Singing in the Dark

by Ginny Owens

  And now no walls stood between them. In the confessing, the lamenting, and the offering of Hannah’s prayer, we see God’s empowering begin. Hannah vulnerably voiced her total weakness to Eli, and her honesty and humility provoked him to offer her a blessing (v. 17).

  Hannah got up from her place of prayer a changed woman. Though she didn’t know what the Lord’s answer would be, she walked away from the encounter finally able to eat. Her face was different too—she no longer wore the expression of a weak, hopeless woman (v. 18). She had laid her cares on the shoulders of the One who could carry them best. She had offered God her weakness, and He had stabilized her with His strength. She had given God her desire, and He had given her Himself. Now she could go and worship Him in hope, regardless of what would happen next (v. 19).

  At our core, many of us believe that while prayer is a nice idea, it is actually up to us to save ourselves. I have lots of friends who rely on the relentless inner grit they’ve developed. Their relationship with God is distant—respectful perhaps—but they aren’t interested in meeting with Him.

  And there’s a reason. Day in and day out, they have battled specific life challenges. They’ve cried out to God in the past, but no answer arrived. No miracle took place. So they assume that if there’s a God, He must not care about our daily challenges. Or perhaps He wants us to figure things out on our own. Or maybe He isn’t actually good.

  It can be painful to think of a caring, loving, listening God when our circumstances are so overwhelming. So instead of going to God with all our deepest resentment, anger, sadness, and desires, we trust in our own strength. We perfect the art of our makeup, as it were, and face the world all on our own.

  This is certainly where I used to live. I didn’t talk to God much about people’s reactions to my blindness. I assumed it was a trial meant to toughen me up. I figured that if I ever became a super-Christian, I’d be able to rise above it all. I’m thankful to be long past the bullying era, but the fear and misunderstanding I’m often met with—and the accompanying feeling that I am less than—have sometimes left me brokenhearted. At times I’ve chosen to feel like a victim.

  I was explaining this to a friend one day.

  “I have done everything I can to prove myself,” I lamented. “I run my own business, and I’ve had great adventures as a musician. And I think I’m generally well put together. So why can’t I meet people’s expectations? Why am I often seen as someone to be pitied instead of an equal—or a potential friend?” After thinking for a moment, I admitted perhaps the more honest question: “Why can’t I meet my own expectations?”

  My friend happens to be an avid prayer warrior and a life coach. “What do you think God thinks of your struggles?” she asked. “How do you think He feels when He sees people being unkind or dismissive? Or when He sees the unbelievable pressure you put on yourself?”

  I did not know.

  As I prayed and asked God to show me, He began to reveal His heart. Jesus healed people with all types of challenges, inviting others out of their fear and doubt, and weeping before He raised Lazarus from the dead—the stories leapt out at me from the pages of the Bible in a way they never had before. I realized how He aches because of the suffering in the world and the sadness I (and the rest of us) feel.

  His longing was for me to come to Him, to be honest and vulnerable, and to empty everything in the recesses of my heart as Hannah did. I hadn’t taken to Him my sadness and frustration over the challenges of being blind, and I had held many other things back as well. Trying to manage in my own strength had driven a wedge between us.

  As I read His words and met Him in prayer, seeing and experiencing the beauty of His heart, His strength took root in me, overpowering my weak, human version of strength. And I began to change. Though my circumstances were not different, as with Hannah, my heart started to rise above them in a chorus of true strength.

  Strength in Weakness

  Hannah’s next prayer (1 Sam. 2:1–10) shows us that true strength is not found inside ourselves. It grows as we pour our hearts out to a holy God, inviting Him into the midst of our anguish and our longings, where He most teaches us to trust and love Him.

  Hannah sang of how she became wrapped in the joy and strength of the Lord instead of in her own circumstances. In her song, we hear that true strength—strength to face our darkest days and rise above our enemies—comes when we rest our overworked and exhausted souls in the arms of the only One who can renew our strength. As we learn to lean on Him, our love for Him grows, as does a deep joy we can’t find anywhere else.

  To borrow a quote from a Benedictine monk, “Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”2 It is the inner smile that remains through trials. As we will see, by the time Hannah sang her song, she had already both received a son and given him back to the Lord (1:27–28). Yet her joy was intact. Her song is not about her son but about her Lord, her rock, who gave her strength (2:1–2).

  In Hannah’s song of strength, she sang about her great God who reverses fortunes—giving children to the childless woman and filling the hungry (v. 5). Her all-powerful God brings poverty, but He also lifts up the poor, granting them “a throne of honor” (vv. 7–8). Hannah also sang of failure for those who trust their own strength instead of God’s strength (vv. 3, 9). She had learned these things firsthand. God allowed her to be childless for some time (1:5–7), and then He gave her—a weary, heckled, misunderstood, childless woman—a son (v. 20).

  After raising her son for several years, Hannah willingly gave him back to God, as she had promised, taking him to the tabernacle to live with the Lord. “I prayed for this boy,” she said, “and since the LORD gave me what I asked him for, I now give the boy to the LORD” (vv. 20–28). We don’t have a category for this type of action today, but one of my seminary professors had a helpful analogy. He said it would be sort of like sending your child to boarding school and visiting him only once or twice a year.

  When Hannah went to worship at the tabernacle year after year, she brought her son new clothes she had made for him (2:19). How astounding is that? Hannah returned to the place of worship with her husband and her rival, and like before, she did so with no child. But now Hannah was different. Now she sang. She worshipped.

  Every year, Eli would bless Hannah and her husband, asking God to give them more children, and He did … but not immediately (vv. 19–21). How could Hannah sing and worship in these circumstances—essentially childless? Quite simply, Hannah’s Lord, not her longing, was now at the center of her soul.

  Hannah’s meeting with God brought her to a faith that was at once childlike and mature. She now believed that God was in charge and that loving Him above all else gave her strength to do even the most difficult things. In other words, Hannah’s strength came from trusting God’s strength. From trusting that He was in control of her life and of what happens in the world. As she looked to Him for her identity and rested in Him, her song of true strength emerged.

  I’ve written a chorus that says it this way:

  Thank You, Lord.

  You don’t always give me what I ask for.

  Even when I’m crying out that I’m sure,

  You see what I can’t see and give me what I need.3

  The reason I struggle daily to live in God’s strength is that it means I have to be okay with being weak. Though you might think blindness is my greatest obstacle, my internal weaknesses are much more challenging. The great weakness for a driven “entertainer” like me is worrying about how I am perceived. Yet as I rest in my identity in Christ, I find true strength. I know that my grit—that drive and determination—will never be enough to sustain me, nor will the attitudes of others be enough to break me. With the love of the God of creation surrounding me, how can I not release to Him my need to control what other people think of me?

  How does this play out in real life? It means I try to look at myself the way the Lord sees me—as His dearly loved daughter, the recipient of Christ’s
finished work on the cross. I don’t look at how I or anyone else evaluates me. As Timothy Keller has said, “The essence of Gospel humility is not thinking more of myself or less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”4

  If others think I’m weak, that’s fine. They’re right—I can’t do life on my own, and I’m becoming ever more confident in that fact. Resting in God’s strength means I don’t focus on making myself look impressive or insisting on my independence. It means I sometimes accept help I don’t need, just to have the opportunity to connect with someone new. It means I can focus my attention on doing what He has put in front of me: serving, encouraging, helping bring change, and being unafraid to be vulnerable. It means my inner grit now comes from the power of the cross.

  I realized at some point that my drive to appear strong had put a wall not only between God and me but also between me and others. Turns out, people have lots of questions about how I do life, and my lack of vulnerability had kept them from asking. Now I have a video series called How I See It, where I show how I accomplish everyday tasks like putting on makeup.

  And once again, as I’ve seen with my songs, when I open up and share, others begin to share their own vulnerabilities and questions. Being honest has invited others into honesty as well, revealing that none of us can do life in our own strength.

  The Bigger Story

  Only God could work through Hannah’s suffering to bring hope to us. Little did she know that her son would lead Israel out of the darkest period they had ever known. Little did she know that young Samuel would find resilient strength in the Lord as his mother had or that he would challenge the nation of Israel to once again find its strength in God.

  Hannah also confidently sang of things that hadn’t happened yet. She sang of the anointed one to come, not knowing that Israel would soon be led by anointed kings instead of judges. Not knowing that this son of hers would go on to anoint King David, the king after God’s own heart.

  Nor could she know that, a thousand years later, another joyful song of strength would be sung by a young woman soon to deliver God’s ultimate anointed King:

  He has done a mighty deed with his arm;

  he has scattered the proud

  because of the thoughts of their hearts.…

  He has helped his servant Israel,

  remembering his mercy

  to Abraham and his descendants forever.

  (Luke 1:51, 54–55)

  Both Hannah and Mary sang of how weak and powerless humans are and how strong and powerful God is. What’s more, they sang of how He loves and remembers His people. In His love, God chose to become weak so that we could gain eternal strength. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not open his mouth” (Isa. 53:7).

  The more we are moved by Jesus’ choice to empty Himself and become weak on our behalf, the more wholeheartedly we can sing of—and live in—the strength He gives.

  Your Song of Strength

  I like to think of our lives as songs being written. Every moment, we are singing words and melodies to the world around us—and not just in the moments we think are important. If that’s true, wouldn’t it be great to sing hopeful songs? Songs that declare our own weakness and the joy of the One who gives lasting strength?

  I love how Paul, the boldest and seemingly strongest of people, spoke about weakness. He had a specific weakness—“a thorn in the flesh,” as he called it—that constantly plagued him. “Concerning this,” he wrote, “I pleaded with the Lord three times that it would leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.’ Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me” (2 Cor. 12:7–10). The original Greek paints a picture of Christ’s power being a tabernacle over him. The more Paul embraced the reality that he couldn’t do it on his own, the more Christ’s strength enfolded him.

  I have to admit, I don’t always want to sing a song like this. I’d rather sing about my own strength. But the Lord says that a more beautiful song is the one all about how He works in our weakness.

  I invite you to bring your song of brokenness, tears, pain, questions—whatever you need to give to God—and write it in this space. Remember that He loves lifting up the poor in spirit and giving strength to the weak. Or if you have a deep sense of His joy, then, by all means, sing about that! Whatever your song is today, here are some words from my heart’s song to inspire you:

  You were made for more than breathin’—

  More than playin’ small and runnin’ scared.

  You were made to walk in freedom—

  To love and laugh, to find out why you’re here.

  Your name was known before the earth was formed.

  You were made for more.5

  God’s Song of Strength

  Hannah sang of who God is. As truth took root in her life, her strength grew. Let’s learn these words from her song today: “There is no one holy like the LORD. There is no one besides you! And there is no rock like our God” (1 Sam. 2:2).

  Let’s also memorize the words that Jesus said to Paul—can you imagine how many times he sang these words during his challenging life? “He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness’” (2 Cor. 12:9).

  The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.

  He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

  You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

  Psalm 23 ESV

  Chapter 5

  A Song of Rest

  Disquiet in the Quiet

  It’s a lovely spring morning in 2020 as I sit writing in the living room of my four-hundred-square-foot New York City apartment. In the couple of years I’ve been here, the noise of the bustling city drifting in through my front window has become a familiar and comfortable companion.

  But today the street outside my window is eerily quiet—as it has been every day for the past month. Only the ambulances break the silence, sounding their sirens at least once every half hour.

  Each day, the death toll rises. And so does the anxiety of uncertainty.

  Who would have thought the world could so quickly descend into such deep darkness? But here we are.

  We’re learning what it means to experience the unknown. We’re learning about suffering too incredible to wrap our minds around. And we’re learning how to adapt to a strange new way of living—secluded in our homes with family members or roommates or, as in my case, endlessly alone. As the drama drags on, we try to navigate the new rhythms of uneasiness beating in our hearts.

  As I write this, I’ve had mild COVID-19 symptoms for ten days now—low-grade fever, aches, shortness of breath, total exhaustion. I’m not sick enough to be tested, but friends in the medical profession think I probably have the virus. I’m thankful the symptoms aren’t worse, but I’m ready to feel like myself again. Since I’ve been forced into this slower pace, I’ve been thinking a lot.

  I think about the health care workers on the front lines of the battle, and I pray that they would be protected and have hopeful hearts. I pray for those who are isolated, especially those with disabilities and those in the twilight of life. I pray for those who were instantly unemployed or who have lost their businesses. On some level, I feel their pain: all my concerts for the foreseeable future have been canceled.

  I wonder what we’ll learn from this season. What we’ll say when we look back. On the other si
de of all this, what will we be like as a world? I wonder if there are words that could bring peace in the midst of a pandemic—and if those words are somehow in me.

  I ruminate on words that have brought me immense comfort in the past to see if they still do: “The LORD is my shepherd; I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul” (Ps. 23:1–3 NHEB).

  I was seven or eight when Mom taught the Twenty-Third Psalm to me and my brother, JD. Though I was exceedingly proud to have memorized it, I wasn’t sure what it meant. I think it was the language of the King James Version that brought on the mystery for this southern kid. Did “I shall not want” mean I wasn’t allowed to want anything? And I loathed the idea of being made to lie down anywhere.

  Now, as a grown-up, I understand what this psalm means in theory, though I still resist its call. Perhaps you are the same. We love the idea of the Lord being our shepherd, guiding us—especially through seasons of uncertainty. We love the idea of peace in any place—even in the presence of our enemies or on our darkest days. But for most of us, finding that peace is rare, if it happens at all.

  Why is peace so elusive? Why is anxiety so much easier to come by than the rest God promises us?

  How do we experience the feeling of calm that David sang about here?

  In the course of time, the lyrics of this song have become deeply rooted in my soul. Through seasons of heartache and change, they have whispered tenderly to me of a God who is not just a great Creator but a loving Shepherd who is caring for, protecting, and guiding us through every moment. In recent years I’ve returned to it often to meditate, its words singing deeper comfort to me now than ever before. Let’s open it together to find the rest David sang of so we can sing of it too.