We interrupt this Spring Break series...

We're in the thick of things with our classes. Lately I've been trying to take in as much as possible, applying what I've been learning on a more personal level. The great thing about where we're at in school is that everything we're learning feels applicable. Jeremy and I think about our future in ministry often and how we want to shape our family and lives around truth and the calling that the Lord has on our lives. Without getting too corny, I wanted to share a story with you from a book I've been reading called From Fear to Love. It's from one of my counseling classes and it addresses the cycle that we get into when we let our fears allow us to move to control and then supercharge our control with anger. This story is in the chapter on overcoming our fears in a section called "Learning to be Real". It actually is taken from a children's story called The Velveteen Rabbit. Margery Williams describes what it means to become real... 

"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 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 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."

What the story relates is that vulnerability is the key to love, that risk is involved in becoming REAL.