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Did you know you can search the Internet for ways to “be cool?” Advice like this is particularly available the younger crowd, those school aged kids still full of angst and not sure exactly which way to roll their jeans and tuck their shirt to avoid ridicule.
But the internet is full of advice for us older ladies, too. Older being relative, for you can find directions on how to be well liked in college or at the office. You can find out how to be liked by other singles, other moms, or by guys. The internet even holds the secrets on what the difference is between being well liked and being popular.
How Mordecai ever became so famous then, must be a true mystery. The internet wasn’t around to give him the step by step on how to become powerful, or how to be “popular with his many kindred.”
Actually, Mordecai had something better than the internet, if you can believe it. He had, as the writer of Hebrews says it, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” God had granted him a dream - a tiny spring which became a river, and there was light and the sun an abundant water - these things he did not see, and yet hoped for in God.
So he had faith. And Mordecai had love. The kind of love that comes from God, the kind of love that all the saints: heroic love. Though the book is called Esther, it ends by telling us of of the deeds of Mordecai. It reminds us that he “sought the welfare of his people and spoke peace to all his people.”
We don’t need the internet to help us with this, either. We can be like Mordecai. We can practice our faith in God by loving our neighbor. We can speak truth to people, in love. We can set about our days to really seek out the best for the people in our lives. Not the best as we see it, our the best as we believe it. But the best for them. This will take a true dieing to self on our part, but it will be so worth it in the end.
It will make us saints.
Reflect: What, in your life, are you seeking direction for? Are you wrapped up in discovering the “step by step” and “how to” of it? Or are you resting in “the assurance of things hoped for?”
Act: Whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, offer it back to God. Give him those audacious goals and big dreams; let him take care of the details. In the meantime, spend some time today and really listen to your “neighbor.” How, in your charity, can you help him or her?
