For Such a Time as This

There are some days when I feel so misplaced.
So much like I don't belong anywhere.
Like when I see a group of older ladies giggling over coffee, who have obviously been friends for a lifetime... and I wonder if I will ever have that.
Or when I see a family playing together at the park.
I wonder if I will ever feel like I truly fit in somewhere again, if there will ever be a place for me where I am truly accepted for who I am, and can be my real, true self. Vulnerable. Open. Honest. And loved anyway.
Sound familiar?
Sometimes I wonder if I was born in the wrong time period.
As a child, I sewed my own clothes just like the ones that Laura wore on Little House on the Prairie, and wore them to school...complete with bonnets and boots (yes, my mother let me go to school this way for 2 years! Can you believe this?) (Her excuse, by the way is, "You were Gifted; we didn't want to get in the way of your creativity." Uh huh. And I had no friends... why, we wonder? HA!)
The 1800's may have been perfect for me.
I also would have made a great hippie. If I had been born just a few years earlier, that would have been GREAT. Long hair, amazing music, absolutely incredible clothes, lots of love... everything except the drugs. Yep. Maybe I should have been born then. Maybe I would have fit in.
Ever feel that way? That you're just in the wrong decade? Century? World?
The thing is...
God has a plan.
Ever read the book of Esther?
Oh if you haven't, I wish you would. Better yet, do Beth Moore's study on Esther with a group of women from your church and really, really get into the story. You'll learn more about yourself and about Esther than you can ever even imagine.
Esther was a beautiful young Jewish girl who was brought to the King when the old Queen pretty much just ticked him off and he'd had enough of her. So he needed a new Queen. And long story short, Esther was it. But someone else was having the Jewish people killed, and Esther had to hide the fact that she was Jewish. Its an intense story, and I find parts of it awfully amusing. Lots of drinking and partying and men huffing about.)
One of my favorite parts is where her uncle tells her in Esther 4:14 "For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?"
Esther was brought to be Queen RIGHT at that time, that perfect time, by God, to save the Jewish people (you're going to have to read the rest of the story on your own to find out.)

You,too, are in the world for such a time as this.
And so am I.
God has a plan for our lives. A perfect plan.
He didn't just accidently put me here to live in 2010 by accident. You either.
I didn't accidenly miss the 1960's even though I feel like I would have fit in better there.
God put me (and you) here,right now, for a purpose. To accomplish HIS plan.
There's a reason you are here. And there's a reason you are here RIGHT NOW.
Maybe you know what it is. Maybe you don't. But there still is one.
Maybe you are meant to save someone. Maybe you are meant to serve the Lord with Gladness as a janitor, a teacher, a mother, a prayer warrior, a nanny. Maybe you are meant to give Glory to God through your artwork, your writing, your prayers, your time. Something. But its something that needs to be done now, in the 21st Century... today.

As the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139:16...
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

God knew before the world began that you would be here today, in 2010. He has a reason for you... for such a time as this.