Praying for Your Children the Way Hannah Did

Hannah's story in 1 Samuel 1 is often read as a story about infertility, and it is. But it is also one of the fullest pictures in Scripture of a parent praying. She prays before the child exists, she prays with the child in her arms, and she prays as she hands him over. Households can learn from each of those three moments, whatever stage they are at.

Begin with the prayer before. Hannah asked God for a son in bitterness of soul, weeping, silently, for a long time. Some families in your church are at this stage right now, and they carry it quietly. If that is you, Hannah gives you permission to ask plainly and repeatedly, and to bring the grief and even the resentment along with the request. She did not pray a polished prayer. She poured out her soul. There is no better model for a couple who long for a child than a woman who wept in the sanctuary and told the priest she was deeply troubled. Do not hide this from God, and consider not hiding it from a trusted few in the church who can pray with you as Eli eventually did.

Notice too the content of her request. Hannah did not ask for a child to complete her life or to silence Peninnah. She asked for a child to give to the Lord. This reorders the whole matter of parenting before it has begun. The child is not, in the end, for the parents. Christian households do well to say this out loud early. Whatever children God gives are his first. A prayer for a child that includes the intention to give the child back is a prayer that has already understood something most of us learn painfully later.

The second moment is prayer over the child. Hannah stayed home from the pilgrimage until Samuel was weaned, which in that culture may have been three years or so. We are not told what those years contained, but the boy who arrived at Shiloh knew how to minister before the Lord as a small child, so something was taught in that house. Practically, this is the season of praying with children, not only for them. Pray aloud at meals and bedtimes in words simple enough for a toddler to repeat. Let children hear their own names spoken to God. Let them hear their parents ask for help and give thanks. Children learn to pray the way they learn to talk, by hearing it done in the home.

A household might set a few fixed points. A short blessing spoken over each child at bedtime, the same words every night, so that the words become part of the child. A moment at breakfast to ask God for the day. A weekly time when the family prays for one specific need outside itself, a neighbour, a missionary the church supports, a country in the news. None of this needs to be long. Hannah's prayer in the temple was silent and, as far as we can tell, brief. The point is that it was real and it was regular.

The third moment is the hardest. Hannah brought Samuel to Shiloh and left him there. She said that she had prayed for this child and that the Lord had granted her request, and so now she was giving him to the Lord for his whole life. Then she worshipped. Most parents will not leave a three-year-old at a tabernacle, but every parent faces the moment of giving back. It comes in small forms first, the first day of school, the first time a child goes somewhere without you, and then in larger forms, a move, a marriage, a calling to a place or a work you would not have chosen for them. Households that have prayed the first two prayers are better prepared for the third. If the child was asked for as God's and raised as God's, then releasing the child to God is not a loss of something owned but the completion of something promised.

Two cautions belong here. First, Hannah's vow was extraordinary and specific. Scripture does not require every parent to promise a child to full-time ministry, and treating a child as the means of fulfilling a parent's spiritual ambitions is a burden Hannah did not lay on Samuel. What she gave was the child's whole life to God's purposes, whatever they turned out to be. Second, the household Samuel entered was Eli's, and Eli's sons were a disaster. God can raise a faithful child in an unfaithful environment. Parents who fear the influences around their children should take heart from this, and should also remember that Hannah kept coming back year by year with a little robe, which is to say she did not disappear from his life when she gave him up.

Finally, 1 Samuel 2:21 records that the Lord was gracious to Hannah and gave her three more sons and two daughters. The child given back was not the end of God's generosity but the beginning. Households that hold their children loosely before God usually find that God holds them more tightly than the parents ever could.