"What honor and recognition has Mordecai received for this?" the king asked. "Nothing has been done for him," his attendants answered. – Esther 6:3

Today's Scripture Reading (November 2, 2023): Esther 6

Young Adult author and an important LGBTQ author, David Levithan, in his novel "Every Day" writes, "It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored." I know Levithan is talking about the LGBTQ community, and he is probably right. Still, it is not a feeling restricted to a particular group of people living in our society. There are a lot of us who "feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored." It might be the prevalent emotion of most people living in our contemporary society. We know that we are visible, yet we are completely ignored, or even worse, we feel we have been discarded by the more prominent and influential portion of the culture. Many people think they live each day like modern lepers; they live and walk in neighborhoods, but nobody cares that they are there. Instead, they pass through life figuratively calling out "unclean, unclean."

As an adult, there is a girl I wish I could sit down with for a while. Her name was Lila (her real name; I won't publish her last name, although I know it well, even though I haven't seen Lila for over fifty years). Lila became the leper of my elementary school. To say that the kids were cruel to Lila is a severe understatement. Even as an elementary student, I understood how the kids treated Lila was wrong. She was teased, taunted, and left utterly alone by the kids in the schoolyard for the sin of being awkward. And I and the kids I hung around with also kept our distance. Maybe we were just thankful that it was Lila and not us.

I know Lila well, yet I can't think of one time I had a conversation with her. I can't think of one time that I even smiled at her with a casual "Hello" and the mention of her name. I saw her, and I ignored her. And as an adult, it is my non-action by which I am haunted. I wish I could sit down with her and just say "sorry" and tell her how much I wish we could have been friends. But that chance passed me by more than half a century ago.

Mordecai is "painfully visible, and entirely ignored." He is visible for a couple of reasons. First, he is a Jew in a culture where parts of the society wanted not just him but his race exterminated. Second, he has done a significant service for the King, but the first factor seems to have overridden the second. Anyone else would have received an honor from the King, but it must have seemed to Mordecai that the fact that he was a Jew meant that there would be no honor coming his way.

That is until the King has an episode of insomnia and decides to review the records of his recent reign. In those records, he again sees Mordecai, but this time, he refuses to ignore this hero.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Esther 7