How to Be An Awesome Minor Character, Part 2

Luke Chapter 2 tells about the amazing birth of Christ and how God reached out to lowly shepherds to be the first to announce the coming of the savior.  It also details a second story of Jesus being presented at the temple, and how Joseph and Mary received encouragement and confirmation regarding the identity of Jesus.  Being that Luke, the writer of the book, was a doctor, it is very likely that he included this part to show how outside sources, independently acting people, confirmed the identity of Christ, making the entire story more plausible. 

The first person Luke uses to confirm Christ’s identity is a minor character named Simeon, a devout man who was told by God that he would live to see the Messiah.  Luke also details the story of another minor character with an equally amazing story.  This character was a prophet named Anna, a woman.

I like that God used Anna, merely for the fact that the culture of the time was a male-dominated culture.  I personally think this reflects on an aspect of how God wanted His people.  There is an importance in male leadership, even if this topic might have been distorted over the years by our flesh, and it very well could have been misused by the Jewish people.  Whatever the case may be, God chose a woman prophet as a minor character in the story of Jesus.

In Part 1 of How to Be An Awesome Minor Character, I proposed that while a personal relationship with Jesus is important, it might be more accurate to view the story of our lives as being about Jesus, as the main character, like this chapter, and not with us being the heroes, as our self-centered, fleshliness might like.  With this perspective, it is easier to cast away the sins of pride and fear.  Anna is another example to us as to how we could become awesome minor characters in God’s story.

Anna was incredible as she devoted her entire life to God.  Verse 37 says “She never left the temple but worshipped night and day, fasting and praying.”  That’s dedication for you.  Like Simeon, she devoted much of her time to the Lord.

Anna was very old, so she had lived a long time before we meet her.  What happened in those years, we do not know.  What we do know is that she was married for seven years only and then she was a widow until she was eighty-four.  We do not know at what point in her life she was married, if it was recently or very early on.  We do not know if she had a happy marriage.  We do know that somehow, sometime, she experienced a very deep loss and then she never married again.  What did Anna do with her pain?  She sought the Lord with her whole being.

When Mary and Joseph came to the temple with the Savior of the Universe, Anna was no stranger to the ways of God.  She had saturated herself in His presence.  She could sense the presence of God and told everyone around that he would redeem Jerusalem.  She confirmed the identity of the Savior, she who had lost love and some kind of respectability in her culture, for married women had status and security in those times.
While perhaps not all of us are like Anna or are called to live lives like her, I think we can take from her life the lesson that if we want to be awesome minor characters in God’s story, we need to take what has been given to us, accept what has been taken, and still glorify God for it.  We may not understand pain or things that happen, and life may not go our way, but ultimately if we seek God and keep our hearts soft toward him, we will fulfill our purpose, even if that is to speak one word of truth.  We may not see our purpose at the moment, and perhaps our days may be dark and dreary in the eyes of society, and maybe our days may not be what we would have wished, but ultimately, in the end, the story will be the most beautiful if we surrender our days to God.