When God Calls Your Name in the Wilderness

My friend's kid was playing video games when she called him for dinner.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yeah."

He didn't move.

Three minutes later, louder: "Dinner. Now."

"I heard you the first time."

Still sitting. Still playing.

She finally walked over, stood between him and the screen, and said something every parent has said at some point: "You're not listening to me."

But here's the thing, he was. His ears worked fine. Sound waves entered his auditory canal, vibrated his eardrum, and registered in his brain. By any measurable standard, he heard her.

He just didn't do anything about it.

The Language That Wouldn't Let You Get Away With That

Ancient Hebrew has about 8,000 words. English has over 100,000. That means Hebrew words had to do more work, each one carrying meanings that English splits into separate terms.

The Hebrew word shama is one of those overloaded words. We translate it as "hear." But shama doesn't stop at the eardrum. It keeps going through the mind, into the will, down to the feet.

Here's the part that should stop you: Hebrew has no separate word for "obey." Shama covers both. To hear and to obey are the same word, because to Hebrew speakers, they were the same thing.

If you heard but didn't respond, you hadn't actually heard. You just had noise hitting flesh.

The Most Backwards Promise in the Bible

At Mount Sinai, something strange happened.

Moses read the covenant to the people, and they responded with a phrase that's been puzzling rabbis for three thousand years: "Na'aseh v'nishma."

"We will do and we will hear."

In that order. Doing first. Hearing second.

Wait, shouldn't it be the other way around? Don't you need to hear the instructions before you can do them?

The Talmud records that when Israel said this, the angels were stunned. A divine voice rang out: "Who revealed to my children this secret that the angels use?"

The secret? Understanding doesn't precede obedience. It follows it.

You don't fully hear something until you've done it. The doing is the hearing. That's why shama means both.

The God Who Doesn't Just Notice

This brings us back to a desert. A spring. A pregnant slave with nowhere to go.

The angel tells Hagar to name her son Yishmael, Ishmael. It means "God hears."

But now you know what that means.

It doesn't mean God's ears picked up the audio of her crying. It means God responded. He showed up. He spoke. He made promises. He moved.

"God hears" isn't a statement about divine perception. It's a statement about divine action.

When Scripture says God heard Hagar's affliction, it means her pain wasn't just noticed…it was answered.

The Name Nobody Taught Her

What Hagar does next is unprecedented in all of Scripture.

She names God.

Think about that. Abraham received names from God. Moses asked God for His name. Jacob wrestled all night and never got one. But Hagar, a foreign slave with no standing in the covenant community, no theological training, no credentials, looks at the divine presence and calls Him something.

El Roi. The God Who Sees.

Before this moment, no one had done that. After this moment, no one would again.

She wasn't being presumptuous. She was being precise. For the first time in her life, someone had truly seen her. Not as property. Not as a problem. Not as a means to an heir.

Seen.

And the God who sees is also the God who hears, which means He's the God who does something about it.

The Command That Complicates Everything

Here's where most people stop reading. Because what comes next is uncomfortable.

After this tender encounter, after being seen, named, promised blessing, God tells Hagar to go back.

"Return to your mistress and submit to her."

We love quoting El Roi. We make wall art out of it. But Genesis 16:9 doesn't make it onto many coffee mugs.

The same God who saw her pain sent her back into it.

Why?

Because a pregnant woman alone in the ancient Near East had zero survival options. The desert would kill her within days. Going back to Abraham's household, despite the contempt, despite the power dynamics, despite everything, was the only path that didn't end in death.

Sometimes God's "I see you" doesn't come with "I'll remove you." Sometimes it comes with "I'll sustain you."

The Difference Being Seen Makes

Here's what I think we miss in this story.

Hagar's circumstances didn't change. She walked back into the same household, the same dynamics, the same woman who had mistreated her. The situation was identical.

But she was different.

She walked back carrying something she didn't have before: the knowledge that she was seen by the God who hears, which means the God who acts.

Being seen by God doesn't guarantee your circumstances change. It guarantees you're not alone in them.

That might sound like a consolation prize. It's not. It's the thing that makes endurance possible.

Hagar would face hard things again. Years later, she'd be cast out for good, this time with a teenage son and a single skin of water. And God would show up again. Because He's El Roi. He sees. And because He sees, He moves.

The Well That Got a Name

The spring where Hagar met God became famous.

It got a name: Beer Lahai Roi the well of the Living One who sees me.

Years later, Isaac, Hagar's future brother-in-law would live near that well. The place where a desperate slave encountered the divine became a landmark in the family's geography.

Our encounters with God do that. They leave coordinates behind. The places where we met Him, rock bottom, hospital rooms, 3 AM floors, desert springs, become holy ground. Not because the location is sacred, but because something happened there we can't forget.

Someone said our name. Someone asked where we'd been. Someone heard.

And in Hebrew, that means someone moved.

The Question for You

If you're reading this and you feel invisible, overlooked, unseen, unknown, let me ask you something.

Have you considered that the God who saw Hagar sees you?

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Actually.

The same God who found a pregnant slave at a spring, who asked questions He knew the answers to, who gave her a promise that would echo through millennia, that God knows your name, your story, and your situation.

He might not remove you from your circumstances. He might, like Hagar, ask you to go back into something hard. But He will not leave you unseen.

And if He sees you, really sees you, then according to the way Hebrew works, He's already moving.

El Roi.

The God who sees.

Yishmael.

The proof that when God hears, He doesn't just notice.

He shows up.