The in Esther tells us to TELL THE TRUTH

To tell helps us get well.
Jesus encouraged people to tell the truth.

One day Jesus met a woman who wasn’t well at all. Emotionally, she was very ill. She had been divorced by five husbands and was living with a sixth man.

A man could divorce his wife for any reason at all - if she talked to a man outside her family ... or went outside with her hair loosed ... or took her spinning wheel outside her house where it was cooler.

This woman felt so rejected that she went to the well for water at noon, when she wouldnt have to talk to the village people. They looked down on her and called her names.

Then Jesus came. Jesus wouldn’t have had to walk through Samaria, where the woman lived. Most Jews didn’t. Jesus wouldn’t have had to talk to a Samaritan woman. Most Jewish men didn’t. Jesus wouldn’t have had to ask her for a drink. Most Jews would have called her unclean. Jesus didn’t.

Because Jesus cared about this woman, he asked her for a drink. He talked to her because he wanted her to face the truth about her life. He wanted her to face the fact that she wasn’t well. He wanted her to face the past, to admit her hurts. He told her to go get her husband.

The woman said she didn’t have one. Jesus knew her life. He knew about her five husbands and her live-in lover. He told her the whole truth about herself - all of it. He accepted her as she was, and he told her who he was - the Messiah! The woman was so excited she forgot her water jug. She ran off to the village to tell the people she had formerly avoided: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could this be the Christ?”

The woman at the well became well. The healing process began when she faced the truth about her past, knowing that the One who knew her best loved her as she was.

(This story is told in John 4:4-29)