Good morning…
Sensing the hardened pea of every emotion, I feel like the sensitive-skinned Princess who found her Prince one wet, stormy night. Will you remember with me the childhood story?
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THE PRINCESS ON THE PEA a translation of hans christian andersen’s “prindsessen paa ærten” by jean hersholt
Once there was a Prince who wanted to marry a Princess. Only a real one would do. So he traveled through all the world to find her, and everywhere things went wrong. There were Princesses aplenty, but how was he to know whether they were real Princesses? There was something not quite right about them all. So he came home again and was unhappy, because he did so want to have a real Princess.
One evening a terrible storm blew up. It lightened and thundered and rained. It was really frightful! In the midst of it all came a knocking at the town gate. The old King went to open it.
Who should be standing outside but a Princess, and what a sight she was in all that rain and wind. Water streamed from her hair down her clothes into her shoes, and ran out at the heels. Yet she claimed to be a real Princess.
“We’ll soon find that out,” the old Queen thought to herself. Without saying a word about it she went to the bedchamber, stripped back the bedclothes, and put just one pea in the bottom of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on the pea. Then she took twenty eiderdown feather beds and piled them on the mattresses. Up on top of all these the Princess was to spend the night.
In the morning they asked her, “Did you sleep well?”
“Oh!” said the Princess. “No. I scarcely slept at all. Heaven knows what’s in that bed. I lay on something so hard that I’m black and blue all over. It was simply terrible.”
They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate. So the Prince made haste to marry her, because he knew he had found a real Princess.
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Even when I try to pile high layer upon layer, I can still feel the hard pea of an unresolved emotion. Waking me from sleep, each mass dissolves into my journal as I discern with God the real me. With my inner skin so sensitive, so delicate, I desperately need to marry the Prince of Peace, morning after morning. I lie down and sleep; I wake again because the Lord sustains me (Psalm 3:5, CSB).
…Sue…
