E25 l You Are Not the Only One Who Asked | I Never Got My Why - Part 3

In Episode 3 of I Never Got My Why, Tennille explores the wilderness story of Hagar and the powerful name she gives God in the middle of unanswered questions: El Roi, the God who sees me.

This episode is about isolation, edited pain, emotional honesty, and the deep human need to be seen fully in suffering.

Inside this episode:

• Hagar in Genesis 16
• El Roi, the God who sees
• emotional isolation
• the edited version of pain
• why women hide the full truth of their grief
• being seen versus being explained

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

What if I told you that some of the most faithful people in the Bible asked the same question you're asking? Not after they found the answer, while they were still living without it. What if the thing you've been quietly judging yourself for is actually all over scripture? What if asking why is not evidence that your faith is weak? What if it's evidence that you're human? Because I think one of the loneliest parts of grief is believing you're the only one who ended up here, and that simply isn't true One of the quietest lies that the why season tells you is that you are the only one. Not the only one in pain. You know intellectually that other people suffer. You've heard enough testimonies. You've sat in enough circles. I mean the deeper loneliness. The one that sounds like nobody else has asked this exact question for this long with this much faith and still not gotten an answer. Nobody else has believed as hard as I have believed and still ended up here. Nobody else would understand. That is the lie. And it is a persuasive one because it disguises itself as self-awareness. So I wanna take you somewhere today. We're gonna go to Genesis sixteen. Hagar was Egyptian. She was a servant. She had no power in her situation and very little say over what happened to her. She was given to Abraham by Sarah because Sarah hadn't yet received the promise of a child and decided to take the matter into her own hands. Hagar conceived, And then the dynamic between the women became unbearable, and Sarai dealt harshly with her, so Hagar ran. She was alone in the wilderness. She was pregnant. She was far from home in a country that was not hers, in a situation she hadn't created, Carrying a child that complicated everything with no plan or protection. And then a question came, not from Hagar, but from God. The angel of the Lord said to her, "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?" I want you to notice something here. God knew where she was coming from. God knew where she came from. God knew where she was going. God knew every detail of the situation before the conversation even began. The question was not for his information. It was for hers. Where have you come from? Meaning, can you name the wound? Where are you going? Meaning, do you have a plan or are you just running? And Hagar answered honestly. She said, "I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai." She didn't say, "I'm fine. I'm just taking some time to pray. Everything is going to work out." She named the wound plainly. She said, "I'm running from a place where I was hurt And then the text says something that I think is one of the most important things in all of scripture for a woman in a why season to see and to read and to understand. She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her El Roi, the God who sees. Not the God who explained it, not the God who fixed it immediately, not the God who gave her a full theological framework For why this was happening. The God who sees me. And then she said something else. "Truly here I have seen him who looks after me." She saw him seeing her. That is the whole moment. She didn't get an answer to the why. She got a name, and that name changed everything that came next for her I wanna talk about isolation for a moment because I think it's one of the most underestimated parts of the why season. When you are inside a question that nobody around you seems to fully understand, you start to edit yourself. You stop saying the full honest thing because you have already seen how people respond to it. They get uncomfortable. They reach for a scripture too quickly. They tell you to pray more specifically or trust more completely or just believe that God is working even when you don't see it. And those things may all be true, but they don't touch the place where you're actually sitting. So you learn to give the edited version. You say, "I'm doing okay. I'm trusting God. It's hard, but I know He has a plan." And people exhale with relief because they don't have to sit in the discomfort with you. I remember one season where I got so used to giving the manageable version that I almost forgot what the honest version sounded like People would ask how I was doing. And I would smile. I'd tell them God was working. I'd tell them I was trusting Him. And none of that was untrue. But it wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was that I was still hurting. The whole truth was that I was still asking why. The whole truth was that I loved God and was disappointed at the same time, and I didn't know what to do with those two realities living in the same heart. after a while, constantly translating your pain into something more comfortable for other people becomes its own kind of exhaustion. So you go home carrying the unedited version alone. Here is what I want you to know. Hagar didn't edit herself. She said exactly where she had come from, and she named it plainly. The woman with the issue of blood in Mark five had been bleeding for twelve years. She had spent everything she had on physicians who could not help her. She was isolated from her community because she was unclean by religious law. And still she pressed through a crowd to touch the hem of a garment because she wasn't willing to stop reaching. She didn't wait until she had a tidy testimony to approach Jesus. she came undone, and she came anyway. Hannah wept so hard in the temple that the priest thought that she was drunk. She was not performing perfect faith. She poured out her actual soul, and God heard her. And there were so many people that asked the same question. Job, David, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, and even Jesus asked. From the cross he cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Son of God entered human suffering deeply enough to voice the question himself, which means your question doesn't scare him. He has stood inside it. These women and men did not sanitize their pain for public consumption. They brought the real thing. And they, and they got met by a God who didn't flinch at their realness You're not uniquely broken. You are in a long line of people who brought their unedited selves and got seen anyway. If all you hear today is this, asking why is not evidence of weak faith Because there are so many people in the Bible that have asked, and Jesus himself cried out and asked the question. The question is not what disqualifies you. It may actually be the place where God meets you, even if you don't get the answer And I wanna say something else about the name El Roi because I think it matters beyond Hagar's story. The name doesn't just describe what God did for Hagar in the wilderness. It describes who God is in every wilderness. Seeing is not passive for God. It is not the way someone glances at you and keeps moving. When scripture says, "God saw," it means he turned his full attention toward a person in their specific pain, in their specific moment, and chose to be present there with them. You are in a why season, and you may feel like you are in it alone. But El Roi is already in the room with you, not explaining, not rushing you through, not handing you a timeline, just seeing fully, specifically you. And there were seasons where being seen by God mattered more to me than getting the answer. And if I'm gonna be honest, there are still a few questions in my life that I would love answers to. Some of them have never come. But I can tell you this. I no longer doubt that he saw me while I was asking and the times that I still ask. Because answers can explain events, but being seen heals isolation. Maybe the miracle of the season is not that you finally get the answer. Maybe the miracle is discovering you were never alone in the question, not because the question disappeared but Not because the question disappeared, but because God met you there. Before we leave today, I wanna give you something practical. Take five minutes this week. Write down the question you have been afraid to say out loud. No editing, no spiritual polishing, no making it sound more acceptable. Just write the real question The raw one, the one you wouldn't ask anyone else, or maybe your trusted friend. And then write these two words at the top of the page. El Roi, the God who sees. And if there is one safe person in your life, one trusted friend, one mentor, a counselor, a pastor, tell them the unedited version. Not because it fixes the pain, But because healing struggles to happen in hiding It helps to talk about it. It helps to share it So we've been going deeper on this topic and many other topics over on Substack. So I want to invite you to come read and stay a while. The link is in the show notes. And if this conversation is speaking to something deeper in you, I want to personally invite you to something that begins next week. On Wednesday, June 17th, we begin a free online Bible study called Why Did This Happen? Together, we are opening Scripture and walking through the stories of women who asked hard questions, lived through unanswered seasons, and discovered that God was still writing their story. This is not a lecture. This is not a place where anyone is going to rush you to a happy ending. It is a conversation around the Word with women who understand what it feels like to be in a why season. If that sounds like where you are right now. I would love to have you join us. Registration is free and the link is in the show notes. One more thing. Later this summer, I will be opening a deeper guided experience for the woman who is ready to move from simply listening to doing the work. more details are coming soon. But if you have been listening and thinking, "I know God is inviting me into deeper healing," I want you to know something is being built with you in mind. I will be back Thursday with part four of this series. And we are going to talk about one of the most quoted verses in the Bible. A verse you have probably seen on mugs, wall signs, and social media and what was actually happening when God said it. So as I leave you, I want you to know that you are seen even here, even now, Even in the Y