Allergies - YUCK!

Today finds me sniffling, sneezing, coughing with running eyes and nose!  YUCK!  I am a posterchild for an allergy medication advertisment!  I know I'll get better, but it feels like it's going to be a long week!

On a more positive note - tonight is the potluck at my house where all the ladies who have played the 2nd round of Game On will find out which team won!  Yea!  In reality - we ALL won.  I can't wait to find out how much weight we lost collectively.  I already have my mind made up that I'm going to play round 3.  Why not?  It's doable and it's working. 

My daughters and I are continuing on in our study of Esther.  We have made it through chapter 4.  It is interesting to watch her struggle with her pride, with fear, with denial - and then to see her take a deep breath and place everything in God's hands.  It's easy for us to brush this off - we know how the story turns out.  However, I'm certain it was NOT easy at all for Esther.  Her statement about "if I die, then I die" just about broke my heart.  I don't know if I could have done it.  After all, we already know what a foolish and fickle man the king was!  I'm sure by this time she had realized this character flaw, also.  As much as we like to romanticize about how much he was smitten by her beauty and LOVED her SOOOO much, at this point in the story she had not even seen the king in 30 days.  Can you imaging being married to someone, living in the same house with them, and not seeing or hearing from them in 30 days?  He was not off fighting some war or wandering around to various lands under his rule trying to maintain order.  He was at home - living life day to day and not being bothered about where his Queen was or what she was doing.  I'm sure that he probably had chamberlains who kept him apprised of her comings and goings - but still - you would think that he would like to see her with his own eyes - touch her, talk to her, spend time with her.  Again - what a man! 

In all of this, Esther loved him.  With all of her heart, she loved him.  Only God would come before her husband.  Even after she realized that her people would perish, she did not want to bother her king.  It wasn't until she was made to realize that she, too, would perish and Mordecai chastised her with the fact that God put her as Queen for "such a time as this", that she mustered up the courage and backbone needed to go against the law of her husband and honor the law of her God.  That's really the way it should be.  I believe more women need to learn to love their husbands second only to God.  We need to learn to submit ourselves to them, to love them, encourage them, to obey them.  This is not an easy task.  It is much easier to say this (or to write this in a blog) than to actually act upon this.  But it is what God commands of us.  He is the head over us.  Our husbands should answer only to God.  We must answer to both God and our husbands.  If we are disobedient in this act, then we are violating God's commandment to us.  Is it not true that if we believe in one part of the Bible, then we should believe in EVERY part of the Bible?  We were not given the option to pick and choose which scriptures we wanted to follow.  We were given His Word to follow ALL of it!  Lord, help me to remember this and to instill this in my daughters that they will be found worthy wives.  Worthy of the love of their husbands and of God.