David Leventhal

The other night as the kids were getting ready for bed they picked out The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams for me to read to them. This is a well-read & well-loved book in our house, not just by my kids but by Missy. On the title page of the book it reads,

Anyway – after I finished reading to the kids & got them tucked in their beds my mind kept coming back to the dialogue that takes place early on in the book between the Velveteen Rabbit & the Skin Horse. If you’ve read this book (& if you haven’t you should) then you’ll remember that the Skin Horse “had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces.” The Skin Horse was the only toy in the nursery to show kindness toward the Velveteen Rabbit.

One day the Rabbit asks the Skin Horse, “What is REAL?” The Skin Horse, drawing from years of experience replies,

“Real isn’t how you are made…it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child plays with you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real…It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

Have you ever met someone who is REAL? Someone who has over time, been through the tough times. Someone who has scars from having weathered storms and yet rather than turning bitter, jaded & pessimistic they emerge from the chaos full of kindness and graciousness and compassion. I’ve met people like this and I almost always leave their presence with an odd sort of envy. I see in them the qualities that I desperately want to posses – wisdom, grace, perspective, kindness & a willingness to love all those they come in contact with. Things that I know the Lord wants to grow in my heart. And then there’s this sinking feeling…it’s the same gut-wrenching emotion that Velveteen Rabbit felt after his conversation with the Skin Horse.

“The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.”

And while I desire those qualities I dread the soil required to grow them in my heart. I want the perspective without the pain. I want the wisdom without the wound. I want the sympathy without the sorrow. I want a character that is free from the impurities that keep me from truly loving my Savior & those He died for, but I don’t want to jump into the furnace so the dross can be scraped off.

And here’s the rub. That is the life that Christ invites us to….in fact, it’s the one He calls us to & it is one characterized by love. Springing from His love for us and then our love for others (cf. 1 John 4:10-11, 19-21). And just like the Skin Horse & the Velveteen Rabbit were loved to pieces by the boy so our Heavenly Father loves us so much that, in that love, He chooses that we should experience sorrow and affliction and pain so that we can become a “vessel for honor, set apart, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21).
Isn’t this what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 1 when he blesses the God who:

“…comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer; and our hope for you is firmly grounded, knowing that as you are sharers of our sufferings, so also you are sharers of our comfort (vv. 4-7).

It doesn’t sound that fun to me, but I believe it produces what I most desire. And with that I’m trusting God to lead me to the same place as the Velveteen Rabbit. Where, as

“time went on, the little Rabbit was very happy – so happy that he never noticed how his beautiful velveteen fur was getting shabbier and shabbier, and his tail was coming unsewn, and all the pink rubbed off his nose where the Boy had kissed him….and he knew that what the Skin Horse had said was true at last. The nursery magic had happened to him, and he was a toy no longer. He was Real.”