The Honest Prayer

Jilian Brown
Nov 24, 2021
5 min read

After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before the LORD. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the LORD.

She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD, and wept bitterly.

She made this vow: "O LORD of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head."

They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the LORD; then they went back to their house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the LORD remembered her.

In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, "I have asked him of the LORD."

1 Samuel 1:9-20

Emotions are a waste of time. At least that is what I used to believe. Why grieve when you can grow? Why lament when you can learn? Why sit in sadness when there is success to experience? Even celebration can be unproductive when you need to get on to the next thing. And goodness knows I do not want to be pegged as “an emotional woman.” I have spent three long years of inner work on this area of my life, yet I still have a hard time validating emotions. But….

Our emotions are God-made and God-given. Our emotions make us human. Our life experience is made rich with tears of joy and the dark night of the soul. How can we empathize with another’s pain if we refuse to feel our own? How can we rejoice with others in their triumphs if we never stop to rejoice in our own? And so, in an attempt to be a Jilian and not an Alexa (or Siri, or any other AI), I am working on the emotion thing. I’m really terrible at it and need a feelings wheel to even accurately land on any given emotion I am feeling. I highly recommend them.

From Calm.com: Originally created by Dr. Gloria Willcox

As children, we are given many parameters for social etiquette. Sit up straight. Chew with your mouth closed. Don’t speak too loudly. Use your manners. Don’t bother other people. Be a giver not a taker. Definitely don’t air your dirty laundry in public. Don’t cry in public—especially if you are a boy. These messages may well be the toolkit for participating in polite society, but they are rather unhelpful when they spill over into our prayer life. What is our view of God when we pray? Do we only say the things we should? Do we keep our voice low, our head bowed, and our requests tame? Even though I know that God knows what is in my heart, I realized awhile back that my prayers did not reflect that knowledge. They sounded like a bullet point list of all things I ought to pray for, but not an emptied heart. Reading the Psalms helped with this a great deal. David and the other Psalmists do not hold back their true feelings when talking to God. Hannah, too, got to the heart of her issues with God.

Hannah was married to Elkanah who had two wives. His other wife, Peninnah, had children, but Hannah was barren. That must have been devastating on so many levels. Not only this, but Peninnah made it her mission to taunt Hannah with this difficult truth at the annual worship service at Shiloh. I guess mean girls were a thing back then, too. After one of these instances, Hannah left the festivities in such turmoil that she went to pray. Her posture of prayer in this passage is so fervent and gut-wrenching that Eli, who was looking on, thought she had had too much wine.

"She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD, and wept bitterly.”

When I am deeply distressed, my first response is often not prayer. What if it was? What if the deep things inside me were not spewed out on others in my verbal processing, but were instead laid at the feet of the only One who can truly comfort me from His true and intimate knowledge of my soul.

James 4 says:

“You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives, so that you may spend what you request on your pleasures...Come close to God and He will come close to you.”

Hannah boldly made her request out of her deep grief. She asked God to remember her. And guess what? He did. She did have a son and his name was Samuel. He went on to do great things for God and His people. I am not saying that everything we “claim” gets answered in the way we want. I know for a fact that is not true. But I do believe real, earnest, and yes, emotion-filled prayer changes things. At the very least, I believe it changes us. It makes us in tune with God and aware of how He is working. I think like James says, we have no idea what could be going on in our life because we do not ask. We are afraid of being disappointed by the potential answer and so we are not brave enough to submit the request. As C.S. Lewis said, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”

So, what is your honest prayer today? Not the sweet, nice, appropriate prayer, but the deep down real one. God is no genie and James points out the importance of motives in our prayers, but I usually find myself guilty of asking for far too little, not too much. Also notice that Hannah devoted back to God the child she begged to receive. She was faithful to that promise. When God answers our prayers affirmatively, do we use those blessings for His kingdom? Are we grateful in even recognizing where they come from? I linked a sermon below by Suzy Silk on this subject of gratitude appropriate for this Thanksgiving week. 1 Samuel chapter 2 begins with Hannah rejoicing. Our prayers are not just for our requests but for gratitude of what God has done already in our lives. If God gives us the child, or the finances, or the healing, or the gifting, or the job we have asked for, are we stewarding it well? It is easy to forget, but the Lord has not forgotten you. He is listening. I find it is our awareness that changes with the honest prayer. Awareness that our good God wants to bless us and draw us close to Him. Hannah did not only have Samuel, by the way. 1 Samuel 2:21 tells us that she went on to have three more sons and two daughters. What might be on the other side of your honest prayer?

The Honest Prayer

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