Looking back upon my life, I can see times when I felt unseen, unimportant, unheard. I felt silenced and broken. There were times when I found myself in a form of exile, and I realized I had lost myself along the way.
I am not a pushy person, a fighter, someone who courageously stands up to opposition. As a matter of fact, I HATE confrontation and conflict. It isn’t that I don’t have convictions, far from it. I KNOW what I believe, upon WHOM I believe, but I tend to have a quieter demeanor. I’ve been told I “have a quiet spirit” about me. I recognize that about myself, which has caused me to realize I am far better at writing my thoughts than speaking them.
I have periodically devoted myself to reading the Bible cover to cover. In one of my journeys through God’s Word, I was reading in the book of Genesis and met the woman Hagar. Here was a woman who was unseen, unimportant, unheard, silenced, broken, and exiled. I felt myself drawn to her at a visceral level. In many ways, I was Hagar.
I chose to dig into her story more deeply, and one particular scene leapt from the pages of my Bible and grabbed hold of me. Hagar, an Egyptian slave and maidservant to Abraham’s wife Sarah, was bearing his child because Sarah was barren, a common practice of the time, though not endorsed by God. Sarah mistreated her, so Hagar fled from her mistress into the wilderness. Here is the account from Genesis 16.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
“You are now pregnant
and you will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers.”
13 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.” 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi [Beer Lahai Roi means well of the Living One who sees me.]; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
The Hebrew name that Hagar gave to God that day is El Roi, The God Who Sees Me. The text I bolded in the above paragraph was the portion that gripped my very heart that day. I knew, and I know, that my God sees me! I will share more about this in future posts, but please notice the setting of this scene. Hagar got to know God at a well or spring in the desert. I, too, have gotten to know God in the desert of my soul as He quenched my thirst for love and my desire to be seen and heard. He found me in the wilderness of my personal exile, and He saw me. He is my El Roi also.
So the name for my website is inspired by Hagar’s experience in the desert. I can imagine her leaning over the water of this spring as she drank, seeing her reflection in the water there as well as the reflection of God. I want to use my voice, in the form of my written words, to reflect upon how I see God in my own life.
Reflections in the Well 