Anyone who has ever waited for something that seemed like it would never come, a child, a healing, an answer, recognizes something of Hannah’s pain. Year after year she went up to the sanctuary to worship and returned without the one thing she most desired.
Hannah was one of Elkanah’s two wives, a man from Ramathaim, in the hill country of Ephraim. The other wife, Peninnah, had children; Hannah had none, and this made her a constant target of taunting at home.
Every year the family went up to Shiloh to sacrifice to the Lord. And every year Peninnah provoked her because of her barrenness, until Hannah wept and refused to eat, even though Elkanah loved her and gave her a double portion of the sacrifices.
On one of these trips, Hannah went to the tabernacle and prayed, weeping bitterly, without making a sound, only moving her lips. She vowed that, if she received a son, she would give him back to the Lord to serve him all his life.
The priest Eli, seeing her lips move without a sound, thought she was drunk. When Hannah explained that she was simply pouring out her soul before God, Eli blessed her and asked that the Lord grant her request.
God answered. Hannah had a son and named him Samuel, because she had asked the Lord for him. As soon as the boy was weaned, she fulfilled her vow: she took him to Shiloh and gave him to Eli, to grow up serving in the sanctuary.
Before leaving without her son, Hannah sang a song that exalts a God who humbles the powerful and lifts the poor from the dust, words that would echo centuries later in the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Hannah’s waiting did not end in resignation, but in surrender. Anyone who prays for years without an answer today can learn from her that God’s silence is not absence, and that what we love most, when given back to him, tends to return multiplied.
