Does your life count? Does it really matter what you do and how you do it? It’s easy to think it doesn’t - we’re ordinary people, living ordinary, unremarkable lives. Our influence is limited, our voices often unheard. We’re like shadows on the landscape from the scurrying clouds above.
The book of Esther offers us a different perspective. Despite not once speaking about the Lord, and even though it moves in the realms of kings and queens, it nevertheless portrays life as suffused with the presence of God and woven with his gracious plans.
When trouble loomed for the Jews, Esther's uncle, Mordecai, saw that a potential solution lay with his niece. Her rise to prominence had not been accidental and it was not without meaning or hope. And so he calls her to consider the possibility that she was there “for such a time as this.”
Mordecai’s rhetorical question also forces us to stop and consider a similar construct: that despite being unknown and without national significance, our lives bear meaning and value in the hands of God. Where we live, what we do, who we know - these are not random details. They are not there by mistake, nor by default. The God who orders our days does so with wisdom and insight and always with his longing to bless others through his people uppermost in his heart.
You are where you are because the Lord has put you there, even through the whole time of the current pandemic. We might play down the significance we bear but our God never does so. The same Saviour who was able to multiply a few pieces of fish and small loaves of bread is more than capable of taking us, with all our inadequacies, and making much, feeding many.
The greatest example of his creative genius, bringing life and order from chaos and darkness, was seen “on a hill, far away…where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain”. The God who can work wonderful redemption through such squalor and shame, through depths of agony and loss, can enter your situation and do something in you and through you that will leave you in awe of his wisdom.
But the extent of that wisdom is likely to be unseen by us, as the larger part of an iceberg remains submerged. Esther's story had meaning and power not simply for the Jews of her own day but helped to sustain her people down many centuries, reminding them of the Lord’s care and compassion for them and his willingness to come to their aid.
The same is true, in a climactic way, of the cross of our Lord Jesus - and it will also be so in the lives of all whose destiny has been secured by his sacrifice. We do not know what impact our words, our deeds and our prayers may have, when they are offered in worship into the nail-pierced hands of our Lord Jesus.
However much your circumstances may change, however unvaried they might be, you have been brought into the kingdom for such a time as this. Knowing that means living by faith, not by sight, with confidence and joy in the one who is your companion along each and every road he calls you to travel.
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Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
E’en though it be a cross
That raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
Though, like the wanderer,
The sun gone down,
Darkness be over me,
My rest a stone,
Yet in my dreams I’d be
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
There let the way appear,
Steps unto heaven;
All that Thou send’st to me
In mercy given;
Angels to beckon me
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
Then, with my waking thoughts
Bright with Thy praise,
Out of my stony griefs
Bethel I’ll raise;
So by my woes to be
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
Or if, on joyful wing
Cleaving the sky,
Sun, moon, and stars forgot,
Upward I fly,
Still all my song shall be,
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
(Sarah F. Adams, 1805–1848)
