No sooner did I liken Serena Williams to Queen Esther for her possible future role of exposing the evildoers, then someone said: “Um, she’s not exactly Queen Esther, you know. Didn’t she appear bare-naked, unmarried, and pregnant on that Vanity Fair cover? And you know that birth is not like the one of Mary.”

Well, I actually hadn’t thought of that, if I ever even knew it in the first place. Still, it changes nothing. She openly acknowledges that she likes the faith but has not practiced it. Now she means to. Is it a bad thing that she has, in the past, called herself a Jehovah’s Witness?

I think not. People love celebrities and will usually concede that they live in a world of their own, facing unique pressures. For better or for worse, nobody makes a big deal of sex before marriage anymore. I don’t even think the news writer of the article that her child won’t do birthdays thought to mention it, or maybe she did and it didn’t register with me. That people do not make a big deal of it is ‘for worse,’ usually, because the Word says that they should, but in this case, it is ‘for better.’

Totally without evidence, based only upon a feel for the way people are, I think that many of her most vocal critics on this front are ones who dislike Jehovah’s Witnesses, who spot the disparity of past conduct and want to slam us with it. Few others care.

Has she lived up to the faith in the past? She says very openly that she has not. Now she reaches a point where she says she will. I think it is a very good thing. Okay, okay, so she is no Queen Esther. Queen Esther did not play tennis. Call Serena the Samaritan woman by the well if you like, a woman who also fell short of the mark, yet became a powerful witness for the Lord.

Do we have a woman who is a mixed bag, having done things both fine and unfine, and who now wants to make them all fine? I’ll take it every time. It is in the spirit of Jesus, I think, who came to save persons ill who had become aware of their spiritual need. She will straighten out all those things before baptism, of course, should she continue on the path she now says she wants to pursue more single-mindedly. Love hopes all things and believes all things. Sometimes it is shown up as wrong in a given case. But it keeps on hoping and believing.

Moreover, to go back to the point of a prior chapter, this Reddit group has done Witnesses huge mischief. The Philly reporter used it as his source to write four incendiary anti-JW articles in a row to damn them in a seeming scandal, but omitting the context that illuminates it.

This group is trying with all its might to equate Jehovah’s Witnesses with the sins of the Catholic church. It is a stretch, because abusers in the Church are clergy. Even after making adjustments for size, if you want to get the same ‘catch’ among Jehovah’s Witnesses, you must broaden your net to include, not just ‘clergy,’ but everybody. That doesn’t mean that some are not diligently trying to do it, as they strive to equate some non-reporting to authorities in previous years to being actual perpetrators of child abuse. They are up to no good, and the alleged sin in such cases is generally “failing to go beyond the law” in reporting such cases to police. I continually make the point that if it is so crucial to ‘go beyond the law’ then that should become the law, the same point that Geoffrey Jackson, a member of the Witnesses’ Governing Body, made to a recent inquiry.

If Serena was to prompt her husband, the Reddit founder, to weigh in on that group in our favor and expose them for what they are—renegades from religion who longed for greater immediate freedom with lesser immediate consequences and who nurse no end of complaints, most quite petty, but some with substance—she would be forgiven ‘a multitude of sins,’ even if she never did manage to get it all together in her own life as she seems to want to do. In fact, in the event of that outcome, and to bring matters full circle, that would be an example of something else Mordecai said to his niece. If salvation does not come through spotless Esther, it will come through some other source. Either way, I’ll take it, say ‘Thank you’ to the Lord, and look around for more ammunition.

See Doesn't Do Birthdays. Part 3

From the book TrueTom vs the Apostates!