I recently came across a little story from the 1920s called When Queens Ride By by Agnes Sligh Turnbull, and I was surprised by how much I could relate to it. Even a hundred years later, the feelings the main character wrestles with—being tired, overwhelmed, comparing herself to other women, and feeling like no one really understands how much she is carrying—still feel incredibly familiar.
This story got me thinking about women, motherhood, our homes, and the way we look at the circumstances God has given us. Before you read my thoughts, I’d encourage you to read the story for yourself. It’s short, but there’s quite a bit packed into it.
You can read When Queens Ride By here: https://faithsteadjourney.com/when-queens-ride-by/
When Hardships Justify
There is something deeply familiar about Jennie.
At first glance, When Queens Ride By seems to be a story about an overworked woman who has grown envious of women whose lives appear easier than hers. Jennie is tired. Her farm is struggling. Money is tight. Her husband is discouraged. She works from morning until night, doing not only the work expected of her, but what she describes as “a man’s work” as well.
Her life really is difficult. And that’s what makes her problem so interesting.
Jennie is not simply a woman who refuses to work. She is a woman who works incredibly hard—and has begun to build her identity around the fact that she does.
She believes that if she doesn’t do the work, everything will fall apart. She looks around at other women and thinks: They don’t know what real work is. They don’t know what my life is like. If they had my circumstances, they couldn’t do what I do.
When the beautifully dressed stranger asks whether Jennie is doing things the right way, something erupts inside her: “What would have become of us if I didn’t do a man’s work?” And then: “A person like you don’t know what work is!”
That outburst reveals something deeper than exhaustion. Jennie does not merely want someone to understand that her life is hard. She wants her hardship to justify her. She has become proud of her ability to endure.
When Resilience Becomes Righteousness
There is a particular kind of pride that doesn’t look like boasting.
Sometimes pride sounds like, I don’t need anyone.
Sometimes it sounds like, Nobody understands how much I carry.
Sometimes it sounds like, If I stopped doing everything, this whole family would fall apart.
And sometimes it sounds like, You couldn’t do what I do.
This is what makes Jennie such a compelling picture of the modern “hot mess mama.”
We often hear, “This is real life. I’m doing the best I can. You don’t know my circumstances.”
And there is truth in that.
We should be slow to judge people whose lives we only see from the outside. We don’t know their burdens, their financial pressures, their marriages, their children, their health, their responsibilities, or the things they carry quietly.
But there is another danger. Our circumstances can become our shield against self-examination. Our suffering can become our source of identity. And our exhaustion can become our evidence of faithfulness.
And our resilience can become a kind of righteousness:
Look how much I endure.
Look how hard I work.
Look how much I sacrifice.
Look how much I do for everyone else.
Jennie has begun to confuse being needed with being valuable, being exhausted with being faithful, and being resilient with being righteous.
Her hardship is real. But hardship does not automatically make us mature. In fact, suffering can take us in two very different directions. It can humble us and teach us dependence upon God—or it can become ammunition for self-justification. The question is not merely, How much am I carrying? The deeper question is, What is my heart doing with what I am carrying?
We Have to Choose
The pivotal turning point in the story comes when a well-to-do woman stops by and gives Jennie something she has not considered: sometimes faithfulness means choosing. “Men are such queer things, husbands especially. Sometimes we blunder when we are trying hardest to serve them. For instance, they want us to be economical, and yet they want us in pretty clothes. They need our help, and yet they want us to keep our youth and our beauty. And sometimes they don’t know themselves which they really want most. So we have to choose. That’s what makes it so hard”.
The stranger then tells her about a choice she made early in her own marriage. She could have worked alongside her husband in his struggling new business, but she recognized that if they both came home exhausted every night, something precious might be lost. So she chose to pour her energy into their home. With very little money, she made their small flat clean and cheerful, turned simple dinners into something special, and saved enough of herself to encourage her discouraged husband. She wasn’t choosing the easier path. She was choosing what she believed mattered most.
This was the first crack in Jennie’s way of thinking. Until now, she had approached her life as though the answer to every problem were simply to do more. If something needed doing, she did it. If there was more work, she worked harder. Her own strength had become her solution to everything. But the stranger introduced a different question: What if the answer wasn’t doing more, but choosing what mattered most? Faithfulness does not mean saying yes to every good thing. We have limited time, limited energy, and limited capacity, and wisdom requires us to recognize those limits. Sometimes loving our families well means giving something up. Sometimes protecting what matters most means allowing something else to remain undone.
The stranger’s story gave Jennie a new way to understand her own exhaustion. Perhaps she had not failed because she couldn’t do everything. Perhaps she had been trying to do too much, without stopping to ask what was most important. And this is where the story begins to move Jennie from simply enduring her circumstances toward seeing that she had a choice in how she lived within them. Her circumstances may not be hers to control, but how she spends herself within those circumstances is not entirely outside her control.
When Queens Ride By
Then the woman told Jennie a story about a queen who lived in troubled times. Whenever the country met with danger, the queen would dress in her finest clothes, gather her court, and ride through the streets. When the people saw her passing by, apparently cheerful and unafraid, they took courage and their morale was lifted.
“And somehow it seems to work. That’s the woman’s part, you know. To play the queen,” the woman remarked.
I don’t think the point the woman is making here is, Dress up and pretend everything is wonderful. It is something much more substantial. She is saying that a woman has influence over the little kingdom around her, and wisdom means learning how to use that influence for the good of those entrusted to her.
A queen doesn’t ask, “How can everyone make my life better?” She asks, “How can I make life better for those entrusted to me?”
That is almost the complete opposite of the modern “queen” mentality.
The modern version often says, I deserve to be treated like a diva. The old-fashioned idea says, Because I have been given influence, I have a responsibility to serve. The diva expects the kingdom to revolve around her desires. The queen understands that people may be depending upon her. The diva demands attention. The queen gives courage. The diva wants to be catered to. The queen learns to cultivate. The diva asks, What do I get? The queen asks, What has been placed in my care?
And that makes the queen a remarkably fitting picture for Jennie. She has spent the whole story feeling crushed by the demands of her little kingdom. She sees the farm, the children, the marriage, the financial problems, and the endless work as things that are happening to her. But, the stranger begins to teach her to see them as things she has influence over. She cannot control everything that happens in the kingdom, but she can influence its atmosphere. She can nurture what is fragile, strengthen what is discouraged, bring beauty into what is bleak, and give courage when others are afraid.
A queen does not need to control the kingdom in order to influence it. She needs to understand her place within it. And I think that’s why this old-fashioned picture of queenship is so valuable for women today. We don’t need another message telling women to be more powerful, more independent, more admired, or more demanding. We need to recover the dignity of wise influence—to rest in knowing what has been entrusted to us, and to nurture it well.
Scripture gives us many beautiful examples of women who lived this way. Queen Esther used the position God had given her to risk her life for the sake of her people. Abigail used wisdom and courage to turn away destruction from her household. The woman of Proverbs 31 strengthened her husband, cared for her household, worked diligently, spoke wisdom, and opened her hands to those in need. And then there is Mary. She was a young woman of humble circumstances who received an extraordinary calling with extraordinary submission: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” Yet in that lowly state, she carried the King of kings. These women show us that biblical queenship is not about status, control, or getting our own way. It is about knowing whose kingdom we belong to, receiving what He entrusts to us, and faithfully tending what God has given us for His glory and the good of others.
A Scent of Hope
And perhaps this is why the little detail at the end of the story matters so much. After the woman leaves, Jennie finds the handkerchief she has forgotten behind. She lifts it, and its fragrance reminds her of something she has almost forgotten exists: beauty. For just a moment, she catches a scent of another way of living, and that glimpse gives her hope. Her circumstances have not changed yet. The farm is still struggling. The bills have not disappeared. Her husband is still discouraged. But something inside Jennie has changed. She has seen that another kind of life is possible, and now she has the courage to begin cultivating it.
And I wonder if this is part of our calling as Christian women. We have been given something even greater than a scented handkerchief—a glimpse of the glory that is coming. Through the Holy Spirit, we have tasted something of the kingdom of God that is still to be fully revealed. We know where this story is going. Christ is making all things new, and one day the beauty, peace, righteousness, and joy of His kingdom will fill the earth. Until then, we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We cannot bring heaven down by our own strength, but we can live as women who belong to that kingdom. We can carry something of its fragrance into the places God has entrusted to us: the warmth of His love, the beauty of His grace, the generosity of His blessings, the peace of His presence, and the wisdom of His Word.
Perhaps this is part of what it means to remember that we are queens—not because we are entitled to be served, but because we were created to rule alongside Adam. From the beginning, God gave humanity the calling to bear His image, to cultivate His creation, to bring order to what is chaotic and beauty to what is void. And as women, we share in that calling. There is a kind of queenliness that is not about position or power, but an air about a woman whose faith rests securely in God: serene rather than bitter, gracious rather than helpless, faithful rather than frantic. To live this way is, in a sense, to reclaim something we were made for—to remember that we are daughters of the true King, entrusted with a royal calling to reflect Him in the little kingdoms He has placed before us.
What a blessed vocation we have. It begins within us, as Christ transforms our hearts, and then it moves outward—to our husbands and children, our homes, our friendships, our churches, our neighborhoods, and our communities. We cultivate beauty where there is barrenness, bring peace where there is turmoil, offer hospitality where there is loneliness, speak truth where there is confusion, and give courage where there is fear. We may feel that these things are small, but kingdoms are built through the faithful tending of what has been entrusted to us. Perhaps that is what it means to live like a queen: not to escape the world we have been given, but to bring the beauty of the kingdom we belong to into it. And perhaps, as we do, someone else may catch the scent too—and begin to hope that something more beautiful is possible.
