Esther

My sweet friend and neighbor started a summer Bible Study in June. We are doing Beth Moore's Esther. Because of the nature of summer, attendance has been hit or miss and sadly I have missed more than I've attended. Things are settling down now as school is starting back in a week so I am hoping to attend more regularly.

Even though I haven't attended each session, I have been able to keep up with the weekly homework. I think the thing I love most about Beth Moore is her ability to write as if she is speaking directly to you. There is an ease about her style that flows. Another thing I love about her is how she can make a one or two sentence statement and it just shoots straight to the heart of the matter. There have been so many in this Esther study and rather than write a narrative, I'd like to just share some of the things that have really spoken to me.

• When we trust our lives to the unseen but ever present God, He will write our lives into His story and every last one of them will turn out to be a great read with a grand ending.

• You cannot amputate your history from your destiny.

• God is so wholly secure in His own spotless integrity that He feels perfectly comfortable giving us an account of something without making himself accountable to us.

• We too can become so steeped in our culture that we are almost indistinguishable from the world. We too can lose our sense of identity and forget who we are. Indeed the fact that we can hide our Christianity assumes a certain amount of assimilation. I believe one of God's purposes in this journey is to help us recapture both our identity and identification as His children-- not so we can be obnoxious but so we can be influential.

• Only a person strong in character and steadfast in spirit can follow someone else's instructions for long.

• Information served with a heaping side of personal agenda almost never turns in to the meal we had planned.

• Some crises are too important for saving face.

• Guilt is a relentless mocker even if it's misplaced.

• That which shatters our superficiality also shatters the fetters of our fragility and frees us to walk with dignity and might to our destinies.

• Sometimes we fear that fighting for what is right will kill us. Then again, it occurs to us that to stand by and do nothing out of self-preservation is to be dead already.