Thanksgiving is next week in the US. In the next couple days, I’m telling a story to help us think about the challenge of tables.

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I’m guessing that every family and every culture comes to holidays with expectations. And every culture that has holidays that are about being thankful, about giving thanks, has expectations that we need to be grateful.

It’s a little challenging to give thanks as you bow your head over food you don’t really like.

But it’s more challenging when you look back on a year that has deep grief and loss in it. Or when you are looking ahead with uncertainty.

So how do you say what you are thankful for when you aren’t really thankful for what you have?

Hannah was at a meal like that. It was the meal following the sacrifice at the annual trip to the tabernacle. Once a year, Elkanah and Hannah and Peninnah and her children would travel up to Shiloh, where the altar of God was. They would offer a sacrifice to God, thanking him for what he had provided, asking him for forgiveness, praying for blessing for the future. The whole family took time off from regular life and went up.

After the sacrifice, they would feast. Elkanah would serve the meat. And as he moved from wide to wife, from child to child, Hannah was reminded that none of the children were hers. In a culture which would eventually write a song for the journey to the temple that said, “children are a blessing from God”, she felt un-blessed, un-noticed by God.

And it’s important to this story to note that Peninnah constantly reminded Hannah of this. People, and their expectations, kept eating at her ability to believe that Elkanah, and God, might care.

This year, it finally got to her. She eventually moved away from the table and went to the tabernacle to pray.

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More tomorrow.