This popped up on my Instagram a couple days ago. I looked it up (because, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, ninety-eight percent of quotes on the internet are fake), and it is, in fact, a lovely paraphrase of Esther 4:14. The actual translation from the NLV might be even better, though: “Who knows if you have not become QUEEN for such a time as this?”
Indeed.
I wrote it in my journal, and it’s been giving me some life back this week. Back to school plans are rolling out, COVID cases are surging nationwide, and every time I try to wrap my mind around what August will look like, sparks shoot out of my ears and I have to lie down and listen to Benedict Cumberbatch talk to me about quantum physics.
Basically, I’ve been wallowing. In uncertainty, in negativity, in baked goods.
So, it was a welcome notion that perhaps the reason my royal throne is perched next to the white-hot flames of an incandescent dumpster at this moment is that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Or, perhaps, it’s where I chose to be.
Maybe I am in possession of some skill set that this hot mess of the Earth needs right now. Maybe the job description for this lifetime, which currently has me doing eight Chris Farley hair pulls a day, fits my eternal LinkedIn profile exactly.
Maybe in the great teachers’ lounge of the sky, someone was rifling through the filing cabinets and said, “Holy smokes, THIS is what happens on Earth this century??” And then, depending on your theology, you and I were either shipped straight into the fray or we volunteered as tributes.
I’m leaning toward volunteerism over conscription at this point in my spiritual journey, perhaps because being sent seems too much like the involuntary luge. I would like to think that I put down my oatmeal scotchie and said, “You know what? I’m down. I’ll go.” Perhaps they asked if I was sure, as I may have been burned at the stake on the last trip, but I insisted. “I am highly qualified,” I said.
Lately, I had been forgetting to tell it to myself this way. Esther on Instagram reminded me that I make a very willing but very ugly victim, maybe an expert wallower but still a muddy one. It reminded me that I had another Instagram quote stuck to my desk this school year: “Show up in your life as if you had chosen every detail.”
EVERY detail. I’ve read a few books about this idea, and I’m going to tell you right now: I like it. Maybe we all came down here with an existential grocery list. Maybe it’s not just the pandemic that we signed up for; maybe that embarrassing thing you said the other day, that bad relationship you stayed in for years, that mailbox you backed into, maybe all of these were just what you needed to buy on this trip to the humanity store. Sure, they seemed bad at the time, but probably so did getting dumped by your middle school boyfriend who ended up in prison, am I right??
Now, here’s your weekly Eckhart, from my weekly reading: “The deeper interconnectedness of all things and events implies that the mental labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are ultimately illusory.”
Or, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now that which we see is as if we were looking in a broken mirror. But then we will see everything. Now I know only a part. But then I will know everything in a perfect way.”
We have no idea what the plan is, right? I won’t know what’s been good or bad in my lifetime until I’m back up there with an oatmeal scotchie in one hand and a now-discontinued Starbucks white iced tea in the other. Over and over in my life, I see how the events I thought were world-ending were actually world-opening. So… why am I letting a little uncertainty get to me now?
Well, I mean, it’s because I’m a human and we’re in the middle of a freaking pandemic, but I’ll try to end on message here.
Perhaps I was born for such a time as this. You’re here with me, so it stands to reason that perhaps you, also, were born for such a time as this. Perhaps we even intended to come down here and kick some butt together.
No more wallowing, I promise. I will eat this one last cookie, and then I suspect we have some work to do.
