To Gain by Letting Go

I've been reading about Samuel in my Bible reading recently. One character in the Bible that really stands out to me is his mother Hannah. I feel a special connection to her story.

You know when Hannah prayed, and brought her desires before God, He answered her prayer. However, part of her prayer was her promise to give back to God the precious gift He had given her - Samuel. When Samuel was still a young child, probably around three, Hannah brought him to Eli to serve in the worship of God.

She gave up her most precious gift. She left him there. She went back home to Ramah.

I know that God continued to bless Hannah and Elkanah by sending them five more children, but I know that there was a part of her that constantly ached for Samuel, her first born.

Then today I read about Samuel as he judged Israel. He led them to repentance which resulted in their victory over the enemy. He judged Israel from Ramah, his hometown, where he was born.

Now the Bible doesn't say if Hannah and Elkanah were still alive after Samuel's return to Ramah, but I have a feeling that they might have been. After probably 20 years of missing Samuel, Hannah once again had him close. God sent him back.

Sometimes it seems so hard to give our best to God. It feels like we are losing something that we can never gain back. Sometimes it takes years to see the return, sometimes we may not see the results until Heaven. But God always give back much more than we can fathom.

We feel, in our humanness, that if we give our will to God, that we will loose who we are, our self. The truth is we do loose "self," that selfishness that thinks only of us. But what do we gain? God who created each person individually, who designed us to be one of a kind, gives us back our TRUE self. The self we were created to be, which is infinitely better than the "self" we thought we were. As we become more and more like Christ, we become more and more of who we truly are, who we were created to be.

When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts... that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever."

— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)