We Meet Her on the Temple Steps.

Every Christmas season, we read Jotham's Journey together as a family. Not only is the story great, but curling up in mom and dad's bed with all the siblings is priceless. It's a story about a little boy, Jothan, who is separated from his family when they go to Bethlehem for Cesar Augustus' census. The story is about his journey to reuniting with his parents at the time of the birth of the long-awaited Messiah. Tonight we read the part of the story Jotham encounters Anna. What a picture of beauty she is. "Biblical beauty", my mom was calling it earlier (funny, our pastor preached on Anna today, too).

Anna is a widow, and has been for a long time. Some say she we meet her on the temple steps seventy years after her husband's death. Rather than remarrying and carrying on a family, Anna prays. She prays. For seventy years.

I wonder what she prayed about? Sometimes I struggle to pray, even for fifteen minutes. But Anna seemed to understand something about prayer that I don't, some secret or mystery about communicating with God that I am still lacking.

I often wonder about my salvation. I doubt a lot. So naturally I wondered tonight if it's the Holy Spirit that empowered her prayer, gave her something to talk to God about. My prayers are always about me, and well, I'm not that interesting. So my prayers are short. I wonder if it was her singleness, her lack of commitment to and responsibility of a family that enabled her to devote such time and passion to prayer. But I'm single, to. But I choose to be busy with other things instead.

So what is it? I'm guessing it was her expectancy. I'm thinking it had something to do with the way she viewed the Messiah's coming. She knew it was near in the core of her being. She didn't doubt for a minute that the Lord would send His Chosen One to be the Redeemer of humanity. She knew their King of their kings was coming. I bet her prayers began as a longing within. That longing grew into a hope. Hope was given courage and turned into whispered promise, a repetition of the covenant Yahweh made with Israel. It then grew into a spoken word. Then that word grew louder and louder until it was her life mantra. Her life mantra was met in the person of Jesus. Jesus. Jesus fulfilled her life. He brought her life. He always had.

Yes, I think that's what I'm missing. Expectation. I ran into a kid I grew up with today after church. He knew who I was so I pretended to know who he was, too. Called him the wrong name twice. He was cute, too. Bummer. Anyway, we had this conversation about religion vs. Jesus, on of my favorite topics. He said that love is more about being expectant than expectations. I understood it this way. When we see God as having expectations of us, we get a list of nouns we believe he would want us to preform: repentance, confession, prayer, fellowship, etc. But when we're expectant of God, we foresee Him in action: calling, redeeming, loving, reaching, moving, providing. See the difference? We serve a verbal God, a God who is doing and acting. Nouns don't suit Him as well. Nor do they suit us. We're always failing. Hey, that's a verb, too.

So what do I do about this prayer problem I seem to be having? I guess I need to start by asking God to help me expect Him. To expect Him to show up in my life, to expect the Holy Spirit to be alive in mine. I guess, then, I need to ask Him to help me believe He's in me, to prove to me that He exists and is abiding withing my soul. Wow, that's so basic. So elementary.

I bet Anna started there, too.