The Risk of the Open Door: For the Week You Did Not Choose

The Risk of the Open Door: For the Week You Did Not Choose Preview · Opening of the manuscript The email sits in the inbox with a name you already know. A daughter in the youth group is being squeezed at work for a faith she has not hidden. A family in the second row is one signature away from losing the apartment. This church has a member on the school board, another in human resources, another who still has a key to a room where a quieter person is about to be crushed. Nobody voted for this week.

The door is already there. The question is whether anyone in this room will walk through it while it still costs something.

You can feel the sanctuary reach for a safer sentence. Someone says we should pray. Someone else says we should wait until we have more information. Prayer is not the problem. Delay dressed as wisdom is.

Access looks like a gift until the week asks you to spend it. Pastors know this room. You have sat with people who had a seat at a table and used it for someone who could not get in. You have also sat with people who had a seat and kept it as insulation. Then the week comes for your own congregation, and the old language about "such a time as this" starts to sound like a slogan you print on a mug. Esther will not let you keep the mug.

If you preach Esther 4 as a map of anyone's career moment, you will lie. If you preach it as a Jewish queen in a Persian palace, with a real decree, a real law about uninvited entry, and a cousin who will not let her treat the palace as a hiding place, you give this church a God who can deliver even if she stays silent, and a people who still have to decide whether privilege will be spent.