E28 | She Showed Up and She Was Not Okay | I Never Got My Why - Part 6

What if the breakthrough wasn't pretending you're fine?

In this episode of The Living Story Podcast, Tennille explores the story of Hannah and the moment she stopped hiding her grief. For women carrying heartbreak, disappointment, unanswered prayers, or seasons that feel impossibly heavy, Hannah offers a different picture of faith than many of us were taught.

She didn't show up strong.
She didn't show up with the right words.
She didn't show up pretending everything was okay.

She showed up broken.

And God met her there.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why honest prayer often begins where performance ends
• What Hannah's story teaches us about grief, longing, and faith
• The difference between trusting God and pretending you're not hurting
• Why God is not waiting for you to clean up your emotions before coming to Him
• How lament can become a doorway to healing

If you've been carrying pain while trying to look okay for everyone else, this conversation is an invitation to bring your real story into God's presence.

About the Series

I Never Got My Why is a 10-part podcast series for the woman carrying unanswered questions, heartbreak, disappointment, or seasons that never made sense. Together, we're exploring what happens when God doesn't give us the explanation we wanted and how He gently leads us toward healing anyway.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

I think some women have spent so long performing okay that they no longer know what an honest prayer sounds like. We know how to say the right things. We know how to smile politely in church lobbies. We know how to give the edited version, but Hannah walked into the temple weeping so hard the priest thought she was drunk, and God heard her anyway Today I wanna talk about performance. The performance of okay. You know what I mean. The version of yourself you bring to Sunday morning, the one that has it together enough to walk through the door without making anyone uncomfortable. The one that smiles and says she is blessed and means it some of the time and manages the rest. The version that answers fine when someone asks how she's doing, because the real answer is too much for a lobby conversation. and she learned that the hard way. I remember seasons where I could feel the performance happening in real time. Standing at my classroom door welcoming students, smiling at coworkers, teaching lessons, and meanwhile, there was grief sitting right underneath the surface so visibly that people around me could tell I was not okay, even when I was trying very hard, trying my best to appear like I was. That kind of performing is exhausting. Not because you're fake, because you're trying to survive while still functioning. And I think most of us have been doing it for so long, we don't always know where it ends and where we actually begin. Hannah is in 1 Samuel chapter 1. She was married to a man who loved her so much, and that matters. She was not in a loveless situation. She was seen and valued by her husband, But she wasn't able to have children, and in the world she lived in, that carried a weight we can barely imagine today. Her identity, her place, her standing were bound up in something her body had yet been able to do, And she had a rival, Peninnah, the other wife, who had children and used that to provoke Hannah endlessly. Year after year, Peninnah aimed her words directly at the place Hannah was already hurting most. Not once, repeatedly. Which meant Hannah was not carrying one painful moment. She was carrying accumulated grief. And year after year, Hannah wept and wouldn't eat. She wasn't performing grief. She wasn't being dramatic. She was a woman in sustained pain with no resolution in sight and no way to make the hurt stop And then one year, she got up from the table and went to the temple. The text says that she was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly. Not composed, not cleaned up, not ready, bitterly And as she kept on praying before the Lord, Eli the priest observed her mouth. She was speaking from her heart, but her lips were moving and her voice was not heard, and Eli thought she was drunk. He confronted her. He said, "How long will you go on being drunk? Put your wine away." And Hannah answered, "No, my lord. I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for all along, I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation." She corrected the priest calmly with her grief still on her face, and then she told him what she was actually doing. "I've been pouring out my soul before the Lord, not performing worship." And then she told them what she was actually doing And I understand that. I so understand that because I've been pouring out my soul before the Lord, not performing worship, but like pouring, emptying, surrendering the pain, the hurts, She was pouring out everything, emptying, bringing every unresolved, painful, desperate thing she'd been carrying and setting it down in front of God without cleaning it up first. And I wanna sit with that phrase for a moment. Pouring out her soul, not presenting her soul, not organizing the hurt into a coherent prayer with a clear request and a faith-filled declaration at the end. Pouring, which implies there was so much of it that it came out fast and messy and not in any particular order. And I wonder how many women have mistaken emotional restraint for spiritual maturity as if that's the goal. as if the goal was to become composed enough that God never had to see the full weight of what was happening inside them. But Hannah didn't hide the intensity of her grief from God. She brought the actual thing. This is not a broken way to pray. This is the most honest way to pray. And the text doesn't say God made her wait because she was not composed enough. It doesn't say he responded once she pulled herself together. It says, "Eli blessed her and said, 'Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your petition.' And she went her way, and her face was no longer sad. Something shifted before the answer came. Not because the situation changed, because she had poured out her soul, and that mattered. Because sometimes we think peace only arrives once the situation changes But Hannah's story suggests something else, that there are moments where the pouring itself becomes part of the healing. I wish someone had told me sooner that showing up while you are still hurting is not evidence of weak faith. It may actually be evidence of strong faith. Because anyone can worship when the answer comes. Anyone can praise God when everything goes their way and, and everything is just wonderful. Anyone can pray when the breakthrough arrives, and anyone can sing when the chapter finally makes sense. Hannah showed up before any of that happened. She walked into the temple carrying the full weight of what she could not fix, and God met her there. Not after she got herself together. There And what does it actually cost to not do that? When we hold the real version of ourselves back from God because we think we need to arrive together and composed, we are not protecting our dignity. We are protecting a version of faith that doesn't have room for the whole truth. And that kind of faith is exhausting and not actually what God asks for. He asks for our heart, the whole one, the messy, unresolved, still asking why version of, of our heart. You don't have to be healed to show up. You don't have to have resolved the why to walk through the door. The turning doesn't require you to have s- to have stopped crying. It only requires you to keep walking toward God while you're still in it. There were Sundays where I was publicly undone at the altar. Not quietly, emotionally. Undone. Crying through worship because I knew the man who used to stand beside me in, in that same church no longer did it And the songs would start and something in me would just break open in the presence of God. I would cry. The tears would stream down my face To the point that ushers would sometimes just walk by and just give me tissues. And I didn't even see them coming because my eyes were closed. And I would pray and try to collect myself enough to sit down and listen to the sermon and somehow still take notes a- and underline the scriptures through the tears And the strength that it took to show up the next Sunday and do it all over again. Looking back now, I'm grateful nobody told me to stop coming until I felt stronger because If I had waited until I felt healed enough to show up, I would have missed some of the very places God was healing me. I would have missed the altars, the worship, the prayers, the people God placed around me, the scripture He was slowly planting in me while I was still crying through them. And looking back now, I think healing was happening there long before I knew how to name it. Not because every service fixed me, but because I kept bringing the real thing instead of only bringing the edited version, the perfect version, the version that Pretended to be okay And I wanna say something about the women in your life who look like they have it all together. Some of them do, and that is real, and it's grace for them, and we celebrate that. But some of them are doing what others are doing, giving the edited version. Performing okay because the full version felt too heavy, felt like too much to put in a lobby conversation or a small group that was not quite safe enough yet, or a room that had rules about how much grief was acceptable. And I want to invite you into something, not just a turning as a private spiritual moment, the turning as a practice. The practice of bringing the real thing to God first, to save people second. Not performing the resolution you haven't reached yet. Not skipping to the testimony before you have lived through the chapter. But showing up week after week with whatever is actually true, like Hannah, bitterly and honest, trusting that the God who hears does not require you to clean it up first There's something about my own showing up in seasons where I was still in the why. I kept going. not because every service was a breakthrough, not because I always left feeling better. Sometimes I left exactly the same way I came in, carrying the same question, holding the same ache, waiting on the same answer, but I kept going. And something in that consistency, in the act of showing up before I had the answer, before I felt victorious, and before I had the shareable testimony, something in that was doing a work in me that I couldn't see at the time. The turning is not one moment. It's a direction. And every time you show up before you feel ready, before you feel healed, before you have the answer, You are choosing that direction. That's similar to the devotionals I'm doing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on Instagram. I didn't feel perfect or even qualified to do it But something was placed on my heart to do it, to show up. Not something, the Lord And I'm doing it. That is faith in real life. It's not the performed version. It was the actual one So I want you to take that step show up unedited with their true honest self with God Come back Tuesday. We're going to talk about the moment the question turned inward. Not why did this happen to me, but why could I not see my own worth before it did? And with that, friends, I want you to be reminded that you are seen even here, even now, even in the why. I'll see you next week