I got my kids looking out for this thing that happens in so many books and movies and

stories that we watch where you're tracking the development of a hero and waiting, a hero

who might be a hero like Queen Esther in the Book of Esther who's got all kinds of talent

and raw skills and character, but it hasn't yet been refined into the skill set of a hero.

They haven't yet made that decision to fully accept the call to heroism and to rise to the task,

where we're at in the end of Esther chapter four is the moment where Esther is finally embracing

this call to action, this call to destiny and rising as the hero she is meant to

be. But to get to this point, she has to go through a very difficult pinch point that we talked

about yesterday and we're going to talk about more in a minute. And that pinch point is what I

have my kids watching out for when we watch shows now. I'm like, hey guys, there's always this moment

where the hero often literally passes through a very tight little spot, a cave or a corridor,

something that they have to squeeze and wriggle through to get out to the other side and

through this perilous journey now there in a position to really see themselves as reborn

as a new person with a new destiny. This is intentional. This imagery is not an accident. It has

been woven into storytelling for a really long time. Sometimes this moment of passage or rebirth

is presented figuratively. The characters stuck between a rock and a hard place. But quite often

it's presented literally as a tight spot that they've got to wriggle their way through. And again,

I'm not trying to be gross, but I mean, the tight spot is a metaphor for the birth canal. It's a

metaphor for being born a new as a new thing. So now whenever that happens in a movie, my kids start

calling it out. I took my boy to go see some ridiculous Kylo Ren, what's the guy's name? Adam Driver

film where he goes to ancient earth or something like that. And there's a sequence right in there

where they get stuck in a cave and he's got to find a way to crawl through this tight little spot

...