What Can We Learn From Esther? — Tileston on Courage for Such a Time
⏱ 14 min read
You have been asked, by something other than yourself, to do the thing you have been hoping someone else would do. The thing that costs. The thing that, if it goes well, will save a small piece of the world around you, and that, if it goes badly, may cost you the standing you have spent years quietly building. Speaking up at the meeting where the wrong thing is about to be decided. Going to the elder of the church about the matter that has been left unaddressed for two years. Telling the truth to the family member whose silence has become a pattern. Beginning the conversation that you are the only person in the room positioned to begin. And the inside of you, when the asking arrives, does not feel brave. The inside of you sounds like a young queen sitting in a chamber in a foreign palace, knowing that uninvited approach to the throne room is, by the law of the land, punishable by death — and weighing whether to go in anyway.
That is the inside of Esther. The book named for her — the only book in scripture that never mentions God by name, though His providence sits inside every sentence — turns on a single line spoken by a young Jewish queen in a Persian palace, after three days of fasting, before she walked into a room she had not been called into. If I perish, I perish. What can we learn from Esther in the Bible is, in part, this: the courage was not the absence of the fear. The courage was the willingness to walk into the throne room with the fear still in her, because the cost of not walking was greater than the cost of walking. Mary Tileston, who collected devotional passages for women in long seasons of weighed decisions, gathered three lines in Daily Strength for Daily Needs that read the inside of the such-a-time moment more carefully than any modern leadership essay. This is the slow reading of them. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Esther was probably nineteen or twenty. The text never gives her age, but the chronology of the book — Persian queen-candidates were selected from young virgins, the year of beauty treatments preceded her presentation to the king, the events of the crisis unfold a few years after her marriage — suggests she was barely out of her teens when Mordecai sent her the message that would re-shape the rest of her life. Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this. She had been an orphan, raised by her older cousin, taken into the royal harem during a city-wide selection she had not asked to be part of, kept her Jewish identity secret on Mordecai’s advice, and become queen of an empire that ran from India to Ethiopia. The crisis arrived when Haman, the king’s chief official, procured a royal decree to annihilate the Jewish people across the empire on a date eleven months away. Mordecai sent word. Esther sent back the polite, accurate, fearful response: uninvited approach to the inner court is death. Mordecai sent the longer reply. Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king’s house, more than all the Jews. And then the sentence that would haunt her: who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this.
What the fear actually was
The fear Esther was carrying was not the fear of physical death alone, though the death was real and the law was real. The fear was the deeper fear of losing the safety she had quietly built. She was queen. She was sheltered. Her Jewishness was hidden. The palace, for all its strangeness, had become a place where she had a measure of control over her days. To approach the throne room uninvited was to put all of it — the queen-ness, the shelter, the carefully managed identity — onto a single decision that might end in her execution and would, even if it did not, expose her people-of-origin to a king who had just signed their death warrant without knowing she was one of them.
You will recognise the texture. The fear does not feel like cowardice from the inside. It feels like reasonable risk-management. The reasons for not going into the room are not invented; they are real. The career you have built will be damaged if you say the thing. The relationship will be strained if you tell the truth. The position in the church will be lost if you raise the concern at the elders’ meeting. The fear is not making the cost up. The cost is real. The question is whether the cost of not going is, on the slower scale of conscience, larger than the cost of going. Esther sat with that question for three days.
Tileston, writing for women who knew this kind of decision intimately, collected a line that names the inside posture of the woman in the chamber:
“Whatever happens, abide steadfast in a determination to cling simply to God, trusting to His eternal love for you; and if you find that you have wandered forth from this shelter, recall your heart quietly and simply.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it twice.
The phrase that does the work is abide steadfast in a determination to cling simply to God. Tileston is precise. She does not say abide steadfast in a determination to do the brave thing. She does not say abide steadfast in courage. She says cling simply to God. The courage Esther walked into the throne room with did not come from a self-generated bravery. It came from the three-day fast — the deliberate clinging to God in a fasted body — that preceded the walking. The fast was the clinging. The walk was the consequence of the cling.
(If the long quiet weighing of a costly decision has been your shape this season, SOAP Bible study method — free printable worksheet walks the kind of slow daily scripture practice that holds the chamber-time before the throne-room moment. And if the practice has not yet found its shape because you are uncertain how to begin, SOAP method for kids is the gentle introductory version, while how to start a quiet time with God walks the ten-minute version of the practice for the woman whose chamber-time has to fit inside the smallest available hour of the day.)
And if you find that you have wandered forth from this shelter, recall your heart quietly and simply. The instruction is small and unhurried. Tileston knows what Esther’s three days were like. The mind wanders. The fear surges. The clinging slips. The instruction is not try harder to cling. The instruction is recall your heart quietly and simply. The recall is not a dramatic spiritual recommitment. It is the small bringing-back of the attention to the One being clung to. Esther’s three-day fast was, almost certainly, three days of this exact recalling — the attention drifting toward the death, drifting toward the king’s last-known unpredictability, drifting toward the palace politics, and being quietly recalled, again and again, to the simple clinging.
The second passage: courage steadfast, trust fixed
“And we shall steer safely through every storm, so long as our heart is right, our intention fervent, our courage steadfast, and our trust fixed on God. If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness which are sometimes produced by the multiplicity of your domestic worries. No indeed, dearest child, all these are but opportunities of strengthening yourself in the loving, forbearing graces which our dear Lord sets before us.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the four conditions Tileston names for steering safely through a storm: heart right, intention fervent, courage steadfast, trust fixed on God. The four are not arranged hierarchically; they are simultaneous. Esther on the morning of the third day, putting on the royal apparel before walking to the inner court, was steering by all four at once. The heart was right — she had decided what she was going to do, and the deciding had stopped the inner argument. The intention was fervent — she had fasted three days, and the fasting had clarified the wanting. The courage was steadfast — not large, not heroic, simply not abandoning the decision. And the trust was fixed on God — fixed not because she had received an explicit assurance of His help, but because the alternative to fixing the trust on Him was fixing it on the king’s mood, and that was not fixable.
This is the part that does the slow theological work for the woman walking into a costly moment. The trust does not have to be felt as warm or full. The trust has only to be fixed. Fixed is a small, structural word. It means attached at the point, regardless of the surrounding weather. Esther’s trust was fixed at the point of God, not at the point of the outcome. She did not know whether she would live or die. She knew where her trust was tied. The not-knowing the outcome and the knowing-where-the-trust-is-tied are simultaneously possible, and the simultaneity is what fixed means.
If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. The stunning is anticipated. Tileston does not pretend the storm leaves the woman unaffected. She names the stunned-ness as part of the journey. Esther between her first audience with the king and the second banquet — the long anxious day in which she had not yet asked her actual petition — was almost certainly stunned. She had survived the entry. The king had extended the sceptre. The first invitation had been accepted. But the question had not been asked. The stunned-ness of the in-between hour is the part the courageous-woman essays tend to skip; Tileston, who lived a long widowed life, does not skip it. Take breath, and go on afresh. The phrase is small and exact. The breath is what makes the next sentence possible. Esther took the breath. The next banquet came. The petition was made.
A pause, here, for the body
The teaching has a body to it. The weighing soul holds its weighing in the chest and the throat — the long-set tightness of a woman who has been holding a decision in for days, breathing shallowly, swallowing the sentence she has not yet said. Pause now.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put one hand lightly on the base of your throat, where the collarbones meet. Take one slow inhale. Notice the small place where the breath catches just below the hand. On the exhale, let the throat soften by a small amount — not by trying to relax it, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to keep the sentence held in. Take one more slow inhale. On this one, let the exhale move all the way down to the diaphragm. Notice whether the chest releases by a half-inch.
That small softening under your hand is the body’s translation of take breath, and go on afresh. The body that has been holding a costly sentence inside for days has begun to brace at the throat — the throat is where the unspoken sentence lives. The slow exhale through the released throat is the body’s permission to bring the sentence into the room. You are not yet saying the sentence. You are allowing the body to be in the posture from which the sentence can be said. Esther, walking through the corridor toward the inner court, was almost certainly doing this exact small softening — the body’s slow preparation to speak after three days of fasted silence.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built around this kind of slow daily preparing. One short passage each evening. Room for the honest sentence — the one you might not yet be ready to say out loud, but can write on the page, quietly, in your own hand. The woman walking into a such-a-time season needs a journal that will sit with the unspoken sentence for as many evenings as it takes for the sentence to be ready to be said.
The third passage: cast behind fear, sin, and death
“We cast behind fear, sin, and death; / With Thee we seek the things above; / Our inmost souls Thy spirit breathe, / Of power, of calmness, and of love.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it three times.
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the verb cast. The fear is not, in the contemplative-courage tradition Tileston is drawing from, defeated. It is cast behind. The fear remains a thing that exists; it has simply been placed behind the soul rather than in front of her. The soul facing the such-a-time moment does not stop having the fear. The fear is behind her now. The eyes are on the things above. The fear is still there. It is not in the line of sight.
For Esther in the inner court, this is exactly the inner experience the text implies. The fear did not leave when she walked through the doorway. The fear was behind her, present, real, while her eyes were fixed on the king and her trust was fixed on God. We cast behind fear, sin, and death. The casting is an act. It is not a feeling. The feeling of fear may still be present. The act of placing the fear behind her — refusing to let it stand between her eyes and the throne room — is the act of courage. The courage is not the absence of fear. The courage is the deliberate placement of the fear behind the eyes, by a small ongoing act of will that the contemplative tradition calls recollection.
Our inmost souls Thy spirit breathe / Of power, of calmness, and of love. Notice the order. Tileston does not say power, then victory, then triumph. She says power, of calmness, and of love. The power is real, but it arrives in the form of calmness — the calmness that allowed Esther, having entered the throne room, to wait until her second banquet to make her petition. The calmness is the form the power takes. And under the calmness, the deeper thing: love. Esther’s courage was, finally, not for her own honour or her own preservation. It was for her people — her cousin Mordecai, her aunts and uncles in the streets of Susa, the unnamed Jewish households across the empire who would die if she did not speak. The love is the under-current. The calmness is the surface. The power is the spirit’s gift, in that order.
For the modern Christian woman walking into a costly moment, this is the line that gently corrects the energy of the asking. You do not need power to fuel the moment. You need calmness, fuelled by love. The power will be given — in the form of the calmness — at the moment the calmness is needed. Your job is not to summon the power. Your job is to let your inmost soul breathe — the slow exhaled inhalation of a soul that has placed the fear behind her and is, at last, looking up.
What Esther’s courage actually was
What can we learn from Esther in the Bible, taken across the full arc, is not a model of bold disruption. The bold-disruption reading of Esther is a misreading. Esther’s courage was patient. She did not run into the throne room on the morning she received Mordecai’s message; she fasted for three days first. She did not make her petition at the moment the sceptre was extended; she invited the king to a banquet, then to a second banquet, then made her petition. She did not denounce Haman before she had carefully placed him next to the king at her own table. The courage was patient, calibrated, and aware of the cost. The courage was the willingness to walk in combined with the patience to time the asking. Both are part of the such-a-time response.
This is the slow gift the book of Esther offers the modern woman who is facing a costly decision. You do not have to walk into the throne room today. You may need to fast first. You may need to invite to a banquet before you make the petition. You may need to walk three days of unhurried clinging to God before the door is the right time to be approached. The walking, when it comes, is not impulsive. It is the deliberate, patient, fixed-trust walking of a soul who has placed the fear behind her and is doing the costly thing on the timeline the moment actually allows. If I perish, I perish is not a battle cry; it is the smaller, quieter sentence of a woman who has finished her chamber-time and is walking down the corridor with the trust fixed.
(For the sibling slow readings in this contemplative-fathers series, what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus walks Tileston on Mary’s Magnificat — another young woman whose costly yes was preceded by a quiet chamber-time of pondering, and what can we learn from Hannah’s prayer walks Spurgeon on the praying woman whose long-waited petition was made, like Esther’s, in a holy room she had walked into on the courage of fixed trust.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the weighing heart in proximity to the One the trust is fixed on, until the chamber-time has ripened and the corridor to the inner court is ready to be walked.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Tileston’s slow vocabulary — cling simply to God, courage steadfast, cast behind fear, power of calmness and of love — into a daily companion built for the woman whose such-a-time moment is, at last, ready to be named and walked toward.
