The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong

Written by Karen Gonzalez and Sandra van Opstal

Narrated by Joana Garcia

Meet people who have fled their homelands.



Hagar. Joseph. Ruth. Jesus.



Here is a riveting story of seeking safety in another land. Here is a gripping journey of loss, alienation, and belonging. In The God Who Sees, immigration advocate Karen González recounts her family's migration from the instability of Guatemala to making a new life in Los Angeles and the suburbs of south Florida. In the midst of language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and the tremendous pressure to assimilate, González encounters Christ through a campus ministry program and begins to follow him.



Here, too, is the sweeping epic of immigrants and refugees in Scripture. Abraham, Hagar, Joseph, Ruth: these intrepid heroes of the faith cross borders and seek refuge. As witnesses to God's liberating power, they name the God they see at work, and they become grafted onto God's family tree.



Find resources for welcoming immigrants in your community and speaking out about an outdated immigration system. Find the power of Jesus, a refugee Savior who calls us to become citizens in a country not of this world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705239728

Karen Gonzalez

Karen González is a writer, speaker, and immigrant advocate who emigrated from Guatemala as a child. She attended Fuller Theological Seminary, where she studied theology and missiology, and she has worked in the nonprofit sector for thirteen years. In addition to her first book, The God Who Sees: Immigrants, The Bible, and the Journey to Belong, she has written for Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and the Baltimore Sun. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Reviews for The God Who Sees

[Dexter Richardson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Karen Gonzalez's uses an appropriate lens to write about the God who sees the various people in the Scriptures who are displaced and find themselves in unfamiliar countries as the outsider and the stranger. I hope people will read this book who want to understand a perspective that humanizes people in our society who are often put down and marginalized. The God Who Sees does that by showing the connection between the biblical narrative of God's people who are outsiders and God's love for them and God's love for those that are marginalized by society that God sees.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gonzalez has written an informed and heartfelt book that should be read widely, especially in our churches. Her own family story is interspersed with reflections on Bible figures who were immigrants though they are seldom presented that way. Gonzalez does us all a favor with her presentation of and reflection on these stories, but I resonated the most with her own story, perhaps because it is so familiar to me from encounters and friendships with immigrants, and from my own family's story which occurred long before Gonzalez's.