Enough

Following the high energy and inspiration of the women’s conference today, I am collapsed on my couch, trying to rally my last drops of energy into a few coherent sentences.

(Thank you for your prayers!)

Last week, when I wrote about Samuel, I ran out of room to talk about his mother.  I talked about her today at the women’s conference, and I would like to mention just a few things about her and her amazing silence.

I wonder, when Samuel was crying to the Lord that night (as I wrote about last week), angry about what was happening with King Saul…I wonder if he wondered if God was enough.   I wonder if he remembered his mother.

Hannah, like many of the faithful women in the Bible, is so silent, so invisible.  She appears for what, three chapters? and then vanishes out of sight, with nothing but a yearly sewing project to indicate that she was still alive.

But there was a moment when she was not silent.

We find Hannah psychotic and weeping, appearing to be out of her mind, begging God to give her son.

“If you give me a son, I’ll give him back to You,” she said.

God led Eli, the spiritual leader, to bless her, and Hannah went home and conceived and gave birth to Samuel.

Hannah knew that God had answered her prayer.

The most interesting thing to me next is not what Hannah says, but what she doesn’t say.

We have no record that Hannah debated about backing down on her promise to give her son back to God.   The moment she became pregnant…the moment the delivery was over and she held the beautiful child in her arms…the moment he learned to smile…the moment he walked.  If it had been me, I think I might have said, “God I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s best he stays with me.  I know I promised, but…”

Or, what about when she listened to the news.  What about when the gossip about Eli’s sons reached her ears.  They were sleeping with women at the doors of the tabernacle, the very place she was going to send her son.  What kind of an environment is that to send a young boy to?  Did Hannah want to say, “God, I can’t give Samuel to Eli.  He doesn’t know how to take care of his own sons.  I know I promised, but…”

There is no hint in Scripture that her end of the deal was ever questioned.  And when she weaned her son, she took him to Eli, and thanked God for his goodness, and left the little boy there.

You can have faith, or you can have control, but you can’t have both. (All In, Mark Batterson)

Hannah had faith that God was enough.  She knew He had been enough in the past, so she assumed He would be enough in the future.  She knew, from the way God had rescued her–through Eli, by the way–that He was big enough to do anything, even big enough to raise a little boy without his mother in a strange and potentially dangerous place.  She didn’t vanish, and I think she poured all her love into the coat she sewed each year.  But she gave up her rights to motherhood, to controlling her son’s environment, because she believed that God was enough.

In giving up those rights, she went down in history as the mother of one of the most faithful men in the Old Testament, a man who influenced and anointed kings, a man with a very close relationship with God.  Most mothers would be jealous of that legacy.

It turns out that God was, in fact, enough.