Do you judge people based on how their life looks from the outside?
This week, we’re looking at a very special book in the Bible. Let’s see if you can guess it:
- It’s one of the only two books that doesn’t mention God by name 🤔
- It’s also one of two books named after a woman 💁🏻♀️
- And it mentions India 🇮🇳 🙌🏽
Did you guess it?.... It’s Esther!👸🏻
I’m excited to take you on this journey.
As a young girl, I loved this fairytale-like story in the Bible: a simple girl who became a beautiful queen and then a brave heroine, saving her people. But now that I’m older, I realise it’s more akin to a heartbreaking human trafficking story, at least in the start.
Esther is a young, beautiful, orphan girl. Her cousin, Mordechai, has taken it upon himself to take care of her, but he is unable to protect her from the king’s officials, who come to collect all the beautiful girls in the country so the king can take his pick (read the story in Esther 2).
Esther is, of course, treated much better than the average trafficking victim; she gets servants and beauty treatments. But the fact remains that she was a prisoner, being groomed to sleep with a man without her consent. She had no choice in the matter.
This week, we will discover together how God uses Esther and completely turns her story around for His glory, in a way that only He can do.
But let Esther’s story also be a reminder that we don’t always know or understand what is really going on in someone’s life. It might seem glamorous from the outside, but in reality, the person might be living in bondage or struggling with all kinds of challenges hidden underneath the surface.
As you enter this week, ask God to give you grace for all the people you may encounter. To help you not be judgmental, but to show kindness in unexpected ways, because you never know what they might be dealing with that you don’t know.
