Keeping Your Vow
You don’t have to know the struggle of infertility personally to know and understand that life often brings seasons of anguish and desperation. Ecclesiastes 3 tells us to everything there’s a season. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow waxed poetic about pain writing, “into every life rain must fall.” And as the late artist Prince even told us, “Sometimes it Snows in April.” Pain and despair practice equal opportunity. And if you haven’t experienced a painful season in your life yet, as the old folks say, keep living. You will.
And just like Hannah in the Book of Genesis , the darkness and desperation of our pain can lead us to attempt to make deals with God. Many of us in this room have been pushed into situations where we’ve called out to God saying:
God if you’ll just heal them, I promise I’ll come back to church…
God, if you’ll just bring them home safely, I promise I’ll love them better.
God, if you’ll work this out for me this one time, I promise I’ll never do it again…
I remember being at Kaiser Walnut Creek in April 2005, 33 weeks pregnant with a baby who had stopped moving inside me. In that moment I had no understanding of how close both he and I were to death. Laying on a gurney I was told, “the only chance we have to save the baby is to take him now.” As doctors and nurses began running circles around me getting prepped for surgery, I did the only thing I could do in that moment, I opened my mouth and poured out my heart to God. “God, if you will just save us, I will…”
No matter what kind of anguish we experience — be it physical, mental, emotional or the pain of marginalization due to the societal ills of poverty, racism, misogyny, homophobia — whatever the case, our attempts to bargain with God are all an effort to conjure some kind of power, to find some kind of leverage in circumstances that would attempt to make us feel powerless. We bargain like we have some kind of currency we can use to make a transaction with God. But desperate times push us to do whatever we can to circumvent that pain, to set things right, to make our situation fair and equitable, to bring forth a sense of justice. This is human nature. And this is what we see in Hannah’s story.