Over the past two days we have sat with two women I suspect we know far better than we would like.
We watched sorrow harden into bitterness in the first, and we watched it dim into a tired and silent numbness in the second, and if we read those words honestly, most of us found a little of ourselves in each of them.
Today I want to introduce you to the third woman, the one we quietly long to be, and I want to begin by setting aside the thing we most often assume about her, because we will misunderstand her completely if we imagine that she simply suffered less.
She did not.
She is the faithful woman, and she walked the very same valley as the other two.
She buried people she loved, she waited years for prayers that seemed to go unanswered, and she was disappointed and overlooked and worn thin in all the ordinary ways that life wears a woman down.
There were nights when bitterness sat down beside her and made its case, and mornings when she woke to that same flat grey weariness and could feel almost nothing at all.
The bitter woman had rehearsed her wounds until she knew them by heart, and the numb woman had buried hers so deep she could no longer feel where they lay, and this woman was tempted toward both, yet she learned, slowly and imperfectly and often through tears, to do something quieter and braver than either.
She carried her wounds straight to the Lord, and she left them there.
Her faithfulness was rarely dramatic and almost never felt heroic.
It looked, most days, like a tired woman opening her Bible again when the words had gone dry the morning before, and praying one more honest sentence when she had run clean out of eloquent ones, and choosing to believe, against the plain evidence of her circumstances, that God was still good and still near and still hers.
There is a woman in the first book of Samuel who has taught me more about this kind of faithfulness than almost anyone.
Hannah wanted a child with an ache that had gone on for years, and her longing was made sharper by a rival in her own home who provoked her and mocked her until she wept and could not eat.
Scripture does not pretend that she bore this gracefully or felt only holy things, for it tells us plainly that "she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore." (1 Samuel 1:10)
She stood at the very crossroads where the other two women stood, with bitterness pressing in on one side and despair on the other, and the wonder of her story is not that she felt none of it, but what she chose to do with all of it.
She prayed.
She brought the whole of her grief into the house of God and poured it out where only He could see, until the old priest watching her mistook her trembling lips for drunkenness.
When he accused her, she answered with words I have prayed back to God in my own hardest seasons, that she had "poured out my soul before the LORD." (1 Samuel 1:15)
She did not tidy her sorrow before she brought it, nor wait until she felt strong enough to pray it beautifully; she carried it raw and unfinished to the only One who could do anything with it, and there she laid it down.
And then comes the line I find almost unbearably tender.
Before a single circumstance had changed, before there was any child, before God had given her any visible answer at all, we are told that Hannah "went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad." (1 Samuel 1:18)
Something settled in her in the very act of trusting Him.
The burden had not yet been lifted from her life, but it had been lifted from her hands and placed into His, and that alone was enough to lift her face.
That is the secret hiding underneath the faithful woman, and it is far humbler than we tend to expect.
Her faithfulness was never really a matter of her own strength of character, for it rested, every single day, upon the faithfulness of God, whose "compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." (Lamentations 3:22-23)
She did not have to summon a whole lifetime of endurance at once.
She only had to receive the mercy that was new that particular morning, and then rise the next day and receive it again, until in that quiet daily returning a whole faithful life was slowly built, without her ever feeling especially faithful while she was living it.
This is why I take such hope from her, and why I long for you to take hope as well.
The faithful woman is not a sturdier species of Christian, born with a stronger soul than yours. She is an ordinary woman who kept returning to an extraordinary God, and that road remains open to every one of us, whichever of the other two women we may have been living as lately.
The prophet Habakkuk came to the end of all his earthly reasons for joy and chose God anyway, declaring that "although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines... yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation." (Habakkuk 3:17-18)
He did not wait for the harvest to return before he worshipped.
He worshipped in the empty field, and by His grace, so can we.
So if these three days have shown you that you have become the bitter woman, or the numb one, do not lose heart, because the faithful woman is not somewhere behind you in a past you cannot reach.
She stands in front of you, as near as your next honest prayer.
You become her in the small and unwitnessed choices of an ordinary Tuesday, when you open the Word again, when you tell God the truth about your heart again, when you decide once more to believe that He is good while you are still waiting to see it.
"And let us not be weary in well doing," Paul wrote to people who were bone tired, "for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." (Galatians 6:9)
Of the three women we have met this week, only one of them is still being written, and she is the one you are becoming today.
The bitterness can be healed.
The numbness can be wakened.
And the faithfulness, when at last it comes, will prove to have been His faithfulness in you all along.
If this series has stirred something in you, would you take a moment to ♥️, comment, or share it? These small gestures carry this message to other women who need it, and they mean more than you know.
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Take an honest walk through what God says about the most untamable thing any of us carry, the few inches behind our teeth that can build a home or burn it to the ground.
"Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21), and most of us have felt the weight of that verse from both sides of it.
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