This post is a part of the 5-Minute Friday link-up. We write for just 5 minutes on a one-word prompt and see what happens (OK, I confess that I cheated on the time today. This took way longer than 5 minutes!) No heavy editing allowed.
One of the things I like best about a good Cinderella story is the idea that something that seems impossible becomes a possibility with just a little bit of magic, a fairy godmother who will change your circumstances so that you can even get a foot in the door, a chance to catch the eye of the prince, and hope. Lots and lots of hope.
One of my favorite versions is the 1998 movie “Ever After: A Cinderella Story” starring Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott. She is feisty and thoughtful and considerate. The first time she actually meets the prince in person, she throws an apple at him and knocks him off her horse, which she thinks he is stealing before she actually recognizes that he’s the prince. Oops.
Through a lot of subterfuge on her part and assumptions on his, the prince thinks she is a courtier and therefore someone that he can hang out with. But she’s actually just an orphan living in their ramshackle estate house while her stepmother and stepsisters dismantle it from the inside piece by piece.
As the prince and Cinderella spend more time together, hangin’ with DaVinci and talking about education and its importance for everyone, getting set upon by gypsies who they then befriend, romantic interest grows.
But the prince is being pressured by his father to get married, preferably to a princess from another country so that an alliance can be made. And so, of course, the whole story of the ball and Cinderella’s appearance, the glass slipper, the pumpkin turned coach. All those magical things.
And they all lived happily ever after.
“Ever After” was not a musical, but the 1965 Rodgers and Hammerstein version, introducing Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella, included a song called “Impossible.” Here are some of the lyrics:
Impossible
For a plain yellow pumpkin
To become a golden carriage!
Impossible
For a plain country bumpkin
And a prince to join in marriage!
And four white mice will never be four white horses—
Such fol-de-rol and fiddledy dee of course is
Impossible!
But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say,
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things are happ’ning every day!
“But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:26).
What are you trusting God for today?
Compelled 