“So, Nehemiah, cupbearer to the king, fought like a Black girl from Brooklyn?” I said out loud as if someone told me the world was flat after all.
I hardly believed that could be true of Nehemiah, but there it was staring at me in Scripture: “ . . . I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair. . . “
My daughter, Kaki, then about ten years old, looked at me the same way she looked at sugar-free cake.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What do you mean?”
That was all the coaxing I needed. After all, this was our “cozy toesies” time and Kaki knew that meant a story was coming. We curled up on the sofa with our toes buried in a warm blanket, opened a Bible app, and listened to a long portion of the Word of God. Our plan was to pay close attention, note anything extraordinary or strange, and talk about it. Talking about it usually meant telling a story.
For years, I have found that comparing a theme in a Bible story to a similar theme in our own lives brings greater recall and clarity to both.
I explained to Kaki that in my elementary school, you could always tell which girls were going to have a fight outside following afternoon dismissal. Fully prepared for the open-fisted slap-beating and hair-pulling that defined “fighting like a girl,” the contenders always arrived at the flagpole with their faces shiny from being slathered in Vaseline and with every hair on their heads tightly plaited to their scalps in neat series of six to eight cornrows. That meant any hand that tried to slap-beat their faces would slide right off and any attempts to pull their hair would end in frustration. It also meant there would be a certain lack of resolve when all was said and done because no one walked away with what they really wanted—satisfaction and peace.
It wasn’t only the odd similarities in settling conflicts that compelled me to share this story with Kaki side-by-side with Nehemiah’s story, but the likeness of the emotion behind it as well.
Like those little girls on a playground in Brooklyn, Nehemiah is good and mad. While he is cupbearer to King Artaxerxes in Persia, Nehemiah gets the king’s permission to leave his post in order to help his Jewish contemporaries rebuild the fallen walls of Jerusalem and to help rebuild the city. For twelve years, Nehemiah is their governor and makes great strides in Jerusalem’s physical recovery as well as the spiritual recovery and well-being of its people.
Sometime after Nehemiah returns to his post in Persia, he learns his cohorts in Jerusalem have fallen back into their sinful behavior. Nehemiah, therefore, returns to Jerusalem, and his reaction to the people’s sin, perhaps in accordance with his royal duty, is to discipline them by beating them and pulling out their hair.
Nehemiah’s co-worker, Ezra, the priest is likewise good and mad about the sinfulness of the people. His reaction, however, is to tear his own clothing and to pull hair from his own head and beard. In accordance with his official position as priest, Ezra personally takes on the sin of the people by punishing himself. What a perfect picture of what our Savior has done for us and a perfect explanation of what was missing in the account of those little girls in their after-school confrontations.
Thank you, Lord, for miraculously connecting the stories, themes, and issues of our lives to those already written in Scripture in a way that showcases your wisdom, relevance, and desire to give us hope and to amaze our kids.
Amen.
