The book of Samuel opens with a woman crying at a doorpost. It begins with no king and no army. 2"Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children," the narrator says plainly, and then makes sure we feel the weight of it. The LORD had closed her womb. He says it twice in five verses. Whatever else was going on in that house, year after year, Hannah's grief had God's own hand somewhere behind it, and she knew it.
Everyone around her tries to fix what she carries, and every attempt falls short. Peninnah provoked her grievously. Elkanah means well and misses her: 8"Am I not more to you than ten sons?" A husband's love was never going to be Hannah's answer. Even Eli, the priest, sees a woman speaking in her heart, lips moving with no sound, and decides she must be drunk. The one man whose job was to recognize God's presence cannot see it in his own doorway.
So Hannah takes the whole weight to the LORD. 15"I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD," she tells Eli, and the phrase names what happened, everything in her, unguarded, emptied out before God with nothing held back. Her vow is an offering made from the bottom of that emptying, a promise that whatever she is given, she will give back. She asks three ways, look on my affliction, remember me, and do not forget me. See me. Remember me.
Then the narrator gives back her own word. 19"The LORD remembered her." It is the word used when God remembered Noah and the floodwaters began to recede (Genesis 8:1), and again when he remembered Rachel after her own long barrenness (Genesis 30:22). God had never stopped seeing Hannah. A season of silence made it feel otherwise, and Scripture is honest enough to let that feeling stand. His attention had never moved. What moved was Hannah's experience of it, breaking open at last into a son she names Samuel, because she asked him of the LORD.
Then Hannah gives the child back. She asked for a child so that she would no longer be childless, and now, with him weaned and old enough to remember his own mother, she hands him back. 28"As long as he lives, he is lent to the LORD." The gift she received becomes the gift she gives away, and the text shows no trace of regret. It cost her the very thing she had wept for.
Then Hannah sings, and her prayer at the doorpost becomes a song that is no longer only about herself. 4"The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength." 8"He raises up the poor from the dust." A woman who had nothing describes how God runs the world. He takes what the world calls empty and fills it, and takes what it calls full and empties it, on his timing, by his hand. She even reaches past her lifetime to a king Israel does not yet have. Centuries before David's throne, before Israel had asked for a king at all, a barren woman from the hill country of Ephraim already knew how the story would end.
More than a thousand years later Mary would sing nearly the same song, the proud brought down and the lowly lifted, borrowing Hannah's cadence before the son she carried had done anything. Hannah's son would anoint the king her song foresees. Mary's son would be that king.
Pour out your soul today the way Hannah did, honestly, without pretending, when the answer has not yet come. And ask what gift you might be able to hand back.
Prayer
Father, you are not a God who forgets the ones who feel forgotten. Thank you that you remembered Hannah, and that in Christ you have remembered us. Teach us to pour out our souls before you as she did, honestly, when the answer has not yet come. When it does come, give us her freedom to hand the gift back to you and not clutch it. In Jesus' name, amen.