“But Hannah answered and said, ‘…I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have…poured out my soul before the Lord’.…And Hannah prayed and said: ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is exalted in the Lord. I smile at my enemies, because I rejoice in Your salvation’” (1 Sam 1:15; 2:1).
If Hannah’s prayer for a son had been answered at the time she had set for herself, the nation might never have known the mighty man of God it found in Samuel. Hannah wanted a son, but God wanted more. He wanted a prophet and a savior and a ruler for His people. Someone has said that “God had to get a woman before He could get a man.” This woman He “got” in Hannah precisely by delaying the answer to her prayer, for out of the discipline of those weeks and months and years there came a woman with a vision like God’s, with tempered soul and gentle spirit and a seasoned will prepared to be the kind of mother for the kind of man God knew the nation needed. —W.E. Biederwolf