"How God Used Hannah's Suffering To Help People"

1 Samuel 1:2, 1:11, 2:12, 3:35, 7:6

By Drew Zuverink

• "Hannah had no children." 1:2

• "Hannah made a vow to the Lord saying, 'If you will only look on your servant's misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.'" 1:11

• "The priest Elie's sons were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord." 2:12

• "God said, 'I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who will do according to what is in my heart and mind." 3:35

• "Samuel was serving as the leader of Israel." 7:6

Imagine if you overheard someone telling an infertile woman that the reason she can't have kids is because she's sinned against God. That would be horrible! Not only is she grieving the fact that one of her greatest dreams can't come true but now she's being blamed and shamed for it too. Welcome to poor Hannah's experience.

Why do people like Hannah go through really hard things? This is one of the most common and most difficult questions people ask. It's a hard question to answer because each situation is different so there could be a million possibilities. Maybe we're suffering because of our own faults and failures, or maybe it's because someone else hurt us. Maybe the cause is God, or maybe it's actually the devil. Maybe God is trying to grow us, or maybe this is just the result of living in a sinful and broken world where bad things happen. The truth is, we don't usually know why things happen. We can try to guess but that's often the best that we can do, and sometimes, like in Hannah's case, people guess wrong - and that just brings more pain.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to wrap our minds around why we're going through painful things, maybe it would be helpful for us to learn from Hannah's story. Back then Israel was struggling. Their enemies were oppressing them, everyone was doing whatever they wanted, injustice was everywhere, and their leaders were taking bribes. Many of us don't trust our government and neither did they. Israel had a priest, Eli, but his sons were scoundrels who abused the people and Eli didn't stop them. This was before they had any kings so Israel was in desperate need of a good leader. This is where Hannah comes in. In her grief after being barren for years, she promises that if God would just bless her with a son she would give him to the Lord's service. It's fair to ask whether Hannah would have done this if she was able to have children right away. Probably not, and so God used her suffering to bring her to a point where she would offer her child to him. Hannah's son, Samuel, served God from a very young age and while he was still just a boy, God spoke to him in a miraculous way. God raised little Samuel to become Israel's next leader, replacing their oppressive rulers with someone who would be a blessing to them.

The moral of the story is that God used Hannah's suffering to help thousands of hurting people. The hope this story provides is that God can do the same with our suffering. Nobody wants to suffer but we all do. If it were up to us, my wife and I would have never chosen to go through two miscarriages. But now that we have, we can be there for people in ways that we couldn't before. I'd still hesitate to call our miscarriages, "good," but I know that a lot of good can come out of it and that helps. It helps to know that God wants to enter into every situation, even the ones that he didn't cause, and bring some good out of it. In fact this is what God does every day - He spends exactly 24 hours bringing redemption into an otherwise broken world. Let us take comfort in that and let us pray that God would use our suffering to help others too.