How To Become Real

Photo credit to Gary Bending.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often 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.”

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before the 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.

When I was five my Dad found me crying over The Velveteen Rabbit. 

It was a quiet sunny Sunday afternoon after church sometime in the spring. Mom was taking a nap, and I had pulled out the book to look at. I stopped on the page where the Rabbit has been rejected and forgotten; the page where he lies in the dirt, and, remembering the beautiful love he used to know from the Boy, begins to cry.

The sweet, bitter sadness of it pierced my little heart. And I began to cry.

The Velveteen Rabbit was the first book that ever made me cry.

Even now, a decade later, it still makes me cry on the inside, but about something different than the Rabbit’s pain and rejection.

That crying has to do with becoming Real.

When I was younger I always found the song You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You amusing. The lyrics so famously state:

You’re nobody until somebody loves you

You’re nobody until somebody cares

“That’s silly,” I remember thinking. “That means you’re always somebody, because Somebody always loves you!”

It’s true. Isn’t there an Everlasting Father who will always love us? We are always Somebody. But there’s still a part of me that longs, aches, dreams to be Real. Being a Somebody and being Real aren’t the same thing. 

I’m so often struck by the fact that the life we are living on this broken planet isn’t true Life, and that, only in death will we truly find the true fullness of Life. We seem to think of death as this shady half existence when it’s actually the other way around—we are living the shady half existence here. Great Grandpa in Heaven is Living more than you are. 

The life of a follower of Christ is the slow process of becoming Real. Like Christian on his way to the Celestial City in Pilgrim’s Progress, we are all journeying to that city and to the life we will find there. Christian’s life in the City of Destruction was not Real, or at least, not Real in the way the King wanted it. He throws every part of his old life away so he can finally, finally die to himself and become Real.

The story of The Velveteen Rabbit is a journey of becoming Real. Throughout the pages of the book he slowly grows closer and closer to that Realness. First he is loved by the Boy. Then he is forgotten by the Boy and destined to be destroyed, because before he can reach it, he must in essence die. 

Because of the Boy’s love his ears become thin and worn. His whiskers get pulled out. His tail becomes chewed. Because the Boy keeps him in the midst of his illness the Rabbit at last has to be disposed of because he is covered in contagious germs.

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

It hurt the Rabbit to become Real. He had to face the deep pain of being forgotten and rejected. Yet, because of his faithfulness, he is finally awarded true Realness and becomes a living and breathing rabbit.

When we become Real we no longer mind being hurt. Because it’s no longer about us. It’s about others. It’s about Christ. 

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.

Are you willing to become Real if it means to die to yourself? To lose your earthly shine and beauty? To lose the good opinion of your friends, your family, your heroes?

Each day our goal should be to become more Real. And Real, as the Skin Horse said, isn’t something that happens all at once. Growing and flourishing in your faith isn’t something that just takes a day and a night.

You can’t become Real if you insist on being selfish. On having your own way. Of being listening to. Maybe of even being loved. That’s why the Skin Horse said,

“It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.”

It takes years, decades, a lifetime of dying to yourself over, and over, and over again, and having Aslan scrape the scales of filthy sin off your back, before you can become Real. And during the process, the world probably won’t like you all that much. They will most likely see you as ugly, strange, deluded.

But my friend, you will have become Real.

And to be Real is worth more than anything that is, or was, or ever will be.

 But these things don’t matter at all,” says the Skin Horse, “because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

God wants to lead you to Him. With him you will become Real.

What will you give to become God’s Real?