365 Days of the Great Names of God, Day 231: God of Hannah

God of Hannah

"'As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the LORD. I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the LORD. For his whole life he will be given over to the LORD.'" (1 Samuel 1:26-28 NIV)

If, when we get to heaven, we're permitted a little Q&A session with some of the ancient faithful, I'll be adding my name to Hannah's sign-up sheet straight away. 

Here is a woman who not only does not have the children she desperately longs for (and we must always remember the stigma attached to childless women in that culture), but she has to watch her husband's other wife (and we must just accept that there are certain normalcies of life in ancient times that are always going to be tough to swallow) get what she herself wants—and taunts Hannah to boot! Talk about adding insult to injury.

Then, after "this went on year after year" (1 Samuel 1:7), when poor Hannah is so heartbroken and so mistreated by her rival that she cannot eat for all her weeping, her husband asks her, essentially, "What's the matter with you? Why are you upset?" (Elkanah, PLEASE: work with us, here.)

Yet after all this, Hannah still believes in the goodness of the Lord enough to pray to Him and pour out her soul to Him (1 Samuel 1:15) and to offer to give back to Him the thing she wants most in the world, if only He will give it to her in the first place.

This vow of a woman who trusts in the loving-kindness of her God comes after years of not getting what she wanted. Years of not getting what other people had. Years of not getting something God Himself said was good: "Children are a gift from the LORD; they are a reward from him" (Psalm 27:3). Hannah's story would read entirely differently if she had been begging God to give her something He was on the record as opposing. But the longing of her heart was for something God had repeatedly indicated His favor toward. 

And then there is the fact that we are clearly told, "The LORD had closed [Hannah's] womb" (1 Samuel 1:5). Hannah's barrenness was not the result of living in a broken world that sometimes comes with bodies that do not do all we wish them to do. It was the result of the intentional act of the Lord Most High. Whether or not Hannah knew God had "closed her womb," she certainly knew He could open it if He wanted to but had chosen not to.

I think this is one of the stickiest, trickiest part of faith: acknowledging that God often does not do things that seem to us to be good, that He, for whom nothing is impossible, is capable of doing.

Hannah did not only trust God "if." She did not only trust Him "when." She trusted Him. Hannah's story shows us that God can open what He closes. He can lift up what is downcast. He can bring life from death. But if He does not, He is still good, and He is still God. 

When (not if) there are good things on this earth that, for reasons I cannot understand, God chooses not to bless me with, I have to get to the point where I understand that this world is not my home. I am not supposed to feel completely content here. And if the longing for something I do not have on this earth causes me to turn again and again toward God Who is the ultimate Fulfillment, then the loss of that longed-for thing has led me to the greatest gain.

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God, let Hannah's song be my song, too: "my joy is in your salvation."