COVENANT HEARTS: BIBLICAL LOVE STORIES REIMAGINED: THE ROMANCE OF PURPOSE: ESTHER AND KING

She had two names. Only one of them was safe to speak. Hadassah is a Jewish girl living in exile in the Persian city of Susa, raised by her faithful cousin Mordecai after the death of her parents. When King Ahasuerus searches for a new queen, Mordecai brings her to the palace gate with a charge she will carry for years: do not reveal your people or your kindred. Not yet. She enters the palace as Esther. She carries Hadassah inside. Through twelve months of preparation in the house of women, through the night the king sees her and extends the golden scepter and sets the royal crown on her head, through the years of a marriage built on love and concealment - she is learning what it means to hold the truth of who she is until the moment requires it to be spoken. When Haman the Agagite arranges the annihilation of her entire people, that moment arrives. The law of Persia is clear: anyone who approaches the king uninvited is put to death-unless the king extends the golden scepter. He has not sent for her in thirty days. And Mordecai's words will not leave her: who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Three days of fasting. Three days of prayer. Three days of reckoning with the possibility of her own death-and the decision that can only be made from the inside of it. If I perish, I perish. The Romance of Purpose is the story of a love that was formed in concealment and proven in crisis, of a people preserved by the courage of one woman who had been placed-by the hidden hand of a God whose name does not appear in her story but whose fingerprints are on every page of it-in exactly the right position at exactly the right moment. It is also the story of every believer who has ever wondered what they were made for. The answer, it turns out, is the same. The scepter is always extended.