Reading time: 6 minutes
Why God is waiting for you to show up
Three episodes into any decent BBC drama and you can feel it. Something is coming… The writers have been laying groundwork and the tension is building whether you noticed or not. The music is always a giveaway. First Samuel chapter 1 has that same drama. You’re not just reading a story about a woman who wanted a baby, it’s more compelling than that. You’re seeing the groundwork dramatically being laid for something much larger and look on in anticipation.
Hannah is barren. There we go. Her husband loves her, provides for her, and is genuinely puzzled why none of it seems to be enough. He’s a bloke. Not reading the room, he says to her, am I not better to you than ten sons? Kindly meant. Completely missing the point, because what Hannah is feeling isn’t a gap his kindness can fill. God has put something in her, a longing, that comfort cannot reach. She goes to the temple and the prayer that comes out of her is so raw, so physical, that Eli the priest decides she must have had a few. And then some.
Here’s the bit worth sitting with because it is encouragement you might want to drink deeply too. God already knew what he was going to do. He always does. Hannah was going to conceive. Samuel was going to be born. So why does the fumbled, desperate prayer matter? Why does her showing up in that temple weeping her heart out change anything if the outcome was already settled?
Because that’s not how God works. He has purposes for your life, real ones, for your finances, your relationships, your health, the thing you’ve been circling for years like a sparrow-hawk. Those purposes move through people, not around them. Partnership is not a spiritual bonus feature. It’s how the whole thing is designed to operate.
Which means the invitation is swung around and is pointed directly at you.
Bring It Back to Him
Eli speaks a word over Hannah (after the mistaken reprimand) and something shifts. She gets up, eats up, and her face… is different. Something feels different here. She isn’t pregnant yet and as far as she is aware, nothing has changed. But she received a conceiving word and that word was enough to move her from grief to peace.
A word from God carries weight because it’s not just something he said once. It’s something He means. And what He means, He wants you to bring back to Him. The scripture that landed. The promise that felt specific. The thing spoken over you that you’ve half forgotten. Dig it out and pray it. Not once, not in a particularly motivated season, but the way a child asks for something they genuinely want.Over and over, and over again. Like when they are asking for an icecream.
Jesus kept using that picture for a reason. Children are completely unbothered by the word no. They have an unshakeable conviction that the answer is actually yes and the adult just needs a moment to come round. Every child knows that ‘maybe’ just means ‘yes, keep asking.’ That persistence isn’t irritating to a good father. It’s exactly what he’s looking for.
Whatever God has said over your situation recently, that is what you pray. Not around it, not the general shape of it. The specific thing. And you keep on praying it until something moves.
Let It Show
Flip over to Hebrews 11, scripture doesn’t commend Noah for how he felt about the flood. It says he was warned and he built. The faith was real because it produced something visible.
So think about what God has spoken over your life and then think about what’s actually different because of it. Not what you believe in theory. What has shifted? Because when you’ve invited someone round for Wednesday you’re at Aldi’s on Tuesday without giving it much thought. The belief is just there, working its way out into ordinary decisions. Of course, other supermarkets are available.
If God has said something about your marriage, is anything different in how you’re showing up in your marriage? If he’s spoken about your work, your finances, a situation that’s been stuck for years, is there anything in your week that reflects the excited expectation that he actually meant it? The level of what God releases tends to be connected to how seriously you took what he said. Not because you earned it. But because preparation is just faith with its coat on.
Shut Down the Counter-Narrative
There’s another story briefly worth pulling in here. Zechariah is not a bad man. He’s a priest, devout, has been praying for Israel for decades. An angel turns up and tells him something remarkable is about to happen. His wife will conceive. The child will be named John. He will prepare the way of the Lord. And Zechariah says, have you seen the state of us, we’re not exactly young.
The biggest surprise is the boss-angel closes Zechariah’s mouth for nine months. Not to punish him. To protect the plan. Because when unbelief gets spoken out loud it doesn’t just sit there harmlessly. It pushes against the very thing God is trying to do. There’s no neutral ground in this. No spiritual equivalent of leaving it on in the background like a Discovery channel repeat nobody’s really watching. Your words are moving in one direction or the other.
God says he’s working in your situation and then you get off the phone with a friend having just thoroughly agreed with every reason it can’t happen. That’s not just venting. That’s working against yourself. What comes out of your mouth consistently is telling you something about what’s actually going on inside. If it’s mostly agreement with impossibility, that’s worth taking seriously.
When Zechariah’s mouth finally opened, out came one of the most astonishing prophetic declarations in all of Scripture. Nine months of silence had done its work. Faith had taken root and when it finally had room to speak, what came out was loaded with faith.
Back to Hannah – she refused the comfortable version of her life. She kept returning to God with what was in her. She let the hunger become fuel rather than letting it become bitterness. God answered. Everything moved forward.
Whatever you’ve been carrying, whatever feels stuck or distant or frankly like it’s been too long already, the purposes God has for your life are still formed. Still standing.
He knew what he was doing with Hannah before she ever walked into that temple. He knows what he’s doing with you too.
