Hannah (Part 765)

Though I tend to reference her quite often, the reality is that Hannah has remained a significant source of contemplation, as well as a great many of my questions.

Am stuck again on the thought of God’s hearing our prayer, but “remembering” us at a different time. As Psalm 138:3 states, “On the day I called, You answered me.” And yet, His action on our behalf may bring “sight” so much later –

And so, as I wonder how it is to our benefit to specifically go without immediate results to our requests, I look at the life of this woman who, by the time she was dedicating her son to the Lord, did so fully, purely, and with praise on her lips (see 1 Samuel 2). Nothing in her relinquished with regret or bitterness, and so much of me reluctantly recognizes that it was the length of the wait that purified her of the fallacies of “entitlement.”

Would I question as much if I could see that the prayers offered, those very pleas breathed by the Holy Spirit, were but to align me, not in anticipation for an answer, but instead, for a fuller relinquishment?

I so often harbor this expectation that the patience demonstrated makes the final answer, the bestowal of the request, all the more “hard-earned,” as though I battled hard, fought ‘on my knees’ with perseverance, in order that I might have what is then placed in my hands. But I sorely fail to see that the reason the battle was so tedious, the wait so trying, was not so that I could be justified in what I receive. Rather, it was so that I would understand, long before God ever laid in my hands that gift, that it was never mine to keep ~

To God, to whom ‘everything under heaven belongs’ (Job 41:11), be the glory for lending us what we are privileged to offer back.