Sunday, 17 May 2009

• My Distractions and Idolatry, Part III of III

  "It isn't that the cat-idea is sinful.  Like Kai, my getting a cat has minimal butterfly-effect on the world and Kingdom. Yet the fact that I put so much time into a future-possibility as I ignored present-realities led me very nearly, or perhaps all the way, into idolatry."

  I said this yesterday, and really, it lies at the final crux of my lesson-learned.  It's true that I have things in me God needs to repair, but even more importantly, God has things in this world he needs me to repair!  And yet I focused on a cat!  This is the dangerous butterfly-affect that my obsession caused.  This distraction kept me from seeing what God wants me to see.

  My mother and I have been talking a lot about this cat-prospect, and part of one conversation yesterday brought up Esther's story.  I was at the time debating what I should read in the Bible, and so after I hung-up with my mother, went there...and what I found really struck me, even scared me. 

  I imagine women in a harem with no outside-access and no jobs will still find things to occupy their time, and it's safe to say that those things probably weren't mostly good things.  Harem politics, intrigues, schemings...  How to best please the king; how to promote their children in the line-of-succession; how to counteract the devices of their competition.  Ever watch America's Next Top Model?  Well, those girls are at least working toward a job and look how catty they get. 

  Esther had been queen for five years when her story introduces Haman.  Half a decade with women, eunuch, servants, and occasionally, King Xerxes, foreign dignitaries, and high-ranking kingdom officials.  She had plenty to distract her from what was happening outside the harem walls and Suza itself.  Then one day Haman is offended by Mordecai, is unable to kill Esther's uncle outright, and so hatches a plot to exterminate all the Jews in Xerxes' kingdom. 

  I find it hard to believe this was the first time in Esther's reign that some threat, under the signature of her husband, was imposed on a people in Xerxes' kingdom; yet this threat was against her people.  Mordecai makes a plea to Esther, who had kept her heritage hidden, to intervene on the Jew's behalf:

  "Don't think for a moment that you will escape there in the palace when all other Jews are killed," Mordecai says.  "If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die."  Esther 4:13-14, NLT

  His message to her strikes me as very intense and urgent, and in my present circumstances, I read in his words a plea to look past all the distractions of the harem and see the bigger issue at hand.  Esther was indeed in a position to do something, and if she chose not to, God would bring up another Jew to fight for his people... but I believe many Jews would have died in that Plan B.  Esther's intervention prevented that from happening, however, because she looked at the bigger problem in her world and took action against it. 

  It's terrifying that in my distracting, idolatrous obsessions, I may be missing a much bigger tragedy.  What if in not seeing the larger issues, I'm not fulfilling the purpose God placed me here to do (the rest of Esther 4:14)?  And God's purposes are so much more lofty and serve such larger ends than our own ever could.  God's purposes affect the lives other people, sometimes to the very point of their life-or-death.  Here is the immense, incredible danger in our choice to be self-absorbed.

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