Grantsdale Community Church
2026-05-10-Mothers Who Watched and Waited
  • Introduction
    Let me just say something before we open our Bibles this morning, because Mother’s Day is one of those Sundays that carries more weight than what appears from the outside.
    For some of you, today is a joy. Flowers are involved. Children remembered to call. There may be a brunch reservation, which in this economy deserves its own kind of applause.
    For others, today is complicated. You’re grieving a mother you lost. You’re sitting with the ache of a longing that hasn’t been answered. You came in exhausted, having gotten up before everyone else, made breakfast for the people who will one day, hopefully remember to appreciate you. And this hour is the first quiet you’ve had all week.
    To every version of that experience in this room: I want you to know you are seen. This sermon is for you.
    For five weeks now this series has been building a case for what it means to stay awake to God. Awake to His presence, His voice, His call on our lives. We have largely been asking,
    What does watchfulness look like in a single urgent hour? In Gethsemane, at an empty tomb. In a dark temple with a sleeping boy.
    But today we ask a harder question, What does watchfulness look like when it has to be sustained for years or even decades?
    What does it look like to stay awake when the answer you are waiting for is taking far, far longer than you anticipated?
    Two women answer that question. They are separated by a thousand years of history and completely different circumstances. But the same quality of fierce, patient, wide-awake faith runs through both of them.
    Their names are Hannah and Mary. And together they may be the best teachers in the entire Bible on what sustained watchfulness actually costs, and what it truly produces.

    Hannah — Awake in the Wilderness of Waiting

    (1 Samuel 1:1–11)
    Hannah’s story opens with a situation immediately recognizable as painful. She is one of two wives married to a man named Elkanah. That tells us right away that this household is complicated, because households with multiple wives are always complicated.
    The other wife, Peninnah, has children. Hannah does not. And Peninnah, demonstrating a spirit of generosity, roughly equivalent to zero, taunts Hannah year after year over her barrenness.
    Elkanah tries to help, as we well-intentioned men sometimes do, by saying the wrong thing with genuine sincerity. He says to her in verse 8,
    1 Samuel 1:8 CSB
    8 “Hannah, why are you crying?” her husband, Elkanah, would ask. “Why won’t you eat? Why are you troubled? Am I not better to you than ten sons?”
    No, Elkanah. The answer is no. You are not better than ten sons. He loves her genuinely, but he has completely misread the nature of her grief. He offers her what he has, rather than what she needs.
    Which is a very human thing to do, by the way. Which is why people who love us, sometimes make us feel more alone in our grief than if they would have just said nothing.
    What Hannah does next is the linchpin of the whole passage. Verse 9 says she got up. After years of silence, after a fresh wave of torment, after an insufficient conversation with her husband, she got up and went to the temple and prayed.
    1 Samuel 1:10 CSB
    10 Deeply hurt, Hannah prayed to the Lord and wept with many tears.
    She didn’t go vent to a friend. She didn’t go home and shut the door. Hannah follows the example of Job,
    Job 7:11 CSB
    11 Therefore I will not restrain my mouth. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.
    She brought her grief, completely raw and unedited, directly to God. In her grief she pleads with God.
    1 Samuel 1:11 CSB
    11 Making a vow, she pleaded, “Lord of Armies, if you will take notice of your servant’s affliction, remember and not forget me, and give your servant a son, I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and his hair will never be cut.”
    Two things deserve our attention here. First, the name. “Lord of Armies,” Yahweh Sabaoth in the Hebrew, appears for the first time in the entire Old Testament. Right here, on the lips of a barren woman in the middle of a desperate prayer.
    The God of cosmic authority is first named “LORD of Armies” by a woman who feels completely powerless. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the text showing us exactly who God is for.
    Second, her vow. She asks for a son and simultaneously promises to give him back. Before she has received anything, she has already decided to open her hands.
    That’s not a bargaining chip. That’s faith, that has already moved to surrender before the answer has arrived. She’s wide awake to God in a way that costs her the very thing she desires most in this world.
    Eli the Prophet watches her praying silently, lips moving, no sound coming out, and draws, what he believes to be the most reasonable conclusion. She must be drunk. Can’t have drunk people praying in God’s temple, so he confronts her.
    But Hannah, who has just poured out years of grief before God, isn’t about to be chastised by another person today. No matter who it might be.
    Yet, she responds with complete composure,
    1 Samuel 1:15 CSB
    15 “No, my lord,” Hannah replied. “I am a woman with a broken heart. I haven’t had any wine or beer; I’ve been pouring out my heart before the Lord.
    1 Samuel 1:16 CSB
    16 Don’t think of me as a wicked woman; I’ve been praying from the depth of my anguish and resentment.”
    She corrects Eli. Clearly, accurately, and without apology. Eli has a gift for recognizing genuine spiritual encounters when he finally sees them and pivots immediately,
    1 Samuel 1:17 CSB
    17 Eli responded, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant the request you’ve made of him.”
    Verse 18 holds the detail we don’t want to miss.
    1 Samuel 1:18 CSB
    18 “May your servant find favor with you,” she replied. Then Hannah went on her way; she ate and no longer looked despondent.
    After the prayer, but, before any answer has come, before anything in her circumstances has changed, Hannah ate, and her face was no longer downcast.
    She had placed her grief in God’s hands. And by doing so something shifted. Notice, Hannah’s reorientation came before the resolution. This is what sustained watchfulness produces, not an immediate answer, but a realignment of the soul toward the God who holds what we cannot hold.
    The LORD remembered Hannah. She conceived and bore a son and named him Samuel. And then, she kept her vow. She brought the child to Shiloh and left him there with Eli. Permanently.
    She watched him grow up, from a distance, in someone else’s house. She made him a robe every year and brought it to him. From that surrendered child, God raised up a prophet who would anoint the first two kings of Israel.
    Hannah waited long agonizing years. She surrendered what she finally received. And neither she nor the nation of Israel were ever the same.

    Mary — Awake Through Pondering

    (Luke 2:19, 51)
    A thousand years later, in a very different set of circumstances, we meet Mary. Her story doesn’t begin with barrenness but with an angel, an impossible announcement, and a conception that required no man, just the will of God through His Holy Spirit.
    The situations couldn’t be more different. And yet, the same quality of interior watchfulness that defined Hannah is present in Mary. It comes in a form that Luke records for us, twice, with nearly identical language.
    The first instance is in Luke 2:19, right after the shepherds have come to the manger and told everyone what the angels said,
    Luke 2:19 CSB
    19 But Mary was treasuring up all these things in her heart and meditating on them.
    The second is in Luke 2:51, after Mary and Joseph found the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, calmly sitting among the teachers, entirely unbothered.
    All while His parents had spent three days, frantically searching for Him, in a state of panic that any parent, who has lost a child for even thirty seconds, will recognize immediately.
    Mary says to Him, “Son, why have you treated us like this?” That’s a remarkably restrained rebuke, given the circumstances.
    And Jesus answers with something she doesn’t fully understand. Yet, Luke tells us,
    Luke 2:51 CSB
    51 His mother kept all these things in her heart.
    Treasuring up, meditating, keeping. These aren’t passive verbs. The Greek word translated “treasuring up,” means to guard carefully, to preserve, as one would protect something irreplaceable.
    The word translated “meditating,” literally means, to throw things together, to compare, to weigh them against each other. Mary is collecting sacred moments, holding them up in the light, turning them, comparing them, looking for a pattern. Mary refused to let experiences pass by her without reflection.
    This is a discipline our society is spectacularly horrible at. We’re historically the best at having experiences. Everything in society today is about our emotions and our emotional experiences.
    We’re historically the worst at absorbing them. We move from moment to moment, notification to notification, emotional experience to emotional experience, with very little time for the interior pondering that Mary practices.
    We’re too busy just living, to notice what we’re living through. Mary refuses to do that. She slows down, even when the outside world is moving fast. A census, a manger, shepherds at midnight, a twelve-year-old, who apparently has his own agenda.
    She kept pondering all the way to the cross. She was in the upper room at Pentecost, still watching and pondering. Take notice of one thing about Mary’s pondering.
    Verse 50 tells us plainly her lack of comprehension of what Jesus said about the temple,
    Luke 2:50 CSB
    50 But they did not understand what he said to them.
    She didn’t understand. But, she kept the moment anyway. She stored it, the way you store something you know will become more valuable with time.
    Years later, that moment would mean something it couldn’t have meant at the time. You see, watchfulness, in Mary’s heart, mind and soul, is the refusal to discard what she didn’t yet comprehend.
    Hannah surrendered her son to God’s service before he was even conceived. Mary surrendered her Son to the world’s redemption, and she watched him go all the way to a cross. They both let go of the one thing they loved most, because they were awake enough to understand it was never theirs to keep in the first place.

    What These Women Teach the Whole Church

    But, this isn’t only a Mother’s Day message. You see, what Hannah and Mary model between them, is the spiritual awareness of a mature, sustained, lifetime of watchfulness. The whole church needs to learn their spiritual disciplines.
    Let’s look at three things they teach us:

    Bring your real grief, not some edited version.

    Hannah didn’t compose herself before she prayed. She came unhinged in the temple. She wept so visibly that Eli thought she was intoxicated. She didn’t simply perform faith, she practiced it in the raw and unglamorous form that true faith often requires.
    There’s a very popular, yet false version of faith. A version that keeps God at a polite distance with watered down, well rehearsed, inauthentic grief. Hannah won’t let us stay there. She wept in the temple. God remembered her. Our raw, unedited grief isn’t a barrier to His love, mercy and grace. It actually addresses it.

    Watchfulness sustains itself through surrender, not grasping.

    Both women received extraordinary gifts with their hands already open. The wide-awake life isn’t the life that accumulates and holds tightly. It’s the life that receives with gratitude and releases with trust.
    This runs directly against our instincts. We want to hold on tight to what we love. But, looking at everyone in this series, who has been genuinely awake, from the women at the tomb to Samuel to Hannah and Mary.
    We can see they all have open handed gratitude. We can’t receive what God has for us next, if our hands are full of what God gave us last.

    Make space for the long work of pondering.

    Mary’s treasuring up and keeping are not emotional responses. They’re spiritual disciplines. They’re the practice of making space, inside a demanding life, for the slow process of understanding what God’s doing in our story.
    We can’t do this at warp speed. We can’t do it while we’re too busy scrolling. It requires what our age is least inclined to give, unhurried interior attention.
    A journal. A long, honest prayer. A conversation with someone who will sit quietly while we figure out what we actually believe. This is the oil in the lamp. And like the oil in the parable, we can’t borrow it when the crisis comes. It has to already be in us.
    Conclusion: The Vigil of Love
    Proverbs 31:25 says of the woman of noble character,
    Proverbs 31:25 CSB
    25 Strength and honor are her clothing, and she can laugh at the time to come.
    She can laugh at the future because she’s not afraid of it. She’s not afraid because she has been watching long enough to trust the One she’s watching for.
    She has brought her grief to God raw and unedited. She has opened her hands around what she loved most. She has kept the unexplained moments in her heart, trusting they will eventually mean something they cannot yet mean.
    She laughs at the days to come, because she has been awake for every experience of every day that has already come.
    To every mother in this room, in every form that motherhood takes, biological, adoptive, foster, spiritual, grieving and hoping, your watching is seen. Your waiting is not wasted. Your pondering is not small.
    The God who remembered Hannah, who chose Mary, who showed up for both of them in the long years of their faithfulness, that God sees you. He knows your name. He has not forgotten a single moment of your vigil.
    To the whole church. We carry this forward week after week, year after year. We choose to be people who bring raw unedited grief before God, instead of a watered down, well rehearsed, inauthentic version.
    We must open our hands around what we love rather than clench them tight. We must slow down enough inside to let what God’s doing in our lives actually mean something.
    This is the final week of our Don’t Sleep Through It Series. We began the week after Easter asking whether we had slept through the Resurrection.
    We end today with two women who never stopped watching, across barrenness and pregnancy and birth and surrender and the foot of the cross and the upper room and everything in between.
    They stayed awake. Their watching, waiting and pondering changed the world.
    Because, the vigil of love is never unseen by the God who is Love.

      • 1 Samuel 1:8ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:10ESV

      • Job 7:11ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:11ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:15ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:16ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:17ESV

      • 1 Samuel 1:18ESV

      • Luke 2:19ESV

      • Luke 2:51ESV

      • Luke 2:50ESV

      • Proverbs 31:25ESV

Grantsdale Community Church
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