December 27, First Sunday after Christmas Day: 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Luke 2:41-52

Which mother, I wonder, has more heartbreak?

I imagine Hannah’s heart breaks even as it exalts when she realizes she is pregnant. She has longed for a child for years, and now this new life has finally come to her womb. But she remembers her promise—she knows she will have to give up her son.

Hannah takes Samuel to the house of the Lord at Shiloh as soon as he is weaned. She leaves him there with Eli the priest—a man whose judgment is so bad he can’t tell a distraught woman from a drunk one, a man whose own sons are by all accounts scoundrels. But she leaves Samuel there anyway, because she promised God she would.