Now Hannah spoke in her heart. Only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli thought she was drunk.
1 Samuel 1:13 (WEB)
in its setting: 1 Samuel 1:9-18
1 Where we are
Dion is twenty-six and has been on the waiting list since May. At ten past three on Tuesday he is on a plastic chair at the community care clinic with the intake form on his knee, and the boxes are filled in beautifully. Dysregulated. Avoidant. Triggered. He looked them up on his phone in the lift. Then the counsellor asks how his week has been, and he hears himself say fine. What he is holding too tightly is the right to describe himself first. If he says the plain thing in plain words, someone else gets to decide what he is, and he has spent years making sure nobody gets to do that again.
2 What the passage is doing
Hannah goes up to the sanctuary at Shiloh year after year and comes home the same. There is a rival in the house who provokes her, a husband who does not understand, and no child. Eventually she goes in alone, bitter in soul, and prays with her lips moving and no sound coming out. Eli, the old priest sitting by the doorpost, takes one look and assumes she is drunk. The narrator tells us plainly what he could not see: she was pouring out her whole self.
לֵב
lēb · heart, the inner person
In Hebrew the lēb is not the soft feeling part of a person as against the thinking part. It is the whole inside of someone — what they want, what they decide, what they know and cannot say. So when Hannah speaks al-libbah, on her heart, it is not a mood leaking out. It is her entire self talking, with no sound at all, and that is the thing God is described as hearing.
3 Taking it with you
You may be the one sitting beside a man like Dion — at the bench outside, on the shift after, in the car park. You cannot make him say the plain thing, and you should not try. But hear what the passage is doing for you. The prayer God received was the one that did not sound like anything. Christ himself prayed with loud cries and tears in a garden, and was misread by everyone watching, and God did not turn away from him. So you do not have to arrive at God with the correct words either. You can come with the unpresentable version, and be heard.
A prayer you can pray
God, I have got good at saying what sounds right, and I am tired of it. Today I bring you the actual thing, badly said. You heard a woman whose voice made no sound, so I trust you can hear me. Be near the person beside me who cannot find their words yet. Give me the patience not to rush them. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
