This past weekend the world paused its activities to witness the much anticipated wedding of Lady Diana’s son, Prince Harry to Meghan Markle.  It was a wedding truly fit for royalty and worthy of all the pomp and circumstance associated with any royal wedding.  Many in the West stayed up all night to catch the early morning live broadcast while others opted for the later reruns.  I confess that I’ve now watched it twice!  It was truly the stuff that Hollywood fairy tale movies are made of.

What is our fascination with an event like this, one which brings out only the A-List celebrities, and one most of us will never experience, that keeps us glued to our monitors so we don’t miss a second of it?  Why do we become emotional when a Prince gets married?  Granted, this was no usual royal event; the groom was the son of one of the most beloved figures of all time, Lady Diana. She was there in every element.  A seat was left vacant for her; the flowers in the wedding bouquet were hand-picked from her garden, and the jewels in the bride’s wedding ring came from Diana’s rings.  Yet even putting all of that aside, there was and always is an enormous interest in royal weddings.  And this one was no exception.

I believe there exists within all of us the dream of finding that someone we never thought we might end up with, that person we feel completely unworthy of, the commoner weds the prince or princess.  This past weekend’s event was not about England-it wasn’t about royalty-it wasn’t even about the breakaway from tradition that was in full display for all to see.  It was about one thing-LOVE!  It represented all that is good about love-redemption, hope, restoration, and above all, second chances.  It was the embodiment of the Cinderella story-the girl with no royal blood line or lineage, the girl who has already been married and divorced, the single mother of the bride, a black woman, sitting directly across from the Queen herself, watching her tainted daughter become the Princess of Sussex!  All that was not supposed to happen, happened-all of the baggage that would have normally discredited her as a fit bride for a prince was disregarded and the world watched as she literally married her Prince Charming and became the daughter-in-law of the late Lady Diana!  Talk about fairy tale endings!  That’s what captivated us.

Those who have found their perfect partner and managed to successfully maintain lasting relationships are truly blessed and understand the significance of love united.  Those who have never been so fortunate continue to dream and aspire to find their own royal ending and perfect romance.   And those of us who have tasted of it and lost it, desire it even more, like chasing that euphoric high once again.  Even people who have been severely wounded by love gone bad who have scars from past failures, are willing to risk emotional pain after a broken heart and become vulnerable enough to allow love back into their lives and continue the search for their own fairy tale ending.  It is a search that never ends-the lucky and blessed are the ones who eventually find it-the most pitiful people on earth are the ones for whom love eludes them and they die alone.

We are driven by love!  The most popular movies are love stories; the greatest songs of all time are love songs.  Even the hymns of old evolve around the central theme of amazing and unexplainable love.  “Amazing love, how can it be, that you, my King, would die for me?”  The heart has an amazing capacity for love, and we all want in on it, even vicariously by witnessing a royal wedding.  It’s a story that dates back to Old Testament times to Ruth, the commoner, finding Boaz, the Prince.  There should be little surprise that the story continues to fascinate us-we in our imaginations insert ourselves into the roles of the prince and princess, longing for the time when, at some level, we too feel like unworthy and yet newly crowned royalty, just because of the restorative power of love.  We long for the day when that certain someone looks upon us, sees all of our past mistakes, our trails of destruction, our faults and failures, and yet deems us worthy of their love for a lifetime. And even when it comes for many of us, we will still be fascinated and captivated in seeing it played out in others as they too find love’s royalty.  This is the kind of love by which God accepts us!  It is a love that is unconditional-it is immeasurable-it is unlimited and it has no expiration date!

It’s real, it’s out there and we are all worthy of it!  Never discount your fascination with watching something so surreal as a royal wedding.  You may not leave the church in a horse drawn carriage with a royal escort, but your happily-ever after ending can come true.  If we all didn’t really believe that, what a miserable existence it would be!