The greatest hope for a parent - long hair!

"then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life and no razor will ever be used on his head."

1 Samuel 1.11

(This follows on from the blog below)

If I were devising a parenting course now, the first question I might ask is:

"Why do you want a child?" 

This is the biggest question - the true answer to it is probably the single most important factor in someone's parenting, but we rarely ask it. Often the true answer (not necessarily the one given) might be a mixture of things:

• "I really want to be a mother/father"
• "It's what everyone else is doing"
• "I want someone to hold/love"
• "I want someone who will hold/love me"
• "I want to make a family"
• "I think it will make me happy"
• "I want to make a contribution to society"

Another question arises and pushes to the front when the child is born - What do I want for the child?

• "That they should be successful?"
• "That they should be healthy?"
• "That they should be happy?"

With all these answers there is a complex interplay of altruism and self centred needs. One of the terrible burdens our children carry is the things we need our children to be and to do for us. 

This was a danger Hannah faced. The waiting for a child, the building sense of desire and longing, could have been awful for Samuel. He could never have lived up to the idol she had made him.

But God saved her from this in her journey of waiting and vowing. She now had answers to those two questions:

Why did she want a child?

So that she could worship the Lord with him, by giving him to the Lord

What did she want for her child?

Long hair! (v.11) For us this is a bizarre aspect of the vow. However for the first readers it was immediately clear. Hannah's promise not to cut Samuel's hair was a sign of someone who is set apart for the Lord's special service. There is a clear link here to a former hairy man - Samson - used by the Lord to save his people.

Hannah's prayer is that her child will be uniquely used by the Lord. She wants his life to be glorious - to bring glory to the Lord and to share the Lord's glory. 

And how her desire is fulfilled! Not so much that he ends up leading God's people (although he does), but that he is the one who starts the fulfilment of her prophecy of an anointed king at the end of the song (v.10). What begins with her little baby, ends up with another baby born miraculously to another scorned woman - Jesus.

The challenge of Hannah's vow to Christian parents is, will we answer in the same way to those two questions. If we want the very best for our children we will want to give them wholly to the Lord and we will want them to be gloriously used by the Lord.

You see such a vision of parenthood in the story of Hudson Taylor. When he decided to go to China to serve the Lord, they in effect lost their son, but in the tears they rejoiced, because he was fulfilling their greatest hope for him son and they knew that there was no better place for him than in the Lord's service.

What if Hannah hadn't done this? 

One of the striking things about the Old Testament is that it can be understood as a catalogue of bad parenting. In fact, the concluding verse of the whole Old Testament (Malachi 4.6) is about how the promised John the Baptist would turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. Reading through the Old Testament, you see why it was needed. 

It is very hard to find successful parent-child combos in the Old Testament. Generally, it is a either a story of neglect or misplaced love (indulgence, favouritism, leniency). Two notable exceptions of times where the parent/child combo is a success are Abraham & Isaac and Hannah/Elkanah & Samuel. In both cases the child was offered as a living sacrifice to the Lord.

Child sacrifice was common in those days (see Jephthah). Children were given over to death in worship of the false gods. The parallel has often been made to abortion today. There is though another parallel. Giving our children to the gods of success (academic, sporting or financial), popularity, beauty, health, materialism. All of which lead to death. 

The choice as a parent is not whether or not we offer our children as sacrifices. As parents, that is inevitable. The choice is, will we offer our children to false gods that lead to death or will we offer them as living sacrifices to the Living God who gives eternal life?