Waiting is the Point

Date: Monday, August 10, 2026

Luke 2 opens with a mandatory census, a crowded inn, and a feeding trough repurposed as a crib. At least that’s how the image forms in our minds. Regardless of the nativity details, this is how God chose to reveal His Kingdom; not with a coup, but with a birth in an obscure town, first announced to shepherds, who were the working-class night shift of the ancient world. It’s the fulfillment of a promise as old as Eden’s curse (Genesis 3:15) and as specific as Isaiah’s “Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). God with us; finally, physically, with us.

Then there’s Simeon and Anna, two elderly saints who had spent decades in the temple doing nothing more glamorous than waiting. Simeon had been promised he wouldn’t die before seeing the Messiah, so he showed up faithfully, day after day, until one ordinary Tuesday a poor couple walked in with their baby and Simeon knew. “My eyes have seen your salvation.” Church history gives us echoes of that kind of relentless hope: the eighteenth-century evangelist George Müller famously prayed for the conversion of a group of friends for decades; some didn’t come to faith until after his own funeral. His waiting was never wasted. It was the point.

Simeon’s song reminds us that the incarnation is the announcement that God still shows up in overlooked places, including the unremarkable middle of our own waiting.

Devotional Prompts:

Where in your life are you being asked to wait faithfully, trusting God’s timing over your own?
How does the humble ordinariness of Jesus’ birth challenge your expectations of how God shows up?

Prayer: Father, thank You for coming to us not in spectacle but in humble flesh. Give us the patient faith of Simeon and Anna, eyes open to recognize You in the ordinary middle of today. Amen.