Topic: Ministry of Presence — Key Scripture: Genesis 16:13 and Psalm 139:1-3
There’s a moment in Genesis that I come back to more than almost any other passage of Scripture — not because it’s triumphant, but because it’s so quietly desperate.
Hagar is alone in the wilderness. She’s been cast out, first by circumstance and later by name, with nothing but a skin of water and a child she can’t save. She has no status, no protection, no one coming to find her. By every measure that mattered in her world, she was invisible — a servant, a foreigner, a woman with no one left to advocate for her.
And in that wilderness, God meets her. Not to fix her situation immediately. Not with a speech. He simply sees her. And Hagar, of all the people in Scripture who could have named God something grand, gives Him a name that has stayed with me: El Roi — “You are the God who sees me.”
She doesn’t call Him the God who rescues, though He does rescue her. She doesn’t call Him the God who provides, though He provides water she couldn’t find on her own. She names Him for the thing that mattered most in that moment: He saw her when no one else did.
I think about that a great deal, because so much of the work of ministry — and honestly, so much of the work of just being human with other humans — isn’t fixing. It’s presence. It’s sitting in a room with someone and letting them know they haven’t become invisible, even if the rest of the world has stopped looking.
Over the years, I’ve sat with people in hospital rooms, hospice beds, and living rooms after unbearable news — people whose crises had gone on long enough that visitors had stopped coming and phone calls had gotten shorter. In those rooms I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t cure the diagnosis. I couldn’t undo the loss. What I could do was stay. What I could offer was the simple, costly act of not looking away.
Psalm 139 says it plainer than I ever could: “O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.” This isn’t a God who checks in occasionally. This is a God who intimately knows — an idea that implies nearness, familiarity and attention paid over time.
That kind of seeing is rare among people, and it’s exhausting to offer well. I know this from the other side too. There were seasons in ministry when I gave so much of my attention to being present for everyone else that I stopped being present to my own soul. Burnout, I’ve learned, isn’t just running out of energy. It’s losing the capacity to be seen — because being seen requires a kind of vulnerability that exhaustion makes almost impossible to access.
If you’re in a wilderness season right now — a diagnosis, a loss, a ministry that’s hollowed you out, a life circumstance that’s quietly emptied your room of visitors — I want you to hear Hagar’s confession as something more than ancient history. The God who met her in the wilderness is not a distant deity making occasional appearances. He is, in the language of the Psalm, acquainted with all your ways. He knows when you sit down and when you rise. He was not looking away from you even in the moment you felt most forgotten.
And if you’re the one doing the caring right now — sitting with someone in their wilderness, offering presence when you have no fix to offer — I want you to know that this ministry of presence matters more than it feels like it does in the moment. You are not wasting your time by simply staying. You are participating in something Hagar named thousands of years ago: the costly, quiet work of being a person who sees.
Presence doesn’t announce itself with results. It rarely feels like enough. But El Roi didn’t come to Hagar with a five-step plan out of the wilderness. He came, and He stayed long enough to be named. Sometimes that’s the whole of the ministry — staying long enough to be named as someone who saw — saw the hurt and the grief and the pain — and stayed through it all..
If no one has told you this recently: you are not unseen. Not by Him, and — I hope, in whatever small way this reaches you — not by the people called to walk alongside you either.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.