“Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” (1 Samuel 1:8)

Have you ever prayed for something, prayed for years, hungering for God to answer? Was it something that would bring you happiness or erase your shame (or maybe both)? Was it something that consumed all your bandwidth? It’s what you thought about when you couldn’t go to sleep, what you prayed about unceasingly, what you just couldn’t let go. Did that desperately sought-for answer to prayer eclipse God in your thoughts and devotion because you were so hungry for it? 

I can say yes to all those questions. What I came to recognize - well, when God finally got through to me - was this: focusing on the problem was enslaving me. Months of grief and prayers poured out in anguish had become - I’ll be honest, because God was with me - sin. I had to lay it down, for good this time, and not pick up the burden anew every morning. I had to realize and trust God knows the problem and has the best answer, the best timing. 

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, Hannah - one of Elkanah’s two wives - is barren. In a society which supremely valued child-bearing, Hannah’s shame is rooted in their stigmatizing her. It doesn’t help that the other wife has children and year after year taunts Hannah about it (1:6-7). It doesn’t help when insensitive Elkanah asks Hannah, ''Why are you downhearted?” I mean, really?? One wife isn’t enough for him, but he asks her, “Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” (v.8). 

So, year after year, Hannah “pours out her soul to the Lord…praying out of her great anguish and grief” (v.16). One year, however, her prayer changes. She vows - if God would give her a son - to give him back to the Lord “all the days of his life” (v.11). 

Has Hannah recognized that years of grief over her barrenness have become sin? She is now ready to sacrifice what has enslaved her, rather than use a child to prove her worth to others, to gain respectability, to erase her shame. She won’t keep the child; she will literally give him back to God. The child Samuel will grow up in the temple at Shiloh. 

“I prayed for this child,” she tells the priest. I wonder - did she finally pray with the right hunger in her heart? Had she heard God Himself asking her, Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons? Had God shown her what she should really be hungering for? 

Substitute for “sons” whatever you’re desperately asking God for, and let Him ask you: Don’t I mean more to you than __________? Let Him ask you what you’re really hungry for. God’s not insensitive to the problem you’re anguishing over. But maybe one reason He hasn’t answered yet is He wants you to recognize what exactly you’re hungering for. Above all, He wants us hungering for Him. Spend some time meditating on these questions, and let them reframe your prayers. I know they reframed mine.