Some graduate from the school of adversity with flying colors; others do not.
A drunken king demanded his beautiful wife to sashay amongst his merry-making cronies during a royal palace party. The queen’s refusal outraged her husband and all the men at his side. If Vashti’s “no” slipped by unpunished, all women might perceive disrespect as the new norm allowed in marriage.
Queen Vashti was banished from the presence of her husband forever. Where she took flight is left to the reader’s imagination. Nary another word is heard from the demoted queen. A beautiful woman named Esther replaced her. God made beautiful what men devised as evil. He always does.
Relationships get messy. Some learn to work through their differences. Others resort to alternate solutions: give in or give up, fight or flight. And some wind up like Vashti—off the radar and never heard from again.
Curiosity leads me to conclude various endings for the woman who left her crown at the castle’s door on the day of her banishment. Maybe she found someone else to love her and sit on an ash heap with her, weeping until the day of her death. Perhaps she was pitied or ridiculed.
My own experience with rejection helps me relate to Vashti. Sitting at the back of a “Single Again” class, I saw male and female Vashtis. Rejection wears many faces. Divorce takes place in relationships other than marriage. Parents and children, siblings, best friends, business partners, neighbors. Rifts, divisions, and exclusions all amount to pain—arrows to the heart.
Colossians 2:10 states, In Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority. Only Christ can make us complete. Another person brings happiness, wisdom, guidance, and a plethora of emotions to a relationship. But no person can be expected to fulfill every longing. Such demand is costly, painful, and generally winds up in the kingdom of Vashtis.
For all the Vashtis banished from a relationship, only God’s love will complete you, enable you to stand, bring hope to your heart, and comfort you through the fiercest of storms.
Everything we need—hope, strength, and love, lies in Christ. He is enough.
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Amen! Thanks for your encouraging devotion, Dawn.