Verse of the Day for October 1

A friend of mine painted a small bedroom yellow. He and his wife had been trying for a child for two years, and one Saturday he decided he was tired of the room being a place where suitcases went to die. He bought the paint. He did the skirting boards properly. He put up a shelf.

That was four years ago. The room is still yellow, and it is still empty. I have stayed in that house. You walk past the door on the way to the bathroom and you can feel it.

I used to think that room was a sad thing. I have come to think it is one of the bravest things I have seen.

Luke gives us Simeon in a handful of verses and then he is gone. We are never told how long he waited. We know only that it was long enough for the text to mention his death in the same breath as his hope — that he would not see death before he had seen. He was old. He had been holding this a long time.

What strikes me is that Luke does not describe him as passing time. He describes him as waiting for the consolation of Israel. The waiting had a direction. It was aimed at something. And when the moment finally came, Simeon was in the temple, which is to say he was standing exactly where a man waiting for that particular thing would need to be standing.

He did not miss it. After all those years, he did not miss it, because the waiting had kept him in position.

There is a kind of waiting that empties you out, and there is a kind that keeps you standing where you need to be standing. Most of us do not get to choose what we are waiting for. We do get to choose which kind of waiting it will be.

The yellow room is not a monument to disappointment. It is a man standing in the temple.