Good morning…
Rubbed thin. That is how many of us feel right now. Rubbed thin from incomprehensible tragedy. Rubbed thin from a plethora of needs jockeying for our time and attention. Rubbed thin from jumbled up emotions we can not put into words. We who feel rubbed thin are ones who have taken the “often amazing, sometimes awful” risk of loving, really loving.
When I think of being rubbed thin, my mind wanders back to a bedtime book. In Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, the seasoned Skin Horse knows by experience the painful privilege of allowing love to rub us thin, to rub us Real.
“’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.’”
When our hair feels loved off and our eyes drop out from too many tears, when the joints holding life together are loose and we feel very, very shabby, the Spirit rises up from within to carry us through each exhausting hour. As the skin of our human heart is rubbed thin, more of God’s unending love becomes Real to the world.
As the tender Spirit of God expands from within, He must become greater and greater, and I become less and less, John 3:30 (NLT),
Sue
