Your Favourite Fictional Hero
In my eyes the person I am going to pick isn’t fictional – she’s actually non-fictional but there are atheists out there who would disagree with me and would say that she is fictional and that the bible is a book of fairy tales. I would say that it is stories but in the way that tribes talk about their history rather than myths or legends that are told to scare children into behaving and things like that.
My hero is Esther, she was originally called Hadassah which was Hebrew for Myrtle. If you grab a bible and flick to about the middle you’ll find a whole book called Esther. She was normal girl who would go onto great things. In the bible the King Xerxes held a huge feast to show of how powerful he was. He ordered his Queen, Vashti to appear before him and his guests. Vashti refused (which was a huge deal she was telling the King basically where to stick his invite).
Xerxes decided that if he let her behave like this it would cause too much trouble in his kingdom so he decided he needed a new Queen. The King sent out a notice decreeing that beautiful young virgins were to be gathered at the palace from every province of his kingdom. Well, it was almost like The Bachelor in a way – there were all these girls for the King to choose from but only one would be Queen. After all the virgins went through their preparations it was then Esther’s turn to go to see the King and she was chosen to be Xerxes new Queen.
Now there are various other bits to the story but the main part is how she trusted in God to provide for her and keep her safe. Xerxes had an advisor called Haman and he was the baddie of the story (BBOOO!!! HISS!), Esther tells the king of Haman’s plan to massacre all the Jews who were in the Persian Empire and she owned up to be being Jewish as well.
In February, Jewish people have a festival called Purim which is where they celebrate Esther saving the Jewish people from Haman’s evil plan.
I love the story because even though Esther comes from really humble beginnings she goes on to achieve something pretty mind blowing. Now okay I’m pretty sure that it’s not in God’s plan that I should save all the people who are a tiny bit Irish from a massacre but God has got plan’s for me and as it says in the story of Esther I was born “for such a time as this”.
A little while ago our Girlie’s group that was started at church read a book called “For Such A Time As This” (Well actually the whole title is Generation Esther: Stories of Young Women Raised Up for Such a Time as This
