The Velveteen Rabbit and the Cost of Becoming Real

In Margery Williams' beloved children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed toy asks the old Skin Horse what it means to become Real. The Skin Horse answers with words that could have come straight from a sermon: "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."

The Rabbit learns that becoming Real means being loved so thoroughly that your fur gets rubbed off, your eyes lose their shine, and your joints grow loose. It hurts. It costs something. But by the end of the story, the battered little rabbit — loved nearly to pieces by a child — is transformed into something genuinely alive.

Paul understood this costly becoming. "We are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory," he wrote in 2 Corinthians 3:18. But that transformation is not a gentle polish. It is the wearing away of everything artificial — our carefully maintained appearances, our sharp defensive edges, our insistence on being carefully kept.

The Almighty does not leave us pristine on a shelf. He loves us into Real. And Real, as the Skin Horse wisely noted, once you are, you can never be ugly — except to people who don't understand.

The question is not whether transformation will cost you something. It will. The question is whether you trust the One whose love is doing the work.