Reframing Your Life With God's PerspectiveSample

Seeing God’s Purpose with the Higher View

One could say it was the first recorded episode of The Bachelor. It took place in Persia sometime around 485 BC. The narrative begins with a Persian king who has deposed his queen and decides to pull out all the stops to select a new one. Women are brought in from all over the land to be given a chance at winning his heart.

Enter Esther, a Jewish orphan girl, who ultimately wins the rose. Suddenly this girl is swept from humble beginnings into a much bigger life than she ever imagined hers to be. However, the end of this Cinderella story is only the tip of Esther’s life, because after she becomes queen, her journey comes to a crossroads. A king’s adviser has persuaded the king to sign an edict that would annihilate all Jews. When Esther’s cousin Mordecai finds out, he tells her that because of her position, she is the only one who can intervene on this decree.

In a dramatic turn of events, Esther suddenly sees all that’s happened to her as part of a bigger story. Everything that brought her to this moment is placed into a broader turn of events, and she sees that she is here—at this time—for a purpose much bigger than herself. Her beauty, her triumph, and her position in the palace are now seen from a higher view, as she recognizes that everything may have happened to her to touch and affect other people’s lives.

As the plot reaches this peak, Mordecai confronts her with the choice that she can remain isolated in her own story, or enter into the bigger story happening around her. She is jolted by her cousin’s words: “And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14).

As she is pulled back from the microscope view of her story, Esther realizes that her decision for how she will move forward carries more weight than she thought. She stands at the same crossroads where all of us stand: to either see our life as our own, to do with what we want, or to see our life as part of God’s story, given to us to touch and affect other lives.

The higher-view lens reveals that our stories are given to us for a purpose much bigger than ourselves.

Adapted from When Changing Nothing Changes Everything. Copyright © 2017 by Laurie Polich Short. Used by permission. For more information, please visit www.ivpress.com/when-changing-nothing-changes-everything