Receive Your Crown

With the Queen’s 90th birthday this year and Kate recently featuring on the cover of Vogue, it’s been hard to miss the Royals.

At the beginning of May, Princess Charlotte celebrated her first birthday and photos were released of this little girl who is usually kept way out of the public eye. Beautifully behaved in her classic outfits and cute hair bows, Charlotte looked every bit the perfect royal baby.

I have a musician friend who played at a service attended by members of the Royal Family last year and he told me that what struck him most was their flawlessness. There was not a hair on their head, or a thread on their clothes, that was out of place.

So is this what makes a princess? Flawless beauty and perfection?

In one of my favourite childhood books, Sara Crew declares that all girls are princesses.

“I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses.”

― Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

This is our truth! We are all princesses, daughters of the Most High God.

Princess Charlotte gets her title from being the daughter of Prince William, a guy who uses his influence to do a lot of good for people and the environment. We get our title from the King who created people and the environment!

Just as Charlotte has done nothing to gain her title but be born, when we are born again as Christians we are born into Royalty. There is no test you have to pass – no pea under the pile of mattresses.

So, back to that Flawless beauty and perfection thing? Yup we get that too. That’s what Jesus did for us on the cross. Anything we feel we have messed up – He knows about it and he died to take the punishment for that.

When we were teenagers my sister and I were huge fans of the Christian dance band The Tribe. My sister had one of their merch t-shirts with the lyric ‘Princess Receive Your Crown’ written over a picture of a tiara. (I was so jealous of that top!!) The whole verse is:

Open up your eyes and focus heaven bound. For what he sees you must believe, Princess receive your crown.

― The Tribe, Hey Girl

So often we reject the title that God gives us. We don’t see ourselves how God sees us and we don’t take what belongs to us. Let’s not grind ourselves into the dust, let’s hold up our heads as princesses.