The first morning I sent Deborah to playgroup, she was only two years old.

I walked her right up to the childcare centre's door, and there I had to stop. That was as far as I was allowed to go, and no further. It was the right rule — but standing there, it did not feel like a rule. It felt like a wall. Here is my little girl, barely two years old (premmie), and she's walking into a room full of noise and strangers and a whole small world I suddenly had no say over. I could not follow her in. I could not protect her. I could only stand on the other side of that door and watch her go in crying and howling.

I am not sure I have ever felt so much love and so much helplessness in the same breath.

I have been thinking about that morning again this week, as I read an article from Salt&Light about the Seniors Ministry Leaders' Forum. And I noticed that as I mediate on the Book of Esther from Ps Eugene Seow's perspective, there is a small detail in the book of Esther that I keep coming back to — and it is that same ache, written into Scripture long before I ever stood outside a playgroup door.

When Esther was taken into the palace, the man who raised her could no longer reach her. Mordecai was not her father by blood; he was the relative who had taken her in as his own daughter when she had no one else. And now the girl he had raised had disappeared behind palace walls he was not permitted to enter.

So he did the only thing left to him. Every single day he walked back and forth near the courtyard, just to learn how she was and what was happening to her (Esther 2:11).

No speech. No grand gesture. Just an old man pacing outside a wall he cannot cross, day after day, because he cannot stop caring about someone he can no longer protect.

I find it intriguing that this is where Esther's story really begins. Not with her courage, but with Mordecai's faithfulness. Before she is a heroine, she is someone who was loved well — by someone who stayed close when staying close cost him something.

We tend to remember the bolder scenes in Esther, don't we? The decree goes out; a whole people are marked for death. Esther alone might plead for them before the king — but to enter his presence uninvited could cost her life. And it is Mordecai, again, who says the hard thing: who knows, he tells her, whether she has come to her position "for such a time as this" (Esther 4:14).

The girl who once simply obeyed him then answers with a faith all her own: "If I perish, I perish" (Esther 4:16).

That's awesome. But here is the line I think we read past most often. Right after Esther sends back her instructions for how the people should prepare, the narrator tells us, casually, almost in passing, that "Mordecai did everything Esther had told him" (Esther 4:17).

Read that again. Until this point in the book of Esther, authority has run one direction. He raised her, he guided her, he gave the instructions and she followed, right? Even after she became queen, she still honored him as she had when she was a child under his care (Esther 2:20).

And now, in a single sentence, it turns. The one who raised her takes his instructions from her.

He does not cling to being the one in charge. The moment she rises into her calling, he steps in behind her.

Moriah has been reflecting together as a church on what is "intergenerational" — that beautiful picture of an older generation and a younger one bound together, serving the same God, believing the same promises. Ps Eugene Seow calls it the "Mordecai and Esther generational model". And I have come to think this quiet verse is the hinge of the whole thing.

Because the goal of Mordecai's years of guidance was never to keep Esther small, or to keep her dependent on him. It was to get her ready. The fruit of healthy spiritual fathering and mothering is not a next generation that needs us forever; it is a next generation that can be trusted to lead — and an older generation humble enough to follow them when the moment comes.

Oh, but that is harder than it sounds. It is far easier to keep our hands on the wheel, to mistake our experience for permanent authority, to confuse raising someone with owning their future! But Mordecai shows us another way: pour in everything you have, and then, when God calls them forward, step aside and serve.

And look where it leads. By the end of the book, the two of them are no longer simply surviving the crisis side by side. They are writing the future together — they are establishing the feast of Purim "with full authority," a celebration for generations not yet born (Esther 9:29–32). The older and the younger, the one who handed off and the one who stepped up, building something that would outlast them both.

I know that playgroup door was only the first of many I will not be able to follow Deborah through. There will be bigger doors, and harder ones — rooms where I cannot just stand outside, peep through the windows and keep watch. And Esther has been quietly teaching me what my job becomes when that day comes. Not to hold her back at the threshold. Not to keep my hands on the wheel for fear of what waits on the other side. But to spend these years pouring in everything I have — and then, when God calls her forward, to have the grace to step in behind her.

That, to me, is the beauty of generations serving together. It begins with someone faithful enough to pace outside the courtyard for us — and it asks of us, when it is finally our turn, the courage to walk into the room.

I don't know which one you are today. Maybe you are the one watching and praying, sneaking a glimpse through the window for that someone who has gone somewhere you cannot follow. Maybe you are the one standing at a door you are afraid to walk through.

Either way, the same God who positioned Esther "for such a time as this" is still arranging his people — older and younger, hand in hand — for purposes far bigger than any single generation can see.

May we have the faithfulness to pace, and the courage to enter!

— Pastor Daniel Gan