Why You Think Your Story Is Already Over

You prayed the prayer. You came back the next day and the day after. The answer never came. People stopped asking because asking made you tired of explaining. You learned to wait quietly so no one would have to feel sorry for you. At 3am your hands lie open on the blanket and they are still empty. You wonder if God forgot the prayer or if you misheard the promise. The body that has been waiting so long it has stopped expecting anything to change. There is an old man in the Hebrew Bible whose hands lay empty in a temple for decades of his life. His name was Simeon. Luke 2:25 says he was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. The Holy Spirit had promised him he would not die before seeing the Lord's Christ. The promise had been given to him as a young man. Decades passed. He came to the temple. He came back the next day. He came back the year after. He came back when his hair turned gray. He came back when his hair turned white. The Greek word Luke uses for his waiting is prosdechomai — actively expecting and ready to receive. The same word appears for Anna in Luke 2:38, an 84-year-old widow who had also been waiting in the same temple courts. Modern hope researchers C.R. Snyder and Shane Lopez later mapped what Simeon was doing — hope is a SKILL the body practices, not a feeling that arrives uninvited. Then one day the Spirit moved him. Luke 2:27 says he came BY THE SPIRIT into the temple that morning. Mary and Joseph were walking up the temple steps with baby Jesus. Simeon walked up. Luke 2:28 — "Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God." The Greek for "in his arms" is ankalē — the cradle of the arms. Hands that had been empty for forty years were suddenly full at the level of the chest. Two minutes of holding closed forty years of empty walking back from the same temple. Then he said the Nunc Dimittis prayer — "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." The Greek apolyeis means to release, to dismiss — the language of a watchman released from his post at the end of his shift. Tonight you find out why the wait does not end by trying harder, but by being moved. The body that has been faithful to the path is the body the Spirit can move on the day the Spirit chooses. Empty hands are not the proof that God forgot you. Empty hands are the cradle ready for what is coming.