The Quiet Girl Who Became Queen

Esther 2

By now the world had changed again. Babylon, the great empire that had carried God's people away, had itself been swallowed by a newer, bigger empire called Persia. Kings came and went, but God's people were still scattered far from home, living in strange cities under strange flags.

In one of those cities lived a girl named Esther. She had no mother and no father. They were gone, and she could not get them back. She was an orphan, and she was a stranger too, one of the scattered people far from home. Two reasons to be passed over. Two reasons to feel small.

But Esther was not alone. Her cousin Mordecai had taken her in and raised her like his very own daughter. When she was afraid, he was there. When she was lonely, he was there. He loved her as if she were the most precious thing in all the world.

Far away in the palace, the king wanted a new queen. His servants went out gathering girls from every corner of the kingdom, and they came even to the little house where Esther lived. They took her too.

You can imagine how her heart pounded. A palace is a big and frightening place when you are a girl with no mother to hold your hand.

Then something happened that no one expected. Everyone who met Esther loved her. The man who watched over the palace was kind to her right away and gave her the best of everything. And when at last she stood before the king, the king loved her more than all the rest. He set a crown upon her head.

The orphan girl, the stranger nobody noticed, became the queen.

Nobody could see why. It looked like good luck, a happy ending and nothing more. But God was working in secret, so hidden that his name is never once written in this story. He was placing Esther exactly where she would need to be, for a day that had not come yet, to save her people from a danger they could not yet see.

God had been there all along. When Esther felt invisible, he saw her. When she was carried from home, he had already gone ahead of her, getting things ready. He was working the way a gardener tucks a seed into the cold ground and covers it over. Looking at the bare dirt, you would never guess that spring is on its way.

That is how God loves to work: lifting up the small ones, the left-out ones, the ones the world walks right past. Long before, in that same faraway land, Daniel had knelt at his window and prayed for these scattered people. Now God was answering, in a way nobody could see yet.

And one day, long after Esther, God would slip into the world himself. Not in a palace, but in a stable. A tiny baby nobody important noticed, hidden, the way he had always loved to come, sent to rescue his family and carry every one of them home.

But first, the crown on Esther's head had a job to do. Turn the page, and you will see the day she was made queen for.