Beauty MarksSample

Beauty that Shows Up


I’m guilty of never showing up.

It’s basically a knee-jerk reaction of mine whenever the going gets tough: Disappear. Avoid confrontation. Hide. Or something quintessentially girly: I text/call my closest girl friends and analyze the situation over numerous cups of coffee in pretty little coffee shops until it’s two years later and I haven’t done anything about it, much less even shown up to deal with the situation. I’ve heard the phrase “flight or fight” so many times, and I know it well. Flight is easy. Flight is comfortable. Flight means never having to face complicated, awkward, difficult situations.

Now, we have a girlfriend in the Bible called Esther, and she was this beautiful young woman who became a queen. Esther was in a situation: The entire Jewish nation is about to be wiped out by a law put in motion by a bad guy called Haman. And she’s the queen over all of that.

You’ll need to read the rest of the chapter so that you can know the rest of the story in full (go ahead, we’ll wait for you), but see, I can relate so much with Esther. Okay, I’m not a queen and I don’t have a rather scary husband who happens to be king, neither am I that drop dead gorgeous, and better yet: I don’t have the fate of an entire nation indirectly resting on my shoulders.

But being women, we see her delaying tactics. What happens when she finds out about this new law that’s going to eradicate her race? She fasts. Then she tells her ladies in waiting to fast with her. She then sends worried messages to her uncle, and even tactfully tries to reason her way out of it (basically she says “my husband is scary and you know he has this law where he’s going to put to death anyone who dares go to him without an invitation). Mordecai, her uncle, kindly dismantles all her arguments and forces her to think about what she’s really doing being a queen and wife.

Today, if you’re in that kind of situation, this is ‘us’ speaking as a Mordecai into your life. What if you’ve gone through all that, lived through all this, and endured all of those for such a time as this?

What if all we have to do is show up and trust God enough that He’s already written the rest of the story?