ESTHER 6: THE RELATIVITY OF TIME
My original post for today was written in 2017, but these additional notes completed today are written 7 years later yet the words couldn’t possible be more relevant than for today. 
Due to a 4½ year saga in our family that has taken me to the pits of hell (questioning if the Creator God is stronger than satan’s power to deceive, once humanity’s God-given freewill choice rendered useless my prayers for those closest to me), I have been fasting for days. Apart from nibbles to stave off headaches and two unavoidable meals with guests here, I planned to fast till I die, if I had to. As matriarch of my family, I’m “Queen Esther” and I refused to accept that satan can grip my family in yet another deception so that we’re no different to our unravelling culture – another statistic, another one bites the dust. Now I’m a pushover-Queen with no authority to speak over my own realm.
Yet silence and “zipping it” for fear of broken relationships can’t be the answer. This is especially so when we are Followers of The Word i.e. the One who is The Voice.[a] The One who spoke in The Beginning then created us in His own image to operate in His likeness.[b] Loving tolerance yet grieving in silence, can’t be the method for dealing with a cultural shift that the heads of the family disagree with. Still, as I continue my fast for answered prayer, I confess that I wasn’t even meant to be reading Esther 6 today. With guests for 2 days, I got behind with my Breadcrumbs. Yet because I love the Book of Esther, I didn’t want to miss anything. And so I find myself reading my own wisdom 7 years later…
Since our Maker transcends what we know as Time (i.e. He lives in Heaven above the earth’s atmosphere and therefore outside Time that is relative only to our 24 hour revolutions), 
He lives outside the limits of what we call ‘now’, ‘soon’, today or tomorrow. What He considers to be ‘imminent’ will almost certainly be different to what is imminent in our estimation. Even the relativity of Time is irrelevant to Him. This is most especially so when we think we’re in imminent danger; at the end of our rope; about to die under the pressure; or, after years of unanswered prayer, we feel that we need a particular prayer answered and provided for ‘now’. In addition, because our Creator God is 100% perfect, He never makes mistakes. Practically, this means that His timing is 100% perfect and there’ll always be a good reason behind why He acts with precision timing.
So then, since He knows more than us from where He’s sitting … far above Time… Esther Chapter 6 becomes a classic example of how my Creator God seems to do things at the very last minute. Like my many restless nights over the past 4+ years, this Persian Emperor in today’s chapter is having a restless night. Noticing now that he was listening to the reading of twelve years of events from the record of his reign [v1], I need to use my wakeful hours not in worry about what’s going on in the present or future; but instead, call to mind the grateful journey that I and my family have taken in the past. The near misses and the answered prayer at just the right time. Then, like the king in today’s chapter, I may find a gemstone that gives me a whole new project as the dawn breaks.
And yet while this is all well and good, to live through the unanswered prayer as the cliff edge gets closer, is hard to accept in the Life of Faith. Having built the gallows 74ft high during the previous afternoon and no doubt into the evening hours[c], for example, 
Haman is awake early on that fateful morning and on his way through the palace gates. It was only at that very moment, that the king was suddenly stuck by the name of a slave who sat at his gate every day for the past five years. [v2-3] Most people call this a simple coincidence. But the precision timing is far too ‘coincidental’ and can’t be anything short of divine intervention. In my first book Breadcrumbs in the Storm, I wrote about a month of unbelievable coincidences every day after our son passed away, and how the uncanny nature of them all had to be God. Instead of calling them co-incidents, we called them God-incidents.
Although I continue to struggle with my seemingly endless wait when Time is irrelevant to the One answering my prayers, the last five decades has shown me that nothing is at all as it seems when it comes to the Creator God. There’s always more involved and it’s often beyond our understanding. When God Almighty finally steps in however, His righteous judgements will be seen to be just and true.[d] So, not only is He saving Mordecai from death in today’s chapter, but He is honoring him for 5 years of courage. Mordecai had concerned himself for 5 years with Esther’s welfare.[e] He risked his own life speaking out to expose a crime.[f] Finally, he wouldn’t compromise his faith in the Creator God by bowing down to a human image of the Creator – regardless of the cost.[g]
Added to the human story is the God-story and from where He sits, our Creator isn’t just able to see around the next corner. He is Omniscient (all knowing) and the stakes are often higher than what I’m facing on the ground. He knew of the plot to annihilate the Jews
and was working on an Empire-wide plan. If this isn’t enough, our Maker is still working to His Global Masterplan that had been promised to Abraham 4+ millenniums ago.[h] So in one swish of His paintbrush, the Creator God’s masterpiece isn’t just focused on the one dot – Mordecai and the gallows – any more than He is focused solely and only on you or on me. When He acts to save us from whatever we’re facing, or whatever is ahead of us, it will be a much bigger correction to the whole picture when His divine intervention steps in.
Unfortunately for us, help from our Maker will come in His way and in His time. But when it comes, it’ll be so ‘unnatural’ that it will be easy to see how it must be Him. Our job is to stop saying that we can ‘thank our lucky stars’, but instead thank Him properly for who He is, what He has done for us, and when He has done it. When we do this in the ordinary, we’ll be ready for His extraordinary intervention that is set in Time ahead of us…
“…He who is coming will come and will not delay…But my righteous one (the righteous) will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him. But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.”[i]
CLICK to return to today’s “Daily Breadcrumbs”
[a] Exodus 23:20-23
[b] Genesis 1:26-26
[c] Esther 5:14
[d] Revelation 15:3; 16:7 & 19:2,11
[e] Esther 2:11
[f] Esther 2:21-23
[g] Esther 3:2-4
[h] Genesis 12:3
[i] Hebrews 10:37-39 (See also Isaiah 26:20 and Habakkuk 3:3-4)