DEC 29 | What I Would Tell You About Waiting
“There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.”
- Luke 2:36-38
"What I Would Tell You About Waiting" is written as a Letter from Anna's perspective to a young woman still in the waiting season. The devotional explores the Light current through Anna's decades of presence in the temple, culminating in her recognition of the infant Christ. I hope you enjoy.
Dear one still waiting,
You do not know me, but I know you. Not your name or your face—but I know what it is to wait so long that waiting becomes the shape of your life. I know what it is to wake each morning and wonder if today will be the day, and to fall asleep having asked that question ten thousand times without an answer.
They call me a prophetess now. They write about me as if I were made of marble—a monument to faithfulness, a lesson for children. But I was flesh and bone, dear one. I was a young bride once, laughing at my husband's jokes, burning bread because I was distracted by love. Seven years I had with him. Seven years that felt like seven days. And then he was gone, and I was twenty-something with a lifetime of aloneness stretching before me like the desert road to Beersheba.
I tell you this so you understand: my faithfulness was not some natural gift. It was a decision I made again and again, on mornings when I felt nothing and evenings when I felt too much. There is a reason Luke mentions that I "never left the temple." It was not because I had nowhere else to go—though that was true enough. It was because I had learned, slowly and painfully, that presence was the only offering I could control. I could not make God hurry. I could not force the consolation of Israel to arrive on my timetable. But I could stay.
And staying, I discovered, is its own kind of prayer.
You are waiting for something. Maybe you know exactly what it is—the child who has not come, the diagnosis that has not arrived, the relationship that remains broken, the calling that feels perpetually delayed. Or maybe your waiting is more diffuse, a general sense that the life you are living is not yet the life you were made for. Either way, you wake each morning in the gap between promise and fulfillment, and that gap has started to feel like home.
I want you to know: God sees you there.
There is something in Luke's account I want you to notice. He says I came up to Mary and Joseph "at that very moment." At that very moment—as if the timing were not accidental. As if all my decades of waiting had been preparation for one precise instant when I would need to be exactly where I was, doing exactly what I had been doing for sixty years. The scholars call this providential timing. I call it grace with a clock.
I did not know, on any of those thousands of ordinary mornings, that I was being positioned. I did not know that my fasting and praying was shaping me into someone who could recognize a baby as a king, who could see light wrapped in swaddling cloths. I only knew that I had made a choice—to stay, to worship, to speak to God whether or not God seemed to be speaking back. And then one day, without warning, a young couple walked through the temple doors carrying the answer to every prayer I had ever prayed.
This is what I would tell you, if I could sit beside you and hold your weathered hands in my weathered hands: the waiting is not wasted. I know it feels like it. I know there are days when you wonder if you are simply treading water, going through motions, performing a faith you are not sure you still feel. But presence is never wasted. Staying is never wasted. Every prayer you pray in the dark is a lamp being lit for a moment you cannot yet see.
I did not wait well every day. Some mornings I woke angry. Some nights I cried myself to sleep on the cold temple stones. I argued with God. I accused him of forgetfulness. I told him that his timing was cruel and his silence was unbearable. And still I stayed. Not because I was strong, but because I had nowhere else to go. He was my only hope. And hope, even when it feels like a thread about to snap, is still hope.
Luke says that when I saw the child, I "gave thanks to God and spoke about him to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem." Notice what I did not do: I did not keep the moment to myself. I did not clutch my answered prayer like a private treasure. The waiting had done something to me—it had worn away my selfishness, my need to be special, my grip on my own story. So when the light finally came, I had hands open enough to share it.
That is the other thing waiting does, if you let it. It hollows you out. It makes you less interested in your own comfort and more interested in the comfort of others. It teaches you that you are not the only one in the temple at midnight, crying out for something that seems never to come. And when your moment finally arrives, you find that you have become someone who wants to run and tell the others—everyone else still waiting—that the light has come.
So stay, dear one. Stay in the place where God has put you, even when it feels like a prison. Pray, even when prayer feels like talking to a wall. Worship, even when worship feels like performance. And know that you are being shaped for a moment you cannot yet imagine—a moment when you will need to be exactly who your waiting is making you.
The light is coming. It always comes. Sometimes it arrives as a baby in the arms of peasants. Sometimes it arrives in forms we never expected. But it comes. And when it does, you will know that every day of waiting was preparation, not punishment.
I am proof of this. Eighty-four years of waiting, and one moment of seeing. It was enough. It was more than enough.
Yours in the long faithfulness,
Anna, daughter of Penuel
Today
Find one small act of presence you can offer today—not because you feel like it, but because staying is its own prayer. Light a candle and sit with God for five minutes without asking for anything. Simply be there. Let your presence be the offering.
