On Hannah’s Story
About Hannah’s story
I want to start this blog by saying that I am not one of these people who reads a Bible story written centuries ago, about someone else, and then immediately claims the promises of God in it for me.
I don’t believe that’s a helpful way to read scripture; their story is not my story, and my story is not you story either. God is writing a different story in each of our lives so I would never presume to know what ending God is writing or to suggest that ours would be the same.
That said, I do think looking at characters in the Bible who struggled with infertility can still offer us some helpful lessons, and so I have drawn a few from the story of Hannah, a Hebrew woman who’s story about struggling to conceive you can read about in 1 Samuel 1.
It’s good to be real with God
Maybe like me, you sometimes find it hard to be honest with God about your emotions when it comes to miscarriage loss or the fertility problems you face.
Perhaps instead, it just feels easier to give God your best spiritual performance; telling him what you think he wants to hear. After all, surely that’s the fastest route to twisting God’s arm and getting what you want from him? Is that kind of thinking just me, or have you ever thought that way too?
But Hannah’s story reminds me that it’s actually good to bring my tears, my anger and disappointment right before God. It’s okay to be real about how I am feeling. He can deal with my rawest emotions. I don’t need to hide them away. And after all, he already knows anyway…
Also, just for the record, I really don’t think there’s any spiritual formulas for getting what we want from God. There’s nothing more we need to do to please me, and no spiritual lesson we need to learn in order to ‘unlock the blessing’ or ‘crack the code’. But even so, I can find myself falling into this mindset at times...
But grace means that there’s nothing more we can do to make God to love us any more or any less than he already does. He loves us fully, completely, wholly, exactly as we are.
The author AW Tozer once wrote: "What we believe about God is the most important thing" and it’s really true.
If I believe that God is holding out on me, or holding something good back from me - like a pregnancy - then it’s hard to want to draw close to him. I mean, why would anyone want to draw close to the author of their pain?
But the truth is that God isn’t holding something back from any of us. He’s not standing by, waiting for us to ‘do better’, to pray the right words, to learn the right lesson about waiting, or to just muster up enough faith…
God doesn’t cause infertility, any more than he causes any form of sickness or disease; and in fact, in Genesis 3:16 difficulties in childbirth are explicitly mentioned as a part of the curse of sin.
If something you believe about God doesn’t leave you wanting to draw towards him, then it’s simply not the truth about him.
2. It’s good to be vulnerable with others.
Maybe like me, you also aren’t very comfortable with public demonstrations of emotion either. You’d rather just bottle all those confusing emotions up until you’re on your own at home.
But not Hannah. She is found weeping and pouring out her soul to the Lord at the temple. In fact, so great was her emotional display that Eli the priest at the temple initially thought she was drunk. Yet she replies:
“Not so, my lord,” Hannah replied, “I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my deep anguish and grief.” (1 Samuel 1:15)
This passage reminds me that it can be helpful to share my emotions with others. I mean, maybe not with just anyone who will listen, but at least with some close trusted friends, family members, counsellors or spiritual leaders who I know will stand with me and my husband, and pray on our behalf.
Sometimes it can be hard to bring your heartbreak to others and ask for help. It takes vulnerability and vulnerability can be hard, especially when we’re already hurting. But just look how Eli the priest meets her where she’s at.
He blesses Hannah, prays over her and encourages her not to worry, but instead to trust in God and to go on in peace, saying ‘May the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him’.
We are then told in the story that Hannah goes home to her husband with her spirit lifted.
3. Healing isn’t instant or guaranteed
If you are at all familiar with this passage, you’ll know that it the goes onto includes: “So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”
Now this was an amazing answer to prayer for sure, but I also just want to apply a small word of caution here. Because I think it’s really easy to read the Bible and to fill in the gaps ourselves, assuming that the answers always came quickly and very miraculously.
But that’s not actually what we are told here in this text. It says that she became pregnant ‘in the course of time…’
This ‘course of time’ could have been a few days or weeks, or it could have been a few months. But it also could have been significantly longer too. It could have been years and years.
We simply aren’t told for sure. But bearing in mind that there were no ovulation sticks, no early pregnancy scans, and no digital pregnancy test kits offering 99% accuracy existed at the time this passage was written, I think it’s safe to assume that there was a reasonable time lapse between the prayer and the answer.
And I often wonder what happened in that waiting time too. Did she trust God fully, without waivering? Or did she continue to wobble and to doubt at times like me?
This is one of the problematic things about reading scripture from our modern point of view. So much unfolds in a single passage or chapter that we can think everything happens instantaneously. But so much is left out too. And often we can end up filling in the gaps ourselves by projecting our own assumptions onto a bible story, when in reality we simply don’t know the parts we aren’t told.
Maybe the pregnancy came soon after, or may not. And in a way, maybe we don’t need to know, because maybe that’s not the main point…
Maybe this story isn’t really about one singular miraculous moment at all, but lots of small, miracle moments lading up to it instead. Hannah’s vulnerability became the conduit for her healing to begin. And the text says she went away with her spirit lifted, long before she got an answer.
So maybe that should be our biggest takeaway.