Growing up, I didn’t know I was a princess. I was 21 years old before I discovered the truth – I am a member of the royal family.All those long years, I felt unloved and unwanted which severely affected my self-esteem. I entered adulthood with skewed perceptions: believing I wasn’t anyone special – just one of the middle children in a poor, rural family. Part of a nondescript amalgamation forged in the crucible of a young woman’s unwanted pregnancy that dissipated in a bad divorce when I was eleven years old.
The new “moms” and “dads” the years brought into my life (and there were several)—they didn’t know I was a princess either. They couldn’t have, or they would have treated me differently, I’m sure. If they’d only known a King’s daughter was in their care, perhaps a different story might have played out.
My age has more than doubled since the fateful day of my discovery. I write of the event on the evening of my 43rd birthday – a happy day spent with my husband, children and friends, concluded around a laughter-filled table with a cupcake-shaped balloon floating over my head. Sitting in the restaurant, my thoughts wondered back to earlier times.
Even though I hadn’t known Him yet, I realized the King had always watched over me. He saw my times of loneliness. He watched when I suffered disappointments and pain. He knew my desperation and observed my fearful flailing when I was a young child drowning – suffocating beneath lake waters before strong hands pulled me from certain death. And then the frantic splashing and beating against life itself as I grew up and began drowning in seas of different sorts.
But all that changed one fall day in 1987.
I always loved my Daddy. We didn’t spend a lot of time together, he often hid out in his workshop and wore its fragrance of sawdust and oil. Bobby Eudell was a good, kind man joined with my mother to bring a new life into the world. March 6 I was born a member of the Yates family, but when I was 21, I discovered my Father, the One who gave me life, was the King of all.
And He wanted me. He still does. Really. He says my life has value and purpose…and not just in the things I do for Him…but because I am His.
Even after learning I was a princess, I still fought the feelings I’d grown up with: undesired and undesirable. A lifetime of programming refused to give way to a new paradigm without time and adjustment. Twenty-two years later, I give thanks to God for gently aligning my malformed thought life to my life’s reality. He took what was (the past that shaped me) and changed it into what is (my present and future with Him).
The seasons and events of my youth are still part of who I am – a backdrop providing high contrast to the joy God has given me in recent years. I liken my past to a black velvet display in a jeweler’s showroom that highlights the brilliance of dazzling gemstones. Diamonds that formed beneath the soil, were mined, polished and shaped, then set and displayed. A diamond's many different facets, created by the pressure of the earth upon dark coal, remind me of how God uses our different life situations to create planes in our lives that reflect new qualities revealed or learned through the living of each experience.
One family night, my kids borrowed a DVD from the library. We plugged into our TV Guardian-filtered player and watched “Princess Diaries” – a cute movie for the most part. The heroin lifted from an obscure nerdiness transformed over time into a beautiful, competent ruler. Under the tutelage of the queen, awkwardness gave way to elegance. Indecisiveness yielded to bold decision-making birthed in compassion and the realization that her position provided the opportunity for her to make a difference in the lives of those in her realm. Beyond learning she was a princess, she learned to be a princess, living out her calling to her kingdom for her time and purpose.
If the Lord should mercifully give me another 22 years on this earth, I pray I will be kingdom-minded as well, living out in my time His purpose for my life. On a deeper level, I desire to see my focus shift from serving Him to simply being His. It’s the result of an intimate relationship that brings true fruitfulness and new life.
I am a princess. I am His.
