It couldn’t be.
Getting ready to sit quietly at the feet of Jesus, she texts me from across the world, “I am getting ready to sit down with Jesus too. It’s my best time of day, doing devotion”.
And the Hannah in me starts to long for her curly-dark-hair bouncing, the bubbly way she greets us, the long car drives holding pinkies…our way of saying…I am here. I love you.
But how change can shake us, life can challenge us, when there is no face to look upon, no loved one to hold close, no hand to hold….and all we have is Jesus.
Still, the world alarms us, warns us to grab tighter to those things we love; keep them close where we have full control…and no powerful God is needed. 
But I have to think long and hard about what the Bible says, because a man living by feelings, trusting what he thinks or wants….will always go astray.
Samuel surfaces. Hannah offering the child she wept for, lamented for, straight back to God. Hannah didn’t covet that child. She didn’t rise up and use him as a declaration to God. She didn’t isolate him, or let her own heart-ache stop her from giving over what she had dedication to God.
Hannah willingly gave her son back to God as soon as he was done nursing and he was ready to be trained in the ways of God; by Eli, the priest who of all people had mocked her previously in her barren state.
And I wonder how many of us have Samuels? Things we have begged for, pleaded, demanded from God. And just when we get them, we start to covet the very thing God meant as a borrowed gift; exhalting them in some form, when all good things are His in the first place.
A song comes on as I worship. My eighteen-year-old serving Jesus in New Zealand, doing her devotions along with me in that moment, in what seems like a world away. And I hear it start to play, “I want more of you, Lord”.
The very song we both praised to last time I saw her.
And instead of aching the distance, mourning this loss, grieving across the seas to hold my baby in my arms….I start to see her praising, hands lifted, like the last time we saw her. Her in the thick of His grace…us a balcony away, singing the same song, hearts lifted to Jesus..
And somehow, it was as if time had merged, I could see her standing in that chapel. There where I left her….like Hannah when giving over Samuel that day so long ago.
And though God multiplies everything we offer Him, everything we sacrifice, give up, willingly pour low at His feet…
I realize, my whole life should be an offering of temporary sacrifices, a gift returned to God not just when I feel like it….but colored with Samuel’s, in everything.
And I climb into the rock of His presence, that place where peace longs for the simple understanding that sometimes that “more of you, God” is the “less of me” which opens the floodgates of His blessings.
Still, yet, we can trust Him in that moment. That moment our greatest treasures are His, gifts offered back in appreciation, lives lived not for our own glory…but for the purpose of loving Him. Not just with what’s easy to give, but with all we hold, that which is….most valuable in our hands.
For isn’t that what He did? Giving us everything, not holding back…so that we could have eternal life…
So our lives could be lived, open handed, Hannah’s in a world where sacrifice is not popular, and love is controlled and manipulated…
But very rarely given away?
