The God Who Sees

Today I'm thankful for the stories of women like Leah and Hagar, who both found themselves suffering in various ways, who felt invisible at times. Yet the Bible shows how God saw them. He never forgot them. He knew of their hurts when no one else on earth seemed to notice or care, and He reached out to bless them even in the midst of their pain.

I can't imagine how much Leah must have hurt, but even in her painful story, we see hope and blessings from God:

“And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.”

--Genesis 29:31

In verse 17 of Genesis 29, Leah and Rachel are first described: “Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured.” Although the exact meaning of “tender eyed” is under debate, the overall idea of this verse is painfully clear: Leah was constantly being compared to her sister...and coming up short. When Jacob entered the scene and fell in love with Rachel, Laban’s younger, “well favored” daughter, Leah had undergone years of feeling less than adequate. She had watched her little sister grow up into a beautiful woman. Leah isn’t described as ugly, necessarily, but she probably felt as if she were. Invisible—that is what she was, always standing in the background while her sister received the adoration and attention. Forgotten—just the girl that everyone smiled and spoke to, but never really tried to get to know. As the elder daughter, she was, by tradition, supposed to marry first, but it was Rachel that caught every man’s eye, Rachel that they really wanted.

When Leah became the victim of her father’s scheming and was married off to Jacob in place of Rachel, maybe she felt a semblance of hope at first. Jacob clearly cared for Rachel, but maybe, once Leah was his wife, he would feel an obligation toward her. At the very least, he would have to notice her. She wouldn’t be invisible anymore. Her future was secured; she would have someone to provide for her, maybe—dare she hope it?—someone to look at her with the same adoring gaze that so often settled on Rachel.

But Leah was doomed to forever feel not good enough. Jacob refused to settle for her and her alone; he demanded that Laban give him Rachel in marriage too. Leah desperately wanted the man she had married to care for her, but he couldn’t see her, couldn’t notice her, not when Rachel was in the picture. Leah felt lonely and heartbroken and overlooked when she was alone, or when she watched Jacob and Rachel together; she spent so many nights crying herself to sleep, probably wondering what she had done to deserve this. But often she felt just as lonely, if not worse, when she spent time with Jacob. The look in his eyes always told her his thoughts were elsewhere: on anything but Leah. She knew he was thinking about Rachel, even when she wasn’t around, and that killed Leah inside. She was always overlooked, ignored, forgotten. Even her father hadn’t cared enough to consider the pain that might ensue if Leah married a man who didn’t love her, and especially if she married a man who had a second wife whom he adored.

Leah was the victim of an unrequited love that she could never move on from, get over, or ignore; she was the sufferer of a heartbreak that never ended. Even when she thought maybe, just maybe, she could earn the favor she craved from Jacob when she laid their firstborn son, then second, and even third, in his arms, she met with disappointment. Failure. Hurt.

She wasn’t beautiful enough. She wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t “well favoured.” She wasn’t loved. She was invisible. She was forgotten. But not by God.

"...The LORD saw..."

The same was the case for Hagar, when she ran from the mistreatment of her mistress Sarah. She felt like she was alone, like no one cared, no one saw. She felt used, after having been part of Sarah's plot to procure Abraham a son. She felt despised, because Sarah and Abraham no longer seemed to want her or care for her well-being. She felt desperate, because suddenly she was out on her own, pregnant and despairing, without the home and shelter she had known during her time as Sarah's maid. Where could she turn?

Then God spoke to her, encouraging her and blessing her. He reassured her that He knew of her struggles and hurts, that she was not on her own. He promised her that her unborn child would be blessed as well, not just a worthless outcast as she probably had feared.

What was she thankful for in that moment? The fact that Someone had finally noticed:

Then she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees; for she said, “Have I also here seen Him who sees me?”

--Genesis 16:13

No matter what we are going through, good times or bad, God is always there. He is always ready to ease our suffering and bless even our difficult circumstances. No matter how alone we might feel, how much it seems others don't care or mistreat us, how often we feel forgotten, overlooked, or invisible, God sees and remembers us.