The Path to Peace: Experiencing God's Comfort When You're OverwhelmedSample

Peace When Our Bodies Fail Us

First Samuel shows us that Hannah knew what it was like to feel that her body was failing her. Everywhere she turned in her shared home with Peninnah, children were underfoot—but they weren’t her children. Day-to-day life was a reminder of her brokenness, a reminder that the life she wanted was just outside of her reach.

Whether we struggle with physical pain, emotional instability, or mental illness, all of us know what it feels like to live in bodies that feel broken in one way or another. Depression, anxiety, chronic illness, infertility, immunodeficiency, cancer, allergies—these are just a few of the many struggles that we, as humans, face on a daily basis.

And it’s hard. So very hard.

Like Hannah, it’s hard to live in bodies that don’t work and don’t seem to measure up. It’s difficult to live with brains that don’t function the way we want them to. It’s challenging to constantly bump up against our limitations and our pains.

Yet there is peace for us in Christ, even in these broken and decaying bodies. Throughout the Word, we see the Lord using men and women whose bodies were imperfect and worn down. Sarah was too old to bear children (see Genesis 18:12), and yet she birthed a miracle in her old age! Jacob had a permanent limp because he had wrestled with God (see Genesis 32:31), and yet he also met with God. Moses struggled to speak, and yet he was the Lord’s chosen leader for the Israelites. Elizabeth had been barren for decades—until the Lord opened her womb (see Luke 1:57-58). Paul had a “thorn in his flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7) that the Lord would not take away, but he was still the author of much of the New Testament.

Yes, there is peace for us—a peace that comes knowing that our hope is not ultimately in the healing of our bodies, but in God himself. For God does not shy away from our broken bodies and weary minds; he loves to show his glory through our weakness!

Yes, Hannah’s infertility brought her great pain and heartache; her soul wrestled with God and others. But what she could not yet know was that the Lord was still at work, writing a beautiful story for her life. For while her body seemed to be withering, her soul was growing in faith.

And long before Hannah’s exterior life changes, she shows us a glimpse of the biblical truth that “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:16-17). Even in her “troubles,” Hannah was a woman who chose to worship God at his temple (1 Samuel 1:9-11). Even as she struggled with infertility and cried over how her life was turning out, she did not turn away from the Lord. She turned toward him instead.

If you find yourself wrestling with God today over your broken body, mind, or spirit, consider Hannah and the many saints in the Bible who walked with God and found their weaknesses met by God’s grace. Like them, you can experience peace as you make the choice to turn toward God today in worship and in faith, even if your life is not turning out the way you had hoped.