Hannah: Trusting God With Your ProblemsSample

Hannah was faithful

After the short introduction to Elkanah’s family, we read how they used to go up to Shiloh, the religious center in those days, year after year as God had commanded the Israelites to do. In Shiloh, they worshiped the Lord and sacrificed to him. Then they ate the meat of the sacrificed animal as a family. This situation intensified Hannah’s pain since it stressed her childlessness. Peninnah celebrated there with “all her sons and daughters” and used the festive meal to upset Hannah and to make her feel bad because the Lord had not given her children.

The easiest way for Hannah to avoid the pain would have been to not attend the Lord’s feasts at all. But she kept going year after year. She did not let her pain interfere with her presence in God’s holy tent or her participation in the sacrifice and worship.

Our current worship services are not completely comparable to the annual feasts of those days. But we can take Hannah's faithfulness as an exhortation to keep attending church services even when we feel depressed and might prefer to stay home and curl up in a corner rather than to be confronted with our loss or pain.

How about you? Does attending church services help you to look beyond your present problems, or do you find it hard to be there? Can you draw strength from Hannah's desire to participate in worship even when it was difficult?