If I was looking for a sign things couldn’t get more obvious. I was asked to preach on Christmas Day and when asked, I immediately knew I should set aside the gospel for the day and instead focus on Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:22-40).

Simeon and Anna are beautiful stories of waiting… and waiting… and waiting. They gave themselves to prayer. Anna never left the Temple area! There was a sense of anticipation. The story calls me out because I know there is the deep need to wait, and the Lord calls me to it, but my noisy life doesn’t want that calling.

A couple of weeks later I was asked to preach that sermon again because our gospel reading for that Sunday was the Luke passage.

There is also a feast day in our tradition for the Presentation of Jesus and when that feast day falls on a Sunday, it can be the gospel for that Sunday. The feast day falls on Sunday, Feb. 2, this year. Three different times in the past few weeks has been this text on waiting.

Before I knew about our gospel reading for this coming Sunday, the Lord caught my attention from a Psalm and I’ve been doing some cross reference searching on… waiting.

Lord… teach me.

It doesn’t get much more obvious. Yet, here is the question: will I respond?