For Such a Time as This

When Queen Esther got the news she was stunned. An edict of genocide against your race will do that. A nation-wide holocaust was scheduled, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Or so she thought.

She was a woman in a man’s world, a world with strict laws against interfering with government policies. She may have been called Queen, but barging into the imperial court was punishable by death. Asking questions about tyranny was equally off-limits. The women of the harem of the court of King Ahasuerus were pretty playthings in this no-nonsense political world. And the King had not called to play with her for over a month.

Like many of us, the first thing Esther saw in this crisis was her own powerlessness.

Overcome by Awe

Some years ago I was cradling my new-born daughter in the middle of the night when I wanted to sleep and she didn’t. I passed the time by reading aloud from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. It’s a tough story about the darkness of colonialism and of the human heart in general, not exactly bedtime reading for infants, but I needed to finish the novel for an assignment. She had no choice but to listen.

A better river story for children would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – equally insightful into the human condition, but not quite as dark.

Today I'm pondering a river scene in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

New Beginnings

After a four-week silence this blog is back – with a new name and a fresh focus. For the past 18 months I blogged about the Wonder of Water – 210 posts exploring references to water in the Bible and what they have to say to us about life today. You will soon be able to read many of these reflections – and more – in my new book Downstream from Eden.

In the last post I wrote before Christmas I used the phrase ‘downstream from eden’ to describe the less-than-ideal circumstances of our life journey in the real world. Yesterday was one of those, a milestone marker for me and my children.