It is August 31st and I have spent the evening wondering through the streets of the beautiful port city of Marseille in the South of France. The sights and sounds are nothing short of magical. Hundreds of boats neatly lined up at the port while holiday makers walk by. I catch my breath as I watch the sunset over the harbour while savouring a delicious French dinner.

There is something else particularly striking to me about this day. Exactly twenty years ago today, Princess Diana died in a car accident right here in France as her speeding car crashed into the wall of a tunnel in Paris while trying to escape a hounding paparazzi. This day has been marked with several documentaries produced by all the major tv channels and news outlets in the world including the BBC and CNN exploring the enduring effect Diana had on the world. I have had a very different documentay playing through my mind.

On the day Diana got married, I was a little girl living in the West African city of Lagos. I did not know exactly who she or Prince Charles were but the wedding was being broadcast live replacing all other tv prigramming for the day and it had an air of magic about it so I watched it

By the time Princess Diana graduated to a global style icon and humanitarian figure, earning the title of “the most phitographed woman in the world”, I was a teenager living in London and studying to be a sciebtist. On the day she died, I watched the news live as a graduate student living in New York City and followed the live coverage of her funersl just as i had her wedding. Strangely enough, I had experienced a premonition of her death just a few wks before. Some years later, I would read about the announcement of Prince Charles’s marriage to Camilla Parker Bowls while I was volunteering towards the care of HIV/AIDS patients in South Africa.

One thing that remains clear about the strong and enduring grief experienced throughout the world in reaction to Diana’s death is that we as human beings are wired for fairytales. In fact, creation began as a fairytale. God created the garden of Eden and it was perfect in everyway. Then He created man and to make him perfect, He created love in the form of a woman. Adam and Eve had it all. All the beauty of a perfect world and the everlasting presence and fellowship of God Himself. But it didn’t last.

I had a fairytale wedding myself. One that was so perfect that I couldn’t have dreamt it up. But like many, I went on to find that the next line does not automatically read “and they lived happily ever after”

Despite our failures and fallen natures that results in so many broken hearts and broken dreams, the intention of God’s heart towards us is to make our lives fairytales. He wired us that way and that is why we love fairytales so much. It is also why we grieve so deeply when it is lost. At the end of the day, all history is God’s story and He is still determined to make a fairytale out of it. He as the ultimate king invites us to join Him in His Story as everlasting princes and princesses.