Dear friend,
As she continued praying before the LORD, Eli saw her mouth. Now Hannah spoke in her heart. Only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli thought she was drunk. Eli said to her, “How long will you be drunk? Get rid of your wine!” Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit. I have not been drinking wine or strong drink, but I poured out my soul before the LORD. Don’t consider your servant a wicked woman; for I have been speaking out of the abundance of my complaint and my provocation.”
I was thirty and sitting in a waiting room with a stack of forms, checking boxes about my own body like it was a rental car I had to report damage on. Nobody warns you how clinical it gets, how fast the wanting turns into paperwork. I remember filling out the date of my last period and feeling like a stranger to myself. That part I never told anyone until much later.
Today I keep coming back to Hannah in 1 Samuel. Not because her story ends the way she hoped, though it does, but because of the detail where Eli thinks she is drunk. She is praying so hard, so wordlessly, that a priest misreads her grief as something shameful. Nobody in that temple could see what was actually happening in her. I think about how much of this stretch happens where no one can see it. The forms, the waiting, the calendar math nobody asked about.
She named her son Samuel, asked of God, and then gave him back. I don't fully understand that ending. I just know she was not quiet in her asking.
What has felt hardest to explain to people who have not lived inside this waiting?
A prayer
God, You watched Hannah pray with her lips moving and no sound coming out, and You knew exactly what she meant. Watch over her now in the same way, in whatever she cannot say out loud today. Amen.