The Grit Scale Has No Line for Mordecai

I suspect that most of us know roughly how much of whatever it takes we have in us, and we suspect it is less than the people you admire have. So when something hard arrives, the first thing we do is check the number. Do I have enough in me for this. The answer usually comes back with some form of “I don’t know”, and then we either force it or quit quietly and call it wisdom.

West Point dug into this in the last few years.

A cohort of 1,086 cadets arrived in the summer of 2018. In March of 2020 the pandemic reached them, and the class of 2022 spent more than half of its four years under pandemic restrictions: cancelled or altered training, limits on visitors, and restrictions on leave. Elizabeth Wetzler and her colleagues had grit scores taken in the first three days those cadets ever spent there, before any of it. They wanted to know what predicted who would still be standing at graduation.

A cadet one standard deviation above the mean had roughly one and a half times the odds of graduating. Physical fitness fared slightly better than that. The entrance examination scores, the numbers that got them in the door, predicted nothing.

Inside their study is a note that sums up some of this. The whole model accounted for about 8.6 percent of the variance. Grit, fitness, and cognitive ability together, eight and a half percent. The authors say plainly that things they did not measure may have mattered more than the things they did. Much of what separated graduation from departure was not captured by this model.¹

So let’s look at how “grit” is measured. The scale is eight items. Setbacks don’t discourage me. I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one. I, me, my. You rate yourself one to five and the average is your score. There is no line on that scale for the roommate who got you out of bed. No box for your mother on the phone at eleven at night. The authors note that concerns about the limited effects of grit interventions make broader approaches to fitness and resilience worth considering. That is what you would expect if we have spent years trying to install in one person something that was never sitting there alone.

I want us to think about where the other ninety percent lives.

Which brings us to a chapter in a book that never once mentions God.

Esther 4 opens with a man in the street making a scene. Mordecai tears his clothes, puts ashes in his hair, and cries out with a great and bitter cry. He climbs to the king’s gate and stops, because verse 2 says no one enters the gate dressed like that. The empire has a dress code for grief. You may be as broken as you want out here. You may not bring it in there.

Then verse 3: the decree reaches every province, and there is great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting. The text gives us no organizer, no recorded summons, and no strategy meeting—only a people on the ground together before a plan emerges.

Meanwhile the safest person in the empire is the last to hear that her people are being killed. Esther does not get a report. She gets gossip. Her staff tells her a man out at the gate is carrying on, and she is undone by it before she has a single fact. The verb can evoke writhing or labor-like anguish. She felt it in her body before she understood it in her head.

So she sends him clothes. She sees somebody she loves standing in rags and she wants to cover him. Anyone would. But look at what it accomplishes. It makes the grief presentable. It solves the only part of the problem she can see from where she is standing.

He will not take them.

Then the wall. Verse 11, anyone entering the inner court uncalled dies unless the king extends the golden scepter, and he has not sent for her in thirty days. Every fact she states is correct. I do not think Esther is simply disobeying Mordecai here; she is arguing the impossibility of compliance.² Her knowledge is accurate and her knowledge is a wall.

Look at what her heart is resting on. Not a lie. A guarantee. We keep waiting to be sure before we move. We want the outcome before we will spend anything, and while we wait we call the delay prudence. That is asking certainty to do the work God is supposed to do. Certainty is a poor savior. It does not come when you send for it, and it charges you for the wait.

Mordecai does not give Esther certainty. He says deliverance and relief will arise for the Jews from another place, then asks, “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Bauckham says Mordecai’s “who knows” is not skepticism, but neither does it have the confidence of prophecy. It is a hopeful working hypothesis.³ Joel says it. Jonah’s king says it. David says it over a dying child. God gives a command and a who knows, and He calls the space in between faith.

Then verse 16. Before she takes one step toward that inner court, Esther does something extraordinarily brave: she goes and gets everybody else. Gather all the Jews in Susa. Fast on my behalf, three days, night and day, no food and no water. The Hebrew asks them to fast “for me” or “on my behalf.” Yet Esther immediately adds that she and her attendants will fast too: the community intercedes for her, and she joins them in costly dependence. She has the crown. They have nothing. She asks them to hold her up. In several biblical accounts, fasting lasts until evening, after which people eat. Esther’s three days without food or water are another thing entirely.⁴ And not one of them will be in the room. They will not see whether the scepter comes out. They will go three days without water in the dark and then go on with their week, and the text never says anybody sent them word.

Esther did not find her courage. It was carried to her by people with less power than she had, and the God this book refuses to name was holding every one of them.

Now look at where she was walking. Toward a throne where the standing law was death, hoping a scepter might be extended. She had three days of hunger and a maybe.

We have been given more than Esther had. Hebrews 10.19-20 says there is a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, and Hebrews 4.16 tells us to come to that throne with confidence. The scepter is not a maybe. It was extended before you knew to ask for it. Esther went not knowing. Jesus went knowing, and He went for people who were not in the room.

So the question was never whether you have enough grit. You do not. Neither did she.

You were never asked to generate the courage. You were asked to walk toward a throne where the scepter is already out.

~PW 🌮🛶

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• Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
• Credé, Marcus, Michael C. Tynan, and Peter D. Harms. “Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (2017): 492–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102.
• Duckworth, Angela L., and Patrick D. Quinn. “Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S).” Journal of Personality Assessment 91, no. 2 (2009): 166-174.
• Firth, David G. The Message of Esther: God Present but Unseen. The Bible Speaks Today. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010.
• Fox, Michael V. Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
• Smith-Christopher, Daniel L. “Fasting.” In Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 456. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
• Tomasino, Anthony J. Esther. Evangelical Exegetical Commentary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016.
• Wetzler, Elizabeth L., Andrew G. Farina, Jeremiah Powers, and Michael D. Matthews. “Grit and Uncertainty: Grit Predicts Performance and West Point Graduation During Pandemic Conditions.” Military Psychology 36, no. 5 (2024): 536–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/08995605.2023.2222631.

1. Wetzler et al., “Grit and Uncertainty,” 541-542. Nagelkerke’s R-squared for the logistic regression predicting graduation status was .086. The authors put it this way: “the model in the current study only accounted for a modest amount of variance, at approximately 8.6%, which suggests that variables unaccounted for may have played more important roles than any of the three variables included in this study.” ↩︎
2. The phrase is Michael Fox’s. Firth quotes it at 4.11: Esther “does not disobey Mordecai, but she does ‘argue the impossibility of compliance.'” See Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 61. Anthony Tomasino reads verse 11 the other way, as a rebuff, with Esther unwilling to risk her life for what Mordecai has asked. See Tomasino, Esther, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016), on 4.11. I am taking Fox’s reading. ↩︎
3. Richard Bauckham, quoted in David G. Firth, The Message of Esther: God Present but Unseen, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), on 4.14. Firth gives it in full: “Mordecai does not mean that if Esther does not do something, God will. He means that deliverance for the Jews will occur somehow, whether through Esther’s actions or some other means. His ‘who knows whether …?’ is not scepticism, but nor has it the confidence of prophecy. It is a hopeful working hypothesis.” ↩︎
4. Ordinary fasts ran from morning until evening, after which people ate. See Judges 20.26 and 2 Samuel 1.12, and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, “Fasting,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 456. Esther calls for a continuous fast, night and day, and without water. ↩︎