From the time I can remember, I have loved stories.
Some first memories are of sitting in Mama’s lap by the warm gas heater while she reads to me from the “Green Fairy Book of Children’s Stories.” Many of these stories were simplified classics and caught my young imagination and never let go.
Bible stories especially made up part of my heritage. Recently, Gary and I were able to see a wonderful Bible story come to life through song, music, drama and acting! “Queen Esther,” produced by the Sight and Sound Theatre at Branson, was wonderful, and I hope you get a chance to see it, experience it and have your heart warmed by it. Remember Esther — Hadassah was her Jewish name — a young woman living in the Persian kingdom as an exile?
While she was a young woman, the king of Persia got rid of his Queen Vashti, and followed the suggestion of his advisors to have a beauty contest to choose his next queen. Sounds like a movie plot right! Drama.
Esther was one of the young women taken to the king’s palace to undergo 12 months of beauty treatments and training. The young women were conscripted to spend one night with the king and then he would choose the one to become his new queen. What the women wanted didn’t matter. They had no choice.
Read the story in the Bible and see how Esther became chosen as queen, being careful to keep her real racial heritage as a Jew secret.
As we see in history, a man, Haman, rose up in hatred to create a plot to kill all the Jews, not knowing Esther was a Jew. Read about the plots and counterplots!
As the story goes on, Esther has a decision to make. Will she risk her life to save her people? Even as queen, she is not able to go unsummoned to the king; he can allow her to come when he sees her or have her killed. She is safe from the violence as long as no one knows she is Jewish.
But her Jewish adopted father Mordecai asks her this question: “…Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 3:13-14)
I don’t think any of us will be put in a beauty contest and selected as queen of a country, but I do think we are all living at this point of history for a reason. God’s plan for us is intertwined with His divine plans and the time we are living our lives.
When we are faced with hard decisions, perhaps a bit like Esther’s, we can ask ourselves: Are we where we are to stand up for God and righteousness, for “such a time as this?”
