Audio Session 3

We discussed the enigmatic Queen Vashti in our third session and how her intriguing and brief story begs the question for all of us, "How much do I trust my King?"

Sunday Selah

"But when the attendants delivered the king's command, Queen Vashti refused to come."

Esther 1:12

Her story has always been compelling to me.
Or, should I say, her lack of story.

We know of Queen Vashti through a few brief verses at the beginning of Mordecai Ben-Jair's account of the events surrounding the establishment of the Jewish holiday of Purim, the writing we today call the book of Esther. We learn that she was known for her great beauty. We know that she was throwing her own dinner party while the king held his.

And we know that when the king commanded her to come before his dinner guests, she refused.

Which lead to her being deposed by King Xerxes, the event that made the way for an orphaned Jewish girl named Hadassah to become the Queen of Persia.

It struck me as I was studying this era of the Persian empire and the mighty kings who ruled during this time how Greco-Roman centric we tend to be in our view of history, at least in this country. The Greek and Roman dominance of the European and Middle Eastern borders lasted about seven centuries combined. We see the influence of that rule in our architecture, our forms of logic, our art and our language.

But what of the Medes and Persians?

The golden age for the Persian Empire dawned several centuries before Greco-Roman dominion. The Babylonian kings and the Persian kings jostled one another's borders for many years before Cyrus the Great unified the Medes and the Persians of present-day Iran and overran his Babylonian neighbors to the north in what is now Iraq. The Persian Empire by the time of Vashti's husband, Xerxes, stretched from India to Egypt and skirted the borders of Greece. When Xerxes took the throne in 485 BC, he was not only known as king, he was also ipso facto Pharaoh over Egypt.

Not too shabby.

While there is a great deal of recorded history outside Scripture surrounding Xerxes and his constant war campaigns against Greece, his building of incredible palaces and his civic law, Vashti is virtually absent from these records. Scoffers say that this 'proves' the book of Esther is simply fairy tale, but most archeologists would have to grudgingly admit that when a ruler was deposed in many cultures, there was an all-out effort to scrub that person's memory from the national records.

Vashti is remembered in a few sources outside of Scripture, in the Midrash, a collection of rabbinic approach to various stories in Scripture, 'filling' in where question marks have remained. Some of the rabbis say that Vashti was the daughter of Belshazzar, the king of Babylon defeated by Darius, Xerxes's father. Midrash legend says that Vashti was the only surviving member of the royal family and that Darius took pity on her, sparing her life and giving her to his son in marriage. Some rabbis taught that Vashti was an especially cruel mistress to the young Jewish girls who served her, forcing them to work on the Sabbath in the nude, huge violations of their religious practices. Some say that Xerxes was a doorkeeper in the house of Belshazzar and that Vashti always held disdain for her upstart husband who overthrew an empire.

And perhaps the reason for these Midrash traditions is an attempt to understand Vashti's refusal to come before her husband at his banquet. Some modern commentaries try to assert that she was told to come wearing 'only' her crown and her refusal was a moral stance, a chaste and honorable posture of a true queen. Some say her refusal stemmed from political intrigue, an attempt to undermine her husband's authority before the court. But the wording of the Scripture carries no connotation of these intrigues and would even seem to counter the claim that she was to appear wearing 'only' her crown. In Persian culture, it would have shamed the king for other men to have looked that intrusively on his treasure.

I've been pondering on her for many weeks now.

And after the tales and legends and politicking and posturing, I feel like the Holy Spirit has taught me this:

It's about trust.

Vashti didn't trust Xerxes.

She didn't trust him with her image, her position, her identity.

Whether Xerxes gave Vashti good reason to not trust him or whether he had always been a consistent leader, her refusal exposes the core flaw to their marriage.

Because when all is said and done, she decided to keep the reigns of her image solidly in her hands.

And lost a kingdom for it.

Vashti has now become something of a feminist heroine in our modern day. Her brief story is often claimed to be a tale of unfair male dominance and the bravery of a queen-as-chattel who dared to stand against it.

Uh, maybe.

But perhaps is goes deeper. Perhaps we might find an allegory for our lives here.

Because we've all been invited to a banquet, even in the midst of throwing the private dinner parties we call our lives.

Jesus tells a parable of this banquet in Matthew 22. He talks about those who have been invited to this banquet, a feast thrown by a king for his son, the bridegroom. But there are those who have been invited who refuse to come. And in chapter 22, in verse 5, Jesus gives this telling detail, saying, "But they paid no attention and went off, one to his field, another to his business."

They decide to keep hold of their calendars, their interests, their images. And in so doing, they miss a kingdom.

They choose not to trust their King with their lives.

Trust.

I feel a certain sympathy for Vashti. She no doubt had gone to some trouble to put together her guest list, her menu, her preparations for her banquet. Perhaps one of the women in her party was just getting to the punchline of a gossipy bit of news. Perhaps Vashti had just finished ushering her last guest to the door and was dreaming of a hot bubble bath. And then this summons comes.

But I take her story as strong medicine. I want to trust my King. I want to trust that whatever He calls me to do, where ever He calls me to show up, if it's day or night, even in the middle of a dinner party, I want to be sensitive to His summons.

And I want to remember the words of my Messiah as He tells of His banquet..."Many are invited, but few are chosen."

Selah.

And Now I'm Just Feeling Sassy....

See that little arrow-green-blinky thingy in the right sidebar? Over there----->
It is a little device that actually will allow you to click it and immediately hear the audio for Session 1.

Yep.

And it only took me hours and hours and hours to figure it out....

Audio Session 1

I'm as surprised as any one else.

I've actually somehow managed to get the Session 1 audio into an appropriate, ad-free site for your listening pleasure.

It's not the most elegant form of pulling this off--but it will do for now.

Because at some point, I must stop playing on the computer and clean my bathrooms. Or do some laundry. Or scrape of the kitchen counters.

So here's the link.

And what a blessing you all are to me!

Sunday Selah

"Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a kinsman-redeemer."

Ruth 4:14

It must have seemed a long day.


Waiting to hear the news.

Waiting to hear her destiny.

When Ruth accompanied her mother-in-law Naomi to Naomi's hometown of Bethlemhem, she came as an outsider, a foreigner, a woman with a dead husband and dreams of dust. It seemed divine appointment that she would catch his eye, this Boaz. He was a righteous, prosperous man, kind and generous. He had favored Ruth as he saw her following his harvesters, picking up grain to take to her mother-in-law.

And she had favored him with a marriage proposal.

Upon the advice of Naomi, Ruth lays herself at the feet of Boaz and asks for him to be her covering as her husband. Boaz is willing, but in the custom of the day, he must first 'redeem' her from a relative who is more closely related and has greater legal right to claiming her and her first husband's property.

Boaz leaves first thing in the morning to meet with this closer relative.

And Ruth is left to wait.

It was spring. The barley and wheat harvest was completed. The hard labors of the previous weeks was now at rest and the stores of grain had been secured against the winter. The sounds of new lambs bleating to their mothers filled the air and the scent of wild flowers carried like a soft note on the air.

And she waited.

Waited to learn if some stranger would stake his rightful claim to her. Waited to see if she and Naomi would have provision. Waited to hear if the protection and kindness she had known in Boaz would become her way of life or if she would become the lesser wife of this closer relative.

Boaz goes to the city gate. He approaches the relative with greater rights. He asks if this relative is willing to purchase the fields belonging to Naomi and Ruth's deceased spouses. The relative affirms that he will. And then Boaz throws in this crucial piece of information.

If this relative redeems these fields, he will receive Ruth as a wife in the deal.

And then I can imagine Boaz holding his breath.

It is common in many cultures that an agreement is sealed with the exchange of a handshake, of documents, of signatures. And in this culture, it was the custom that if one party was giving up the right to property, he would remove his sandal and hand it to the one who was taking that property.

And Boaz finds a sandal being placed in his hands, securing his right to take Ruth as his wife.

Ruth waited, small tasks occupying her time, tidying, folding, dusting.

And then, she sees him. She sees Boaz striding across the fields, his robes slapping against his legs in his hast. She searches his face, looking for news. And then she sees his hand pull something from the folds of his robes.

It is a sandal.

And for Ruth, it is her glass slipper. The glass slipper that identifies her as Boaz's. The glass slipper that gives her a future and an identity in a new country. The glass slipper that means she is accepted and blessed.

Ruth's glass slipper in the hands of the kinsman who has redeemed her.

There comes a moment for each of us, a moment when we realize that we are nothing in this vast universe without Jesus. We feed on the barley seed of His word and we see His kindness, His goodness. And there comes that moment that we lay at His feet, at the foot of the cross and we tell Him that we want to be His bride.

And He goes to see someone about a shoe.

Because the enemy of our souls has stronger rights to us without Jesus's sacrifice. This enemy knows our weaknesses and our sins and tells us we don't need a savior, we don't need anything but our pride and selfishness to survive.

But when we come to the end of ourselves, we know. We know we are nothing without the Lord.

Jesus comes striding through the fields of eternity. He holds something in His hand, something that He has bought with blood and suffering. And in His smile, we see what it is.

It is our glass slipper. He fits it onto the small feet of our existence and in that moment, we are no longer lost.

We are born anew.

As daughters of the King.

Selah.

In Waiting...

What an amazing journey this has been, this season of listening and reading, praying and thinking, all in preparation for teaching The Glass Slipper. It is such a marvel, that the deeper the Lord takes me into His Word, the more treasure He shows me...and the more mystery. Within the hands of my heart rests a basket full of jewels and cherished shiny wonder.

And now begins the process of stringing those precious pearls of love and awe into a cohesive piece.

A necklace of truth fit for the daughters of the King.

Pages of notes lay piled around my bed, laid out in one format, then gathered and reshuffled. Verses scribbled on bits of small note cards spread like confetti, sparkles of eternal truth winking from my hasty penmanship. And I am humbled.

Humbled by what I am learning and by how much I don't know. I have given my heart and my very eternity to this Lover of my soul, and yet I am struck still with how small my understanding of Him is. When I see the way He woos us, His Bride, I marvel at this God that knows all my failing, all my fault, all my doubt, all those dark places that I try to hide from Him. He knows all this. And He still loves me.

And He is willing to speak to me through this Love Letter of His Word.

As I pull all these notes together, as I meditate on Him, on what He is saying, my heart fills with such a strong desire to string together these beads of blessing, this strand of salvation, to somehow honor the beauty of His redemption of us.

To somehow adequately explain how He has paid the bride price and bought us back our honor and position.

And I suppose the best place for me to start is to begin believing it myself. To leave my preconceptions and reasonings behind, to abandon my definitions of role and office, vocation and mission, essence and fiber. To somehow take this incredible truth, that He came to the ends of the earth to rescue me, and to place it as a jewel in my heart. To not just study and talk about it, but to allow it to soak deep until it becomes the fragrance of my soul.

The perfume of a princess.

The aroma of eternity.

Humbly honored to anoint the feet of His other daughters with this sanctifying unction.

Sunday Selah

(In 2007, I started the blog Octamom, in which I shared my photography and adventures as the mom of a family of eight children and one amazing husband. A regular feature on that blog has been a weekly post I call Sunday Selah. It's a time to stop and reflect on Sunday morning. I will be sharing it here as several of my upcoming Selahs will be based on the teaching I am brining in the Glass Slipper class.)

"I will be a Father to you,

and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

II Cor. 6:18

Just like Solomon, the original wise guy, would tell us, everything in life has a season. We go from infancy to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to further maturity. We crawl, we toddle, we walk, we run. Transition, change, season.

We often carry titles associated to these seasons. We have a time as 'the baby'. We are a 'first-grader'. We are a 'graduate student', 'bride', 'young professional', 'new mommy', 'aunt', 'sister-in-law', 'senior executive', 'grandmother'. We wear the titles of these roles as definitions of ourselves, the markers of the places in our journeys.

But there is one title we as women all wear. We wear it all our lives. In a modern world that affords us the opportunity to try on many titles for size, it is the one that endures, the one that touches each of us no matter where our paths have taken us.

And that is the title of daughter.

We may be single or not, married or not, moms or not, aunts or not, sisters or not, grandmothers or not, but one thing we can't not be is a daughter.

If you're female and on the planet, you are someone's daughter.

Whether you have special bond with your mother and father or if that was a relationship filled with challenge, you still are someone's daughter. Whether a parent pointed to you with pride as their child or if your folks acted like you weren't around, you are still someone's daughter. Seasons come and go, titles change, expand and retract, but this one remains.

Daughter.

It was not until 1920 that federal law was passed in the United States giving women the right to vote. And if we accept that a generation is roughly 25 years, that means that in three and a half generations, we have gone from getting the vote to being told we could do anything to being expected to do everything. With those open doors of opportunity has also come an opportunity for the enemy of our souls to sow confusion into our identities, a field that we often survey with a sense of overwhelm, comparison, self-loathing or pride. Someone asks us who we are and we say, “Oh, I'm just a mom.” Or we dust off our diplomas and give our resume. Or we whip out a fat envelope of pictures and name off our grandchildren. Or we talk about work, hobbies, spouses, organizations, responsibilities.

But is that who you are?

Those experiences shape you, to be sure. But when the season of mothering young children or when the season of career focus or when the season of operating as praise and worship leader, when those seasons wind down, how do you define yourself then?

We are a generation of women still trying to figure it out, in varying degrees. Many of us may think we've got a handle on it, but then a season change comes and we feel the identity lurch. The baby of the family leaves for college. The pink slip comes in the mail. The honeymoon ends. The degree is earned. The spouse goes home to the Lord. The ministry goes a different direction. The relocation occurs.

And we are left struggling to explain who we are in the absence of certain titles.

But this one remains.

We are daughters.

We are daughters of the most high God. He has adopted us in, not for a season, but for eternity. And while we scramble to bring Him our finger paintings of accomplishment and labor and study and relationships, He smiles and puts our little homework on the fridge and listens to us talk about our days.

And He calls us daughters.

For always.

Forever.

Daddy's girls.

Selah.