It’s tulip time! These happy fellows are the first to appear in my garden.
My other half tells me I’m overacting, but the story of Hannah abandoning her young child Samuel really makes me mad. To be fair, it’s not the story itself, but the way in which Hannah is commended for what she did. To recap the story, Hannah was barren and desperate to conceive a child. While weeping during a visit to the temple, she encountered the priest Eli who chastised her, misguidedly assuming she was drunk, and they entered into conversation. Hannah promised God that if she conceived a male child, she would dedicate him as a Nazarite until the day he died (I’m not clear how she thought she had the right to make such an important vow on behalf of someone else, but I’ll let that slip for now).
God answered her prayer and Hannah fulfilled her promise by sending her son to live in the temple with Eli as soon as he was weaned. Granted, in those days children would be weaned when they were much older, but Samuel would still have been a very small child. Can you imagine the distressed little boy pleading with his mother not to abandon him? Can you imagine how he must have felt at being left with total strangers? Hannah’s husband, Elkanah, abdicated all responsibility by just telling his wife to do what she thought best, but that’s about as much as we might expect from a man who couldn’t understand his wife’s grief over being barren, saying ‘am I not more to you than ten sons?’
It reminds me of the story of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering because of a misguided promise to God. I can’t help but read these stories from the perspective of the victim – surely if you make a foolish promise to God, then you should bear the ‘wrath’ of God for breaking it, rather than having the consequences pour out over someone who had nothing to do with making the promise?
I see parallels with the experiences of many missionary kids, whose parents sent them away for their education, prioritizing their calling over the needs of their children. Although to be fair, if you subscribe to a theory of atonement that requires God to demand the brutal death of his own son, then what right would you have to spare your own child? On a more mundane level, I remember the family of a very active church member saying there was ‘always a quiche in the fridge, but never for us.’
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t keep promises or make commitments, but I do think we need to think carefully about the impact of our choices on those around us. I know that, if they were reading this now, at least one of my children would be pointing their finger directly at me.