Tonight I received a tiara. It was an unexpected gift from someone who doesn’t know me well: a secret sister. The girls on my dorm floor at college had been exchanging encouraging notes and gifts anonymously for the past few months. When we finally revealed ourselves, I opened a silvery-white box and pulled out the sparkling gift. I discovered that my secret sister was Amy, a beautiful bright-eyed girl with glasses who lives on the other side of the hall. “For princess Sally,” she said with a big smile. I gave her an equally big hug. “Thank you,” I said. “This holds special meaning for me.”
My name, Sally, means princess. But although my name holds such flattering distinction, I don’t flaunt the privilege, power and prestige my title conveys. I’m not a princess of the overnight Hollywood makeover, or of genuine royal English blood or even of the happily-ever-after fairytales I love to read. I’m special, but I’m not exclusive. I don’t presume to rule anyone, and instead of a castle, I live in a dorm like all of the other college girls.
You see, my tiara doesn’t yet fit.
Hair Dilemma
I ran down the hall to my room to try it on, my first time to ever wear a tiara. After fumbling with it for several minutes, I stood in front of the mirror with messy hair, beaming at the tiara sitting lopsidedly on my head. Well that’s odd, I thought. It doesn’t look right. So I tried again. It took me a few minutes to figure out why it was slipping down over my nose or falling off the back of my head; it didn’t fit.
Thinking it was just clumsy me, I hurried downstairs to get the opinion of my very knowledgeable sister, who lives in the same building.
“They usually put their hair up to wear a tiara,” she said. “But you don’t have enough hair!”
Leave it to a sister to point that out. But it’s true. My hair is quite short after a mad haircut rampage I went on over a school break. “Two inches, please,” I said unflinchingly. Two inches it was, and now when I put my hair up in a ponytail, it gradually slips out in tufts. I thought that if I used clips to pin back all the unruly strands, maybe I could gather enough on the top of my head to hold the tiara in place. But it was to no avail.
Frustrated but undaunted, I sat down at my computer, typed “how to wear a tiara,” and clicked “search.” I scanned the pictures, mostly bridal displays, and sure enough, there it was. It was all in the hair. Perched high on glorious gleaming tresses or winking demurely from a billowing veil, the tiaras were worthy of any princess. I sighed. Granted, 2 inches wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but I was still heartbroken.
The spiritual lesson struck as I laid down my tiara and went back to being a crownless princess. Where would I wear a tiara anyway? Well, that wasn’t the spiritual lesson, but it got me thinking in the right direction!
A Crown of Righteousness
I remembered an object of rare beauty that I’d recently seen in an expensive catalog—the kind of catalog that makes me wonder how they got my mailing address, because I could never afford to buy anything from the company. It was a crown replicated from the convincing prop used at the coronation of Aragorn in the movie The Return of the King. It intrigued me for some time. After looking at it, putting the catalog down for a while and then coming back to it, it occurred to me that buying such a thing would be ridiculous.
I was thinking that I’d have to be very proud to buy a crown, and even prouder still to wear it. It seems to me that it’d be a misrepresentation to crave a crown bought from a catalog, which thousands of “Lord of the Rings” fanatics have claimed, and which, undoubtedly, wouldn’t fit me any better than a party tiara from Claire’s. So I’m holding out for a different crown. Not a plastic pretend crown or a movie-replica crown, but a crown of righteousness.
This crown that I’m waiting for isn’t for sale in expensive catalogs. It isn’t sitting in a museum. And it certainly has nothing to do with my own achievements, like the laurels placed on the heads of ancient Greek athletes.
The crown I wait for is a free gift, given in much the same way my plastic tiara was given tonight—unexpected, unmerited. This crown will fit only a certain kind of princess—one who’s a daughter of Jesus Christ, the King of kings.
None of us deserves such a title. Few people, if any, ever earned their royalty. They were born into it. So how can I say I’m a princess? It’s only because “to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12-13).
That’s why my name means so much to me. It constantly reminds me that, despite the lack of towering hair and glittering jewels, I am a princess. In the classic film Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn plays a princess who secretly leaves her royal duties to wander the streets of Rome as an ordinary tourist. Her responsibilities are too heavy, so she does the simple thing: She goes out and cuts her hair—short. There’s no way that tiara is going to stay in place now! But a day in Rome and a haircut can’t change the fact that she’s a princess.
I’m just like Audrey Hepburn . . . well, sort of. My hair may be short, I might not be wearing a tiara and I might be wandering the streets of New York living an ordinary life, but I’m still a princess! Second Timothy 4:8 says, “Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” And so I wait.
Of course, I’ll wear my Claire’s tiara (even if I have to pin it to my head), if only to play dress-up as every 19-year-old college princess should. But I’ll also be content to know that I’m heir to a crown that’s meant to grace my head alone. This one will fit. And when I see the King, I’ll lay my tiara at His feet.
