Royal and Real - Lessons from the Life of Queen Elizabeth II

So y'all, we all know that Queen Elizabeth II has passed away, and I might have a little thing or two to say about that. Hi, my name is Chrystal Hurst, and I'm here every week-ish talking about things that I think will help you to live your life well. And today I want to talk a little bit about Queen Queen Elizabeth II and what we can learn from her life. But first, you need to know that this video happened early in the morning, me hanging out with my inner circle, having coffee and tea and talking about all the things. And I would love for you to check out the inner circle. You can do that by going to chrystalhurst.com/innercircle. And if you're here for the first time, or if you're here for the 10th time, and if you haven't yet subscribed to the YouTube channel or hit that like button or follow me on on Facebook, then I want you to do that right now so you won't miss anything that we have to share with you. The other thing I want you to know is that every single time I put content on YouTube, that content also becomes a podcast. So if you ever feel like, "I can't watch Chrystal today, but I can listen," you know, go on over to thechrystalevanshurst.com, click that podcast button and listen in. I'd be glad to meet you over there as well. There's one other little thing that I want to make sure you know about. I just released a new YouVersion study on YouTube. It is called How to Find Your Destiny, and if you just search for my name, Chrystal Hurst, you'll find that there. All right, y'all, let's get into this whole situation with Elizabeth II. There's a Washington Post article, it's entitled Queen Elizabeth II Did Her Job. The subtitle says, what made her extraordinary was not who she was but what she gave. She became the queen before many of us were born, before many of our mothers were born, before many of our Grandmothers were born a fixed point on a spinning axis. Whether you loved her or not, she was always there. Death and taxes and Queen Elizabeth II were the only certainties of life for 70 years until she died on Thursday at the age of 96. Chances were that you, uh, that what you loved or hated wasn't the woman herself, but the institution she embodied, a sprawling $28 billion firm of inherited titles and property. The woman herself She was a cipher by design. Her position prevented her from vocalizing opinions on politics, elections, social movements, and individual people— anything of consequence, really— because modern monarchs don't run the government even while they appear on its money. You knew she was outdoorsy— corgis, horses, hunting expeditions. You might have read somewhere that as a teenager she served as a mechanic in World War II. She saved her wartime rations to pay for her wedding dress and thereby won the love of a nation that those dark days needed a fairy tale, but a practical one. You knew vaguely that the job was never supposed to be hers. She came to the throne by way of an abdicating uncle, a dead-too-soon father, a lack of a male heir. In 1952, the country's legacy suddenly rested on the sensible shoulders of a 25-year-old mother of two. Was it a fairy tale? Was it feminism? The highest-ranking woman in the world, and her power came not via hard work or via a wedding ring on her finger, but via a chaotic ladder of genealogy reaching through centuries, beheadings and infertility, abdications and overthrowings, all leading up to the singular woman holding the throne longer than anyone had before or likely ever will again. So this, this whole thing, but there's this one line here a little later. It says, being a queen is a grown woman's job and not for the faint fate of heart. Let me read that again. Being a queen is a grown woman's job and not for the faint of heart. So you know that, um, you know, I believe in being real. I wish I could be something else sometimes, but I, you know, it is what it is. I am who I am. But as I read this article and read some others, and, um, because of the water on the floor and because of chaos reigning in my house this weekend, I didn't have a chance to really— you know, when I talk about something that's current, I really want to like dive in deep. But I just was like, I just was reading this article, it made me think of so many things. The first thing is You know, being a queen is grown woman's work. We want the perks of royalty, but we don't want the work of royalty. There are people in the past who have been royalty and didn't have to work for it, right? But if you don't work for it, if you don't own the responsibility of it you don't keep it. And even if you keep it, by you, by virtue of your legacy, whether that be your children or the people that you mentor or disciple, they will not be able to hold on to what you don't work to maintain. Royalty should bring at some level, some level of ease, some level of honor, some level of respect, some level of payoff. And yeah, that's a lot of the criticism that the royal family gets is how much money they spend and what they do with their time and how that is supported by the tax dollar in the UK, right? But the reality is we expect that to come with royalty, that you should look different than us, that you should have privileges we don't have, because people like to look up to other people. We were all made to worship. We were all made to worship, and if we don't worship God, we put people on a pedestal and we worship them. And royalty is a function of what people wanted. The people asked Samuel in the Bible for a king, and he said, listen, you don't want a king. He's gonna tax you, he's gonna take your children, he's gonna make you abide by laws that you never intended for him to create. But the people wanted a king. All the other nations had kings, so they wanted someone to look up to. They wanted royalty. We have royalty because we want people to look up to. But royalty, the perks of royalty, require work. Even when we look at celebrities, celebrities that we consider to be, you know, the queen bee, she gets there by hard work. She does all the things that she needs to do to churn out an album every so often, to be the person who is not only extremely talented but extremely smart. But when we put people on pedestals, we expect them to continue to be someone we admire. And so at the moment a celebrity does something that we don't like, we rip them to shreds. If we don't, ET does, Entertainment Tonight. We want people on pedestals, but what we really want is something to worship. And being on a pedestal, however you get there, requires work. To maintain. The work of royalty, the work of being a queen, is not easy. Just like adulting isn't easy. Being a queen is a grown woman's job and not for the faint of heart. It goes on to say there is a certain amount of keeping everyone in line, of grinning and bearing it, whatever it is at the moment. Don't you think? When you think about the life of the Queen, she had to become Queen at 25. That means that from the moment her uncle abdicated his right to the throne, she was then separately groomed for queendom, because that's what happens when you know you're headed for a position of royalty. There's a certain amount of grooming and training that should happen.. And that grooming and training, by virtue of what you're preparing for, isn't always fun. Sometimes, y'all, we just don't like the training process, do we? But the last time I checked, James says to count it all joy when you encounter various trials, because the testing of your faith produces something— produces endurance. And let endurance have it perfect— have its perfect work, so that you may be, uh, complete, lacking nothing. In order for you to be ready for the trials and tribulations that come with your queendom, you have to have preparation. You have to have preparation for what it looks like to grin and bear it when everybody is talking about the opinions that they have about what you do and don't do with your title and your role. You have to be prepared to deal with different personalities, because when you are royalty and when you're on a pedestal, when you have responsibility, you have to deal with all kinds of different people. And the thing is, if you're not royalty, you can choose, you can pick and choose who you're around. When you're royalty, you don't. By virtue of position, you have responsibility. Being a queen is grown woman's work because royalty requires preparation. The preparation isn't easy, the training isn't easy, because the work of queendom isn't easy either. You have to be prepared to be the figurehead, to be the person who's in charge when terrible things happen. When you're the Queen of England, when tragedy strikes, when September 11th happens, or when your daughter-in-law is killed in a tragic accident, you have to stand up and be a beacon of light and be a focus point for those who are saddened or hopeless. Being a queen is grown woman's work, and you don't get to pick and choose when the frenzied moments happen. But when the frenzied moments occur, you have to step up and say something, do something, tell people what to do next, give them consolus in their grief. It says the role of a queen is not about finding oneself, because this is the arc of princesses, real and fictitious. Disney movies are about the princess because the princess gets the benefit without the, without the burden. No, not the queen. The queen avails herself to her duty of serving the people. The princess gets the overflow of the benefit of the king and queen. There is a certain amount of selflessness, even when you're being real, that being royal will take. And again, you know I'm a proponent for real, but think about the people that you admire. Think about them, and what you'll probably find is that they are willing to do hard things that other people are not. That they are willing to step up when problems come, even if they don't have the solution, that they are willing to offer a peaceful response to a tragic outcome, and then they are regularly showing up and giving of themselves. When you think about a woman— maybe it's your grandmother, maybe it's your mother, maybe it was your great-grandmother who was the matriarch of your family— one of the things that I'm sure marked her was that she was always thinking and doing for other people. That position of royalty didn't stop her from being real. One of the things you probably love the most about your grandmother or your great-grandmother was that she was real. She didn't wear designer clothes, she didn't have a designer home, but when you came to her home, you were comfortable. When you ate her food, you were filled. When you went into her bosom and she hugged you tight in her embrace, you knew you were loved. That's real. But royal meant she took on the responsibility. She made sure everyone was fed. She kept the family together. She understood the duty to family, the duty to community, the duty to work. She did do a few things for herself, but she also made sure that those things did not overtake her life because there wasn't much room for her to fritter away her time with the duty of her responsibility to family and the duty of the job that she had to maintain to keep her household going. How did she raise those 3 kids, those 6 kids, those 9 kids on the salary that she had. You'll never know. What you know is that she did it. And what you know is that when you look at your life, you're thinking, I don't even know that I could. Let me tell you why. Because when there is a duty accepted with living a real life and living it royally, you have to make hard decisions. And the question is not whether she has something you don't have. Whoever that she may be, you have her blood running through your veins. The question is, are you willing to do what she was willing to do? Are you willing to make the sacrifices? And in a world that does not teach people royalty, it teaches people how to get by. The question is, are you willing to do what it takes? Are you willing to receive and accept the duty that comes with being the queen that you admire? This article says she was forever tied to Britain's past and forever responsible for the monarchy's future. Isn't that what a queen does? Isn't that what a queen does? She ties together the past and the future with her acts in the present. She knows that she's not here on her own. She knows that even if her past isn't pretty, that the past, by virtue of it being her past, has taught her what she does not want to be or repeat. And she looks forward to the future and says, I am the tie that binds. I am the one that can make the change. I am the one that can change the the trajectory for the people that I know, for my family, for my friends, for the people in my neighborhood. I have a calling, I have a passion, and when I show up in my very real soul to honor my life, I am the one that can pass the baton. I am the one that will take the crown off of my head and hand it to someone else. And when I do, what will they learn from me? She wasn't just a queen who, you know, only had the nation to think about. She had 4 children and a husband who, by the time she got to the 4th baby, she had to say, I want you here when I give birth, because for the first one, he was off playing. She was a working mom. Of course she had help, but she was still a working mom who was devoted to her children. I want you to know that her speech that she gave when we shut down for COVID was one of the best speeches I've ever heard. At her age, in her 90s, she was able to acknowledge the grief, acknowledge the abnormal circumstances, But what she did when she called out the problem was she also brought forth the hope for a solution. Her voice was calming. Her voice was settled, as if to say, I've lived through many a difficult time. This is difficult, but we will live again. We will rise again. Real does both, y'all. Real says this is your real circumstance. Real says this is where we are. Real says this is what the pain is. Real says this is what we wish was not going to occur. This is what real says. But royal calls people to a higher standard. It gives people a different outlook. It gives people hope. It says, I see something you don't.. It casts vision. It creates a picture of life after the moment that people in their everyday may not be able to see. Royal says, I will lead you there. Royal says, I know the way. Royal says, I have confidence and faith that our nation is stronger than the trouble we are experiencing right now. Royal sits tall and says, follow me. And the beautiful thing about Queen Elizabeth is we don't just have to follow her instructions. She was groomed, of course, to be a queen. And so we could follow her demeanor, her posture, everything about a young woman who knows she's about to be queen is geared towards who she needs to be when people are watching. What you wear, how you dress, what you paint your fingernails with, how you cross your legs, how you greet people, what you do with your time, the laws of the land that you need to learn. Everything is crafted to give you an experience that will prepare you to be someone to be revered. In our lives, I realize that some of us don't feel like we've been prepared. This is why we need mentors and disciples, disciplers, and other women who we can look at, other women who say, "This is how it's done." I've had my fair share of women who've discipled me, starting with my mother and my grandparents. I've been able to watch them, but Even if you don't, the beauty of the season that we live in right now is there's so much availability because of technology for you to watch and learn from people who know what to do, who have learned what to do. The other day I hadn't set my table in a really, really long time, and I set my table for some women who came to visit me, and I realized that I couldn't remember which side the fork and knife went on. And truth be told, some fancy restaurants switch it out now. They opt to put the fork and the knife on the left— the fork and the spoon on the left side, even though it's supposed to go on the right. But they know that most people are right-handed, so they've just decided we put the forks on the right now. But I had to Google and search for the appropriate table setting because I couldn't remember. The beauty of living in this season is that you have so many resources at your disposal to help you in the middle of your real Choose Royalty, to help you know what it looks like to be a queen in your circumstance, to know what to say, to know the history, to be well-read, to be prepared, to know how to talk to different people. You can watch others in this life and learn these things. You were designed to be— you are a daughter of the King. So the question is, do you know what to do when seasons come that challenge your royalty and ask you to change that alone for what's real? You can be real, but you don't have to live there. You can be honest about your circumstances, but you don't have to succumb to them. You can express the pain of your reality, but you don't have to let that pain punk you. You can choose to still sit up straight. You can choose to still have a word of encouragement for yourself and others around you. You can choose to look towards a better day, and you can believe that you're not the first person that has ever experienced this challenge and this difficulty. You can choose to be royal. This guy says, look, I'm an American, and as such, I am liberated from any legitimate impact of the monarchy. Monarchy. I do not have to concern myself with the tax burden. The iffy bloodlines, the intermarriage, the outer marriage, the jewels, the jubilees, the two dozen official residences, the crown's pomp and the queen's circumstance. As an American, I don't have to deal with that. But as an American, I can also remark with both wonder and dispassion on what made the queen so meaningful. And here's what I love about this article: she always seemed like a remarkably average woman. She was not imbued with any preternatural wit or presence or beauty or grace. Her appearance was wholesome rather than striking. She was not sexy or sparkling. She did not appear to have a way with words. Her quotes in public addresses were not particularly deep. She did not give introspective interviews about being a working mother, having it all. She was not on book tours or launching podcasts or chatting with Diane Sawyer. She did not build her brand in the ways we now expect famous, popular, powerful women to do. Instead, she sought to preserve an antique brand, for better or for worse, but not for herself. This is my favorite part. This to me is legacy. This is the remarkable thing, that for 70 years the most important figure in Britain was a woman who did not do many of the things or embody many of the characteristics that society often demands women do. For 70 years, the Commonwealth's most important resident was an extremely average woman who was made sublime only because the people allowed her to be. She did her work. She did her work stoically, stoutly, relentlessly, uncomplaining, for 25,000 days while her contemporaries retired or died, her children got divorced or became caught up in some Jeffrey Epstein scandals. One of her grandsons resigned and moved into Tyler Perry's house in California, and the other grandson stayed put and sired his own heirs who may one day carry on the work that his grandmother had been doing since before the invention of birth control or Barbie. She did her work. She said when she was a younger woman, I declare before you that all my life, my whole life, whether it be long or short, I will be devoted to your service. Hey there, sorry to interrupt this video, but I just want to make sure you are aware of two things that are available for you right now. Listen, you need to be on my email list first of all, because I always share this stuff with my email list first. Just chrystalevanshurst.com. But here are the two things. One is this video comes to you because I deliver it first inside of my Inner Circle. That's a group of women who want to support what we do, support the content that we create, and want more content from yours truly, along with the benefits of community and accountability. Lives are changing in there, and we'd love for you to join us. Simply go to chrystalevanshurst.com/innercircle. We're getting ready to move into the fourth quarter of 2022. And let me tell you, the last quarter of this year is a great time to get ready for the first quarter of next year. So come on and join us, why don't you? We're in there waiting on you. We'll leave the lights on for you. The second thing I want you to know about are my coaching cohorts. These are small groups of women who get together over a specific topic with a mentor or a coach, another woman who has skill, life experience, education who wants to impart that to you. So we've got small groups, 12 women or less, who are going to be meeting to talk about dating or marriage, difficult relationships, becoming a writer, getting booked as a speaker, or exercising your spiritual authority. If this sounds like something you need or something you want— you need small group connection, you need someone who knows your name to speak into your life and tell you how to do it— this is a great way for you to get connected. All right, listen, y'all, let's get back into our content. She was devoted, she was consistent, she was faithful. She thought of herself. She loved to hunt. She did what she loved. She, you know, had her corgis, her precious corgis. She had her 4 children, but she remained faithful to her post. She was royalty because she got somewhere and she stayed there and she was faithful. And I love that apart from being royalty, she was average. She just happened to be born into queendom and she owned it. So you can be real, you can love hunting or fishing or biking or exercising or cooking or reading. You can be average, you can be not necessarily well-spoken, you can be not necessarily a great writer. You can have an average education. The question is not about what you are or are not average at doing. Nobody asks questions about Queen Elizabeth and whether she's average at all these things. All that we care about is she was a queen. That queen meant she had certain duties, and she faithfully showed up and did them well. Royalty is about birth, but even if you're born into royalty You have to own the duty of royalty in order to create the legacy. So this is as large or as small as you need it to be. One day somebody's going to come and do your job. You're going to retire. When you retire, will you have owned that position and done your best, knowing that because that you've inherited for this season that particular job, that you're going to show up in excellence whatsoever you do, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it to the glory of God? Are you going to show up and own that? And when it's your time to move on, will somebody be able to say, she left impeccable files and impeccable instructions, and this was never late? Because you're royal, you show up to that duty that way. It doesn't matter if you're a mom and your family gets eggs and bacon for dinner tonight, even though bacon is too expensive right now. Shucks. The question is, you're the queen of that home, and so did they have something to eat? Because that's the duty. Think about how you operate at your church. I know that you've been church hopping online for the whole last 2 years, but it's time for you to get planted in a church. For you to serve. And then when you serve, to show up, be responsible, be committed, and being dependable, because you're royalty, and that's what royalty is calling you to do. You can be very real about your everyday life, and in whatever your everyday life requires of you, you can be royal. Be consistent, be faithful, and do what you know to do until you know how to do something more. She insisted she was merely a humble public servant, and that's honestly all you and I ever are, because the only thing that you will leave behind is where you've invested. Royalty is a call to service. Always. If you can fuse your royalty with the call to be served, you will leave nothing behind. So when we think about Queen Elizabeth II and 70 years of, you know, little to no scandal in her life specifically, her children are a different story. 70 years of— she just appointed her 15th prime minister. 70 years of wearing the same hair. Honor is due. So I want you to live your very real life, but I want you to ask yourself, if I am a queen— and if you're an adult And if you, you know, you believe you're a child of God, you are. How am I working out my royalty in my everyday life? Because you can be average and still be amazing. One of the downfalls of how we live our life is we think that we're just average, so we just show up and we give average effort. We don't necessarily look at our children and say, oh my God, my children are amazing and they're going to do great things. Some of us do. Some of us look at our children and we look at their grades and we say, I mean, they're just average students. Okay, but what I want you to start doing in your life is looking above and beyond the average and looking for what's special, because there is always something there. And I want you to reframe your thinking about yourself and about your family and think they're royalty, right? If you look at your husband and you say he's a king, now you may know all of his underworkings, you may know what he does around the house and he doesn't do around the house, you may know that he doesn't clean this up or that, you know, he belches here and there, you may know all the underpinnings. But if you had a king, you know, I could tell you, I don't care what Charles III, what King Charles III, what his personal habits are, he's king. So personal habits and all, he still gets the honor that's due his position. Look at your boss that way. Look at your husband that way. Look at the leader at church that way. Are you giving them the honor that's due their position? Because when you do this, that's a part of your duty as well. You can be real, you can speak truth, but you have to also do it with honor. And this is what happens when you are a queen. You understand that honor is due you. So that means that you can correct people. There are people in my life I have to correct. I have to say, can you say that again, please? Or let's try to say that a different way. When you're royalty, that means sometimes you have to teach and train the people that are around you for what you actually— what they actually and how they actually need to treat you. So royalty, it's about how you look at life. Because the only reason why we treated the Queen like a queen is because we were taught to, we were trained to, we were brought up with the understanding that she was special. Look around you. Who in your life needs to be treated as if they're special? And how do the people in your life need to treat you as special too? But before you demand the treatment of the Queendom, don't forget that the Queendom is work and that it requires something of you. You can walk and be real, and you can walk and be royal. And you can be both if you choose. So today what I want you to do is think about what legacy looks like in your life and what royal standard you need to rise to in order to see that legacy come to pass. And you will leave a legacy whether you try to or not. The question simply is, what will you leave by the work of your queendom that you do every day. So come on, queen. You are royalty and you have royal blood flowing through your veins. Now I just need you to show up and do the work. Even if you're average, you can be amazing.