It broke your heart to leave him at the door. (He looked so small beside the ageing priest.) You cried hot tears till you could cry no more then stumbled on. This was a different grief to any you had known. Those lonely years (so long) when you’d not had a child to hold had worn you down, had worn you out. The tears came often, but your heart—though sore—was whole. Now it is shattered beyond all repair and as you slowly make your way back home you feel you’ve left a part of you back there— your flesh, your blood, your longed-for, prayed-for son. But you’d still choose the love—despite its cost— over the emptiness. Your heart exults.
Hannah’s prayer when she leaves Samuel at the temple, beginning “My heart exults in the LORD”1 is one of pure triumph. God has intervened in direct response to her pleading and she finally has the child she’s spent years longing for. But mustn’t it have hurt to leave him behind? And the more she loved him, the more it would have hurt.
Love and loss. They go together, don’t they? If we didn’t love so much, it wouldn’t hurt so much when someone moves away, or dies, or fades out of our lives, or is no longer the person they were. But it does. And if push came to shove, we wouldn’t have it otherwise, would we? As Tennyson wrote (in words which sound less cliched when the stanza is not truncated):
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Hannah, I am sure, would have added her “Amen” to that.
1 Samuel 2:1 (ESVUK)
Beautiful insight.
This is beautiful