My husband and I had only been living in Alaska for three months when I received a phone call that had been my biggest fear ever since I was a little girl.

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It was October 12th. We had just finished the morning announcements at school, and I found out that my dad had just died.

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If you have ever experienced a family emergency while living in Alaska, you know what comes next. Throwing whatever you can into a suitcase, making sure the dog is taken care of, and racing to the airport.

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My mom had also died a few years earlier, so you would have thought grief would have been more straightforward this time around, but it never is. It’s hard, and it’s lonely, and the world keeps spinning. After a few weeks with family, I finally made it back home to Alaska, sad but ready to really begin our new lives here.

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Since I had only been working at a school for about two months when I got the phone call, I hadn’t made a lot of connections with students. I don’t remember the exact details, but after a while, there was one student who started stopping by my office every morning for a quick chat before the bell rang.

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We’ll call her Anna.

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Anna, in all of her 6th-grader glory, was sweet, sassy, and always “spilling the tea” about the latest drama with her friend group. Our interactions never lasted more than about five minutes each morning, but I think I looked forward to that time more than she did.

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One morning in particular, we were talking about how long she had lived in Alaska. She told me she was born here but that her family had just recently moved to town from another part of Alaska. When I asked why her family had moved away from their previous town, she said, “because my dad died.”

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That’s when we realized that we were both in the beginning sentences of the next chapter of our lives. Our dads wouldn’t be a part of the remaining chapters, but I was thankful God had given me the opportunity to be on just a few pages of Anna’s story. I would eventually meet Anna’s mom, get to know her, and share more about my story with her, as well. Anna started coming to see me during the day when she would feel sad, and we’d get to talk about our dads, grief, and where we can find hope.

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If I could, I would do anything and everything possible to take that pain away from Anna. Someone so young experiencing emotions so big and real feels unfair, and there are times when I have felt angry for her. One of the main things we agreed on is that we now know how to comfort others when they are experiencing grief.

Unlike Queen Esther, we probably won’t ever need to advocate for an entire group of people, but we most likely will find ourselves face-to-face with someone just like us, just a few pages behind. And we will have to decide, even in the midst of our grief, if maybe this moment has been a part of our story the whole time.  

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In that moment, if we decide to recognize it, we get a chance to help someone like Anna feel a little less alone.

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So, whatever your “this” is, maybe you were made for such a time. How will you use your influence, your experience, or even your grief, for such a time as this?

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The story of Esther never explicitly mentions God, but He’s there on every page. Just like He is on every page of yours, as well.