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For some time now, I have been living with a prayer: Lord, let me see.
The longer I have lived with it, the less certain I have become that I understood what I was asking. I thought seeing more clearly would mean learning to pay better attention—to notice what familiarity had allowed me to overlook, to question conclusions I reached too quickly, and to become attentive enough that I could still be interrupted by something I had not expected to see.
Gradually, the prayer began asking something more difficult of me. Clearer vision would require more than noticing what was in front of me; it would require reconsidering the assumptions shaping what I saw. I did not realize quite how much that mattered until I returned to a woman standing beside a spring in the wilderness.
Her name is Hagar.
Her story in Genesis 16 is complicated and painful. She is an Egyptian servant in the household of Abram and Sarai, caught within circumstances she did not create and relationships marked by power, conflict, and hurt. Pregnant and mistreated, she finally runs away. An angel of the Lord finds her beside a spring in the wilderness, speaks to her, and tells her what lies ahead.
But it is Hagar’s response to that encounter that has made me linger.
She gives God a name: El Roi—the God who sees me.
There is so much she could have said about the God she encountered in the wilderness. Yet this seems to be what overwhelms her. The God of Abram had found her. Not humanity in general. Not a category of people. Not simply a woman in distress whose circumstances required divine intervention.
Her.
She had been seen.
I think I have spent much of my life more comfortable with the idea of seeing than with the experience of being seen. Seeing gives me something to do. I can become more observant. I can question my assumptions. I can slow down and listen more carefully. I can become curious about the person in front of me and attentive to what I might otherwise have missed. Even when seeing asks me to change, I remain, in some sense, the one doing the looking.
Being seen changes my position entirely.
I am no longer watching where Jesus looks and trying to learn from Him. I am no longer asking only whether I notice the woman in the crowd because He notices her, whether I would stop when He stops, or whether I can hold my assumptions loosely enough to see what is actually there.
Now I am the one standing within His gaze.
And I am not sure that is always as comfortable as it sounds.
Most of us become fairly skilled at deciding what portions of ourselves the world gets to see. Social media has only made that curation more familiar: we choose the photo, frame the moment, edit the caption, and decide what belongs in public view and what does not. We know how to present the competent parts, the useful parts, the composed parts. We know how to answer “How are you?” and keep moving. We know which stories we tell easily and which ones remain mostly unspoken. Sometimes we become so practiced at managing what is visible that we can almost forget there are places within us we would rather not examine too closely ourselves.
But Scripture does not introduce us to a God who sees only what we place carefully in front of Him.
The God who finds Hagar in the wilderness sees the person others might have overlooked. The Christ who stops for the unnamed woman in the crowd allows her to tell Him “the whole truth”—and then calls her Daughter. Again and again, Scripture introduces us to a God whose knowledge of us is not partial, tentative, or dependent upon what we are willing to reveal.
That could be terrifying if the One looking at us were merely an observer.
But He is not.
His seeing is not detached scrutiny. It is attention joined to love. He sees what is beautiful and what is unfinished, what is faithful and what is frightened, what we offer freely and what we keep hidden, what we understand about ourselves and what remains a mystery even to us.
Nothing surprises Him into loving us less.
I wonder what happens to the prayer Lord, let me see when I begin there.
I think that learning to see others more clearly does not begin with trying harder to become observant, compassionate, or attentive. Those things matter, but they grow from something deeper. Before I learn to notice another person with greater care, I need to understand what it means to stand before Christ and discover that His gaze has already found me.
There is a kind of freedom that begins there.
If I do not have to hide from being seen, I do not have to approach another person with so much certainty about what I see in them. If God’s knowledge of me is complete while mine is partial, I can hold my understanding of another person more humbly. If I am fully known and still loved in the places where I am unfinished, I can become less impatient with what remains unfinished in someone else.
And perhaps this is why the question of where I am standing matters so much.
I began by wanting to stand near Jesus and learn where to look. I watched Him notice people inside crowds, stop when everyone expected Him to keep moving, and refuse the conclusions that seemed perfectly reasonable to those around Him. I wanted to learn to see that way.
But I had moved too quickly.
Before I ask how to see as He sees, I need to understand what it means to be seen by Him.
Fully known, without the ability or need to curate what is visible. Seen not by the condemning gaze I sometimes imagine, but by the One who already knows the whole truth and does not turn away.
Seeing differently may not begin with our eyes at all.
What if learning to see begins with discovering that we have already been seen?
Perhaps Lord, let me see is not only a prayer asking Christ to change the way I look outward. It is also an invitation to remain still long enough to recognize that His gaze has already found me.
Fully. Attentively. Lovingly.
And from the safety of that gaze, I can begin to look outward again.
September 18, 2026. Originally published on LinkedIn.