not sleep uh at all. And I think my nervous system forgot how to shut off. And somewhere in that six weeks, or many days of those six weeks, I had the thought and you know, stopped believing that God was seeing me, that he was paying attention. I said the same prayer every night. God, please let me sleep. And every morning I'd get up having not slept, and I would do it all again. And I run a company, I do this podcast, and I try to, you know, speak into other women's lives as often as possible. And, you know, I'm telling women, hey, God sees you, God hears you, and he's watching you and in my own bed at, you know, three in the morning. I I genuinely wondered if he'd looked away from me specifically. And I think a lot of us carry that quiet, ashamed thought uh because it feels unspiritual to admit it. It's hard for me to say, hey, I'm a Christian and I I you know believe in all these things. However, I'm really doubting it right now. So let me say it plainly. I felt unseen by God during one of the hardest seasons of my adult life. Not in some kind of poetic way, in a real exhausted 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling way, wondering where God was. I was suffering. I wanted the spring in the wilderness. I wanted a rescue. I wanted instant relief. I wanted the angel of the Lord to show up and fix my nervous system on the spot. Um, and what I got instead was Hagar's harder assignment: go back into the hard place and be sustained there by me. Not rescued from it, but sustained inside of it. And it wasn't until the day at the six-week mark where I was sitting out uh in my patio and I was praying and I said, Okay, God, I said I'm suffering in this way, but I do believe that I can rejoice in this. I do believe that joy and suffering can coexist. I do believe that you see me and I surrender this to you. And that is the first night I slept, and I have slept ever since. Lamentations 3, 22, 23 became the verse I clung to, and that is the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. I didn't get a dramatic breakthrough. I didn't get some instant rescue. What I got slowly over those six weeks was evidence of God. Friends showed up at my house to sit with me, talk with me. Some brought gifts. I read a verse that landed differently than it had the day before. A body that eventually, gradually remembered how to rest. I found small wells in a very dry stretch of desert. And I couldn't see any of them in the first few weeks because I felt alone and unseen. If you are in a season where you feel invisible, and man, I've talked to a lot of women, and I've I have heard a lot of stories about marital problems with husbands. Nothing catastrophic, but but bad problems within your marriage, and they feel unseen. And a lot of those women over the years, I've continued to talk to them about their story, and I want to tell you something amazing. A good chunk of them, I would say the majority of them, that clung to God during those seasons, God blessed that decision to be obedient and stay in their marriage. And their marriages are thriving now. And again, those are very specific situations I know, uh, you know, and I can just, I can just speak on friends that I've spoken with. But my point is if you're in a season like that, or in a season of motherhood, or your body, or your bank account, or your church, or your own mind, even at three in the morning, hold on to El Roy. This is the same God that saw a slave girl weeping in the desert, and the God who saw me lying awake in a bed I couldn't sleep in for six weeks. Being seen by him doesn't always look the way we expect. Sometimes it's an open door, sometimes it's a closed one. Sometimes it's him sitting with you in the hard place, saying, I know I'm here, and I have a plan you can't see yet. And three things you can do with this today. First, name what's making you feel unseen. Don't leave it as this vague heaviness that clouds your mind. Is it your marriage? Is it your work? Is it a certain friendship? Hagar's breakthrough started when God asked her a specific question and she gave him a specific answer. So specifically answer that question today and give it to God. Second, pray, El Roy. Literally say the words this week. When you feel unseen, tell God, you are El Roy. You are the God who sees me. I don't feel it right now, but the Bible declares it and I believe it. And that's not pretending. That's a Lamentations 3, 22, 23 kind of faith. Third, ask God to open your eyes to what's around you. The spring of water that's already there. The verse that keeps coming to your mind, the friend who keeps checking in, the small mercies you've been too tired to notice. Ask him to show you what he's already put in front of you. And the last point is you are not invisible to God. You never have been. Father, I pray for every woman listening who feels unseen right now in her home, in her marriage, in her own exhausted mind, maybe in the middle of the night. Meet her exactly where she is, not where she thinks she should be. Open her eyes to what you've already provided. Remind her that your scene is never passive. You see and you move and you stay. You are El Boy. We love you. Amen. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode hits home, share it with a friend who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening and come find us at blushrevival.com. We are building a community of women who take their faith seriously and want to take care of the whole woman while they're at it. I'll see you next time.