By Ryan Myers-Johnson
One of the scriptures that has resonated with me for a long time is Esther 4:11-16. As a younger person there was something romantic and daring in verse 14 of this scripture: “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
There is something of destiny there, putting it all on the line, literally risking it all for a greater purpose and a greater calling. Esther is literally “the chosen one” in this scenario, called to save her people through an act of daring heroism with an uncertain outcome. What’s somewhat overlooked about this scripture, though, is the call to arms has a caveat, that she and her father’s house will die if she doesn’t step into the role she was called to. Her back is against a wall: either step forward with wisdom and face death and take a grand risk or fall back, hope for a different outcome - try to escape or evade the situation - with a foretold but unproven pronouncement that death was certain without brave action.
I ponder this as I think about my lineage, my family and what they had to step into, what they had to risk for me to live, for me to thrive and to be the confident dreamer that I am today. What legacy was made, what endurance occurred in the generations before me and the greater lineage of my family-line to position me as I am now? I think of my mother and my sister that instilled in me tenacity, pride and a firm foundation in the Lord. I think of my Grandmother Rosena, a master seamstress, fashionista, mother of 6 children and owner of her own clothing store in the small but quaint downtown of a rural South Carolina town, which was segregated during some of the time that she ran it. I think of my Great Grandmother Cleo who led children in musical performances, songs and parades, marching through the neighborhood roads on their way to my family’s church.
They were born for their days of struggle. They offered the scepter by standing, by living and by thriving in the face of oppression, and countless pull ups and beat-downs so that I could be here, carrying on their legacy of public spirituality, entrepreneurship balanced with motherhood and the strong impulse to be creative outloud, to make joy, to make memories and hopefully to make systemic change for our little Detroit town.
From the thriving of post civil war to the beat down of reconstruction and Jim Crow, to the flourishing of the Black Arts scene and the Harlem Renaissance to war and renewed legal enforcement of segregation through redlining, through the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power Movement to post racial and Obama to today. I see many revolutions that cycle back to profound oppression. I’ve asked myself why I have to live under the threat of the gun, banishing fears that someone might see my son and nephew as a threat when for existing, why we had to lose family, friends and colleagues to something floating in the air, why I have to contend with fires and wars and then I remember that like my family, like the legacies that came before that I was born for such a time as this, that I am who I am, and my family has been given to me by God who knows the end from the beginning and every hair on our heads.