Already Here

There is a version of Esther’s story I was told in Sunday school, and there is the version that’s actually in the text. They are almost entirely different stories.

The Sunday school version had flannel graphs. There was Esther, young and beautiful, chosen by the king from among all the women in the land because of her exceptional loveliness. There were jewels and fine robes and a year of beauty treatments — and yes, this is technically in the text, but the way it was presented to us as children, it sounded almost aspirational. Like a makeover montage. Like something you’d want.

What the flannel graphs did not show us was that Esther was approximately twelve years old when she was taken. That she was removed from her home by force. That the year of “beauty treatments” was a grooming process in a harem — a place where young women were prepared to spend a single night with the king and then live out the rest of their days in another wing of the palace, largely forgotten, unless the king remembered to call for you again. Which he mostly wouldn’t.

What the flannel graphs did not show us was that Esther was a victim of sex trafficking.

I want to say that plainly, without softening it, because the softening is exactly the problem. When we sanitise Esther’s story — when we skip over the abduction and the abuse and the years of living in a king’s possession without consent, and jump straight to her courage in the throne room — we do several things at once, all of them harmful. 

We tell survivors that what happened to them is just backstory. We suggest that suffering is only meaningful when it produces a tidy result. And we train ourselves to see oppression and call it providence.

God’s perfect timing did not put Esther in that palace.

Trauma did. Conquest did. The systematic violation of a young girl’s body and freedom did. And to dress that up as divine choreography is not theology — it’s cruelty with a scripture reference.

And yet. Here is where the story becomes genuinely interesting — not because suffering produced something useful, but because a human being remained a human being inside of it.

Esther was where she was. She had what she had. She was who she was — a woman who had survived things she didn’t choose and developed, in that survival, a particular kind of presence. Not a triumphant presence. Not a healed presence. Just a human one, intact enough to act when the moment called for it.

And when the moment came, she showed up. Not because the suffering had prepared her for it, not because it had all been leading somewhere, not because God had a plan that required her to endure what she endured. But because she was there. And she was still, somehow, herself.

The courage in the throne room was real. But it was one moment in a life that contained years of other moments — the years before, the years of captivity, and all the years after that nobody recorded. The victory didn’t close the wound. Esther still had herself to come home to. Still had the young girl who was taken to sit with, to grieve, to nurture. The bravery was not the resolution. It was just one expression of a person who never entirely stopped being present to herself, even when everything in her circumstances demanded otherwise.

That is very different from the version where it all made sense in the end.
This version says: you do not have to justify your suffering before you’re allowed to act from it. And acting from it doesn’t mean the suffering was worth it. It just means you were there. And you were still you.

Francis Weller, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes that

“what we can do is work to maintain our adult presence, keeping it anchored and firmly rooted.”

Not controlling circumstances. Not manufacturing outcomes. Just presence. Rooted. Available. Refusing to be entirely consumed by what has happened to you.

That is what Esther did.

Not transcend her trauma. Not make the best of it. Not turn it into something that justified what was done to her.

She just remained. As herself. In it. And from that remaining, she acted.

TRUTH-TELL: What’s the sanitised version of your own story — the one that skips the hard parts to get to the meaning faster? What would it mean to tell it whole, without the interpretive spin, without the tidy ending? Not to someone else necessarily. Just to yourself.

L xo