What If You Were Hannah
The story of Hannah is the story of a barren woman who God lifts up from the depths of despair. She suffers not only the loss of her heart’s desire but the relational strife of a husband who has married another woman, likely in order to have children, and the humiliation of being the continual object of that woman’s contempt and scorn.
The books of Samuel often seem difficult to decipher. In them we read of foreign customs, accounts of battles and wars, gruesome acts of vengeance, peculiar acts of mercy, escapades of subterfuge, and other strange tales involving idols, bizarre plagues, suicide, lust, murder, rape, futile seances, apparently evil census-taking, and cattle with a surprising gift for direction.
Hannah’s life sits at the beginning of the narrative as a prologue. Just as, at the end of her psalm in chapter 2, she blesses a king who does not exist and an anointed one who, in the scope of time, has not yet been anointed, her faith is a kind of paradox.
It exists in a place where it has no right to exist. Her country is in moral free-fall. The priesthood is utterly corrupt, and the priest Eli’s line is on the verge of being wiped out. The ark of God is nothing more than a good luck charm in the eyes of God’s people, and Israel itself is about to suffer a major military defeat.
Do we take time to consider how significant Hannah’s faith really is? Or is she just another barren woman in the Bible whose emotional life we ignore because that’s just the way the culture was? I wonder. What would you do if you were Hannah? Would you have a faith like hers?
What if you were Hannah today, and the cultural expectations of her time, giving your husband children, were transformed instead into the cultural expectations of our time, satisfying your husband sexually?
What if, one day, your husband tells you that you don’t please him? You try and try, but in the most intimate and vulnerable physical expression of a relationship, you aren’t good enough. You can’t make him happy.
He loves you, he says. He values your friendship and can’t live without it, but he needs something more. So he has an affair with another woman. But in this affair, it is entirely public. She moves into your home. She goes to church with you. She raises her hands and closes her eyes while she sings, just like all the other good Christians. Your husband is so happy, and people are happy for him. You sit at a table in the fellowship hall, and he has an arm around the other woman and a hand resting on your knee. He has the sexual life he wants, and he has you.
And what do you have? Your life is defined by absence. You see no light from his eyes when he looks at you. You hear no flirtatious joke. You receive no gentle touch. And into that absence the other woman pours all her contempt and scorn. She mocks you endlessly. She derides what you say, ridicules what you like, and turns everything from what you do with your hair to how much you eat into just another reason why your husband doesn’t want you.
You try to talk about your grief with him, but he just repeats that he loves you. See? Look at all the stuff he’s given you. You try to talk about it with others but only get blank stares. Your husband is happy. His happiness should be your happiness.
To top it all off, the God you believe in, the God you worship and pray to, the God whose commandments you hold dear in spite of what nearly everyone else around you does to the contrary—this God looks on your suffering year after year and seems to do nothing.
So, what if you were Hannah? Would you continue to hope in the Savior? Would you have a faith like hers?
