Give Me a Sign

"I saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign..."

- Ace of Base, The Sign

""Send me a sign! A hint. ANYTHING!""

- Anya, Anastasia

Sometimes, when in a moment of great need, a character will cry out to God (or what-have-you) for some kind of sign that shows them what to do, where to go, or even just to let the character know that they are not alone. Often, God is perfectly happy to oblige. The sign can be subtle, or it can be much more obvious. (When Played for Laughs, the sign is usually downright Anvilicious!)

Subtler examples may fall under Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter! is this trope with a more...belligerent tone.

Also see God Test.

Comic Books
"Al: Lord? We both know how strained things have been with us since that whole Vatican incident, but I figured I'd ask just the same. If Wade's serious, if that girl really is going to turn him around, give me a sign, would ya?
 * From Deadpool :

Tosses a basketball over her head. It bounces off the rim, over the roof, and onto an unseen bystander below.

Al: Thanks for squat, Big Guy."

Film
"Jerry Landers: "How about a little rain?"
 * The literal (traffic) sign from God in L.A. Story, which tells Steve Martin to "Kiss Her, You Fool."
 * Happens in Monty Python and The Holy Grail: "Oh, don't grovel!"
 * Bubba Ho-Tep ends with the stars giving Elvis a sign (in ancient Egyptian) telling him all is well.
 * In Bruce Almighty, this happens a couple of times. While he's driving, he asks God for some sort of sign, and then immediately passes by a road sign that reads, "Caution Ahead." He again asks for a sign from God, and a literal truckload of warning signs immediately passes by his car. Also, when Bruce is shouting his insults at God, his cell phone rings. Even after it gets smashed. Bruce himself tries to engineer these sorts of signs so Grace would come back to him, but they all fail.
 * The Messenger. Joan finds a sword in a field and decides that it's a message from God. Her anthropomorphized sense of conscience questions her on how she could know that it didn't end up there simply by chance.
 * In The Man With Two Brains Steve Martin's character asks the portrait of his late wife if he should go ahead with marrying his new crush. Cue thunder, lighting and the portrait spinning around while the voice of his wife wails "Nooooo, NOOOOOO!". "... Any Sign at all..." replies Martin.
 * In Orgazmo, the protagonist asks God to give him a sign if God doesn't want him to act in a porn. This is immediately followed by an earthquake that causes a statue of Jesus to fall off his desk and break. Of course, he is completely oblivious, and follows this by asking for "any sign at all."
 * Bedazzled begins with Stanley in church, silently asking God for a sign ("you know I believe in you, but...") by giving him the courage to talk to the woman he loves. The Devil, outside a window, hears this and proceeds to make his move. Since Stanley ultimately said he knew for a fact that God existed since he'd gotten to know the devil, maybe that was a sign.
 * In The Final, the outcasts demand a sign from God telling them not to carry out their plan. They take the lack of such a sign as proof that God has sanctioned the torture and mutilation that they will inflict on their classmates.
 * The Blues Brothers: "The band... the band!"
 * Voiced by Thorold Stone in the Apocalypse film series movie Revelation when he isn't convinced that there is a God other than the self-proclaimed Messiah Franco Maccalusso, which he doesn't believe is God either. He later gets his sign from the real true God when he and several other Christians get sent into the furnace and are supernaturally protected from the flames.
 * Played for laughs in Oh, God!. To prove His divinity, Jerry asks God to make it rain. He does so... inside Jerry's moving car.

God: "One small shower, coming up." (rain begins falling)

Jerry Landers: "Hey... that's incredible! You didn't even bat an eye!"

God: "Rain's not too hard."

Jerry Landers: "This is amazing!" (he turns on the windshield wipers and discovers that the rain is only falling inside the car] "Hey, it's not raining outside! It's just in here!"

God: "Why should I spoil everybody's day?""


 * In one of the sequels, Bobby Shelton, a struggling musician who sold his soul to the devil, prays to God that He would give him a sign. He receives it in the form of a rainbow that appears bright in the sky at night.
 * In Super, after realizing he could go to prison for going out as the Crimson Bolt, Frank asks God whether he should keep at it, or throw his costume away. Specifically, he asks for God to make something float. Nothing happens, so he drives to a dumpster and tosses everything out. Later, he watches an episode of the show that gave him the idea to be a superhero in the first place, and the main character delivers the moral about "not throwing away" what you've been called to do. He goes back to the dumpster.
 * The Grey: After, Ottway screams at the heavens for a sign in a "now or never" fashion. A few minutes later, he realizes.
 * The main character of Miss Nobody sees St. George as her guardian angel. After one of her rivals at work is sort of accidentally killed by her, she immediately spots a homeless man with a sign saying, "Call me George," and assumes this is a sign that St. George has her back. However, after noticing her other rivals giving her the stink eye at the funeral, she prays to St. George asking for another sign, just in case the homeless guy was a coincidence. Cue her mother's new boarder arriving, who is the spitting image of St. George...and a detective. Later, when she worries the detective may be on to her, she prays for another sign, and it begins to rain outside. She interprets this as meaning she needs a Fall Guy.
 * In A Very Long Engagement, the protagonist makes a number of private bets with herself that, should an upcoming event happen in a certain way, she'll take it as a sign to continue her quest to locate her MIA boyfriend.

Literature
"What I really said was, "Should I go through with this? Lord, give me a sign." At that moment I stop for a stop sign, and overhead a bird electrocutes itself on the high-tension lines and drops dead on the front hood of my car. So I sit there at the stop sign awhile shivering, tilt my head back and real soft I say, "You didn't have to shout.""
 * In Douglas Adams So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, God left his final message to his creation (in fifty foot-tall letters of fire) on the side of a mountain. It reads Marvin got to see it before he died. It made him feel a little better.
 * Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon short story "Have You Heard the One...?" includes this. Jake Stonebender is telling a story about going to a musical gig.

""Men are fools, as always," grunted Conan. "If the plague struck all who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn't be enough left to count the living! Why should the gods--who the priests tell me are just--slay five hundred peasants and merchants and nobles before they slew the king, if the whole pestilence were aimed at him? Were the gods smiting blindly, like swordsmen in a fog? By Mitra, if I aimed my strokes no straighter, Aquilonia would have had a new king long ago."
 * In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian novel The Hour of the Dragon, men pray during The Plague, and take its ending with the king's death as a sign, and a mark of favor for his brother and heir. Conan has none of it:


 * Played very seriously in The Emigrants. Kristina who has been very religious her entire life begins to doubt the existence of God after all the hardships she's had to endure and begs God to exist and to give her a sign that he does.
 * In The Curse of Chalion, Cazaril asks his friend Palli to pray for a sign Palli is skeptical, not the least because Cazaril himself had been skeptical about such things in the past, but agrees to try.

Live Action TV

 * On Lost, Locke spends a good amount of his time looking for signs from the island.
 * The freak snowfall in the Buffy episode "Amends", which prevents Angel's suicide-by-sunlight.
 * In the finale of Power Rangers SPD, a guilt ridden Piggy yells to the sky, asking if he did the right thing turning over the Rangers to Emperor Grumm in the previous episode. A lightning bolt then strikes Piggy's trailer, causing it to crash down the hill, completely wrecking it. Piggy resolves then and there to help the Rangers escape.
 * The crown of butterflies in Kings. Though it is a bit ambiguous as to whether this was an actual sign from God, or just the characters interpreting it that way.
 * On Cheers, Diane has taken to a convent after breaking her engagement to Frasier, realizing she loves Sam. After Sam comes to visit her, she asks God for a sign. Sam returns and asks where the men's room is. Says Diane, "Well, that's not exactly the parting of the Red Sea..."
 * Fringe had an example with a white tulip.
 * In the Supernatural episode "The Man Who Would Be King", Castiel spends the whole episode praying to God, explaining how he came to work with  in his attempt to stop Raphael from restarting the Apocalypse. At the end of the episode, Cas breaks down, begging his Father to give him a sign that what he's doing is right.

Music
"Although sometimes the signs from heaven are vague
 * The Fiery Furnaces' "We Got Back The Plague" notes that about the time George W. Bush was elected, there was an actual case of bubonic plague in New York.

Early November we got back the plague!"


 * DMX's "Lord Give Me A Sign."

Newspaper Comics

 * This is a Running Gag in Candorville. Whenever the reverend asks for a sign, it's always given, and it's always a blackout, presumably signifying God's displeasure at whatever dishonorable scheme the reverend has cooked up to raise money. It turns into a plot point when he asks for a sign if he should reveal that the local voting machines were sabotaged to elect a corrupt candidate--the machines are of a type that wipes its records in the event of a blackout, and only Clyde used a paper ballot, voting for a snide rap star.
 * Bloom County has an example where Oliver Wendell Jones is sitting on his roof, looking at the night sky, and when he looks in the same direction as the reader, the stars in the sky spell out "REPENT OLIVER". He then comments on the difficulty in remaining agnostic these days.

Theater
"Shrek: Why me? Why me?
 * A non-divine example comes from Hello, Dolly!! in which Dolly Levi asks her dead husband Ephraim for a sign that she should marry Horace Vandergelder. Shortly thereafter, Vandergelder quotes Ephraim's favorite aphorism to her.
 * In French works, often played for laughs by having a swan appear for no good reason (in French, the words for "swan" and "sign" being homonyms).
 * In Shrek The Musical, from "Travel Song":

A simple answer would be fine

Won't someone please send me a sign?

Donkey: Oh look, a sign! Yunita Pal Avenue straight ahead!"

Web Comics
"Tiren: Whatever gods are looking out for me, thanks."
 * Done by Sinfest in this strip.
 * In Endstone, Kyri has gotten news that her daughter is driven mad by the Artifact of Doom, and her estranged husband refuses to help her. She sees a morning star as a sign to have faith in the gods.
 * In Dubious Company, after Tiren has second thoughts about joining Kreedor's army, she goes AWOL and gets lost. She looks up at the moon and sees Walter's ship.

Western Animation
""Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me and I am thankful. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: you freeze everything as it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is okay, please give me absolutely no sign." (brief pause) Okay, deal. In gratitude, I present you this offering of cookies and milk. If you want me to eat them for you, please give me no sign. (brief pause) Thy will be done!" (Homer sucks down the cookies)"
 * In the Don Bluth film Anastasia, when Anya prays for a sign, a dog steals her scarf and runs over to the path to St. Petersburg.
 * Parodied often in The Simpsons.
 * One notable example is Homer begging God for help, and the phone rings: "This is God... frey Jones. I heard about your story..."
 * Another Simpsons example is when Homer asked for no sign.

"Homer: Musical instruments? Could that be a way to encourage a gifted child? Just give me a sign!
 * After Homer realises that he can't afford to send Lisa to an independent school, he walks past a music shop:

[the shop manager places a sign in the window, reading "Musical Instruments: The Perfect Way To Encourage A Gifted Child"]

Homer: Eh, works for me."

Real Life

 * Actress Robia La Morte said she embraced Christianity when, driving down the highway, she asked God for a sign that he was real. Moments later, a gang of bikers were passing her on either side - she was anxious about it, then saw by their jackets that they were 'Bikers for Jesus'.