Where to Take a Provocation

The text says that Peninnah kept provoking Hannah in order to irritate her, and that this went on year after year. It was not a single wound. It was a pattern, and it flared worst at the times meant for worship and family. Most of us know someone like that. A colleague, a relative, a person at church whose words are chosen to land.

Hannah's response is instructive because of what it leaves out. She does not retaliate against Peninnah. She does not enlist Elkanah to take sides. She does not stop going to Shiloh to avoid the discomfort. She takes the provocation to the one place where it can be turned into something else, and pours it out before God.

That is a practice for ordinary weeks. When someone's words get under your skin, the first instinct is to answer them, either aloud or in the long imagined argument you rehearse in the car. The second instinct is to tell someone else, which usually spreads the irritation rather than resolving it. Hannah suggests a third move. Take it to the house of the Lord first. Say everything there. Let God hear the version you would never say to a person.

What comes out the other side is a face no longer downcast, and a prayer that has become larger than the provocation that started it. Hannah went in asking about Peninnah's cruelty and came out having offered God a son. Provocations handled this way have a strange habit of becoming vocations.