The prophet Isaiah told King Ahaz, “The Lord himself will give you a sign.” How often have you thought: “Oh, that’s all well and good for those folks in the Bible, but where are the signs in my life when I need them? How am I supposed to know what God wants me to do? Or when or where, even if I were it know what?”

Perhaps the signs are there, just as the pregnant woman was there in King Ahaz’s court, but we fail to notice them or choose to ignore them as the king did in his day. God, the Creator of all that is, can and does use creation to give us signs of his presence, signs of mercy and love, signs of hope and salvation. The days grow shorter, the dark nights longer; the signs of winter surely, but how might the Lord use that to reveal himself to us in our journey home to the heart of God? Heavy, moist fog shrouds the day, obscuring the view of what’s ahead; if we stop to reflect on it, what message do we hear from the Lord? The tide ebbs and flows, the moon waxes and wanes; might that be a sign of constant change in our lives or something deeper?

God may even choose to use material signs in our day-to-day world to wake us up, to get our attention. We may come upon a “detour” sign; how often do we stop to think that the Lord could be using the sign to turn us aside, maybe to see a burning bush, or to lead us in another direction we would never have thought of choosing on our own? Or there’s a “yard sale” sign on a telephone pole that gets our attention; do we ever consider that God might be using the sign to tell us it’s time to get rid of things we no longer need or have room for in our lives?

Nothing is too small or too large, too common and ordinary or too weird and outrageous for the Lord to choose as a sign of his Love. The signs are there if only the eyes of our hearts are open to see. Just remember, two thousand years ago, he chose a young unmarried woman in a backwater town in the far reaches of the mighty Roman empire to bear God’s Son to be the Savior of the world, the sign of God with us—Emmanuel.