Esther was a real woman!

 So did you know that Esther (named Hadassah) was an orphan?  I mean I guess I knew that but I never really thought about all it implied.  What would it have been like to grow up without a mother to teach you and comfort you and model for you feminine strength?  What would it feel like to not have a father to joy in her beauty and teach her about her value as a girl.   And what was it like to be raised by her older male cousin.  Now there is something to chew on.  We don't even know if her cousin Mordecai was married.  We just know he raised her and she became an amazing woman of confident, humble, beauty that drew other people to her without demanding anything.   
How many of us feel orphaned in this life?  Maybe our mother wasn't all we needed her to be.  Maybe she modeled more for us of what not to than anything.  Maybe we struggle even today to know what a real woman truly is.  What is beauty and what makes us feminine?  We live in a world that demands a lot from a woman.  We feel pressured to walk right and look right and fit into a very narrow box.  However, God created us in his image.  Woman wasn’t created last (in the order of creation) as an afterthought of God but as his crown of beauty.  And when it was finished God said “it is good”.  What magnificent words to let sink into our soul.  In God’s eyes we are good!

We are his finishing touch and have a vital role to play.  We offer our beauty and image of God to the world in different ways.  It comes through our smile, through a loving touch, through words of encouragement and our ability to be vulnerable.  These are all ways we leave a feminine fingerprint of God on the world every day.  We offer life and fresh air to people around us and we add our 50% to the picture God gave us when he created man and woman both in his image.  There are things unique about God that only women can show the world. 

The truth is that we are women because God created us that way.  That is what makes us a woman.  It’s not about how we walk or talk or look.  Esther was a woman through and through and she rose from an orphaned girl to a Queen by putting her worth and value in her God.  She rescued the entire Jewish nation by doing something only a woman could have done.