Rabbits and Real Life

One Christmas, the Velveteen Rabbit was given to the boy for a Christmas present. He was a lovely stuffed toy, very nice to look at and soft to touch; but all the mechanical toys were bigger, and more impressive, and were always boasting about how real they were; how they could move and make real noises and do impressive things. Only the old Skin Horse was kind to the Rabbit. He had been around for ever and ever, and seen hundreds of toys come and go, and he knew all about the nursery-magic – all the strange and wonderful things that only wise old toys like the Skin Horse understood.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, “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 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.”

***

Somebody read this out in church the other day, which was quite unexpected but also quite brilliant. And if you’ve seen my blogs on Toy Story or the Lion King you’ll probably already have worked out why I love it so much.

I want to be real. I think we all want to be real. I think we all have a desire, somewhere in us, to be who we actually are with each other – to live our real life, and not always have to create a fictional, edited version of ourselves for public consumption. I think this is partly why life feels so exhausting a lot of the time – we’re trying to do two whole lives at once: the real one, which we can’t help but live, but then also the slightly-made-up, nasty-bits-left-out, cracks-painted-over life that we feel we need to live in front of every one else. I could quite easily go on a rant about facebook and stuff at this point, about how we end up feeling rubbish about ourselves because we’re scrolling down the newsfeed, comparing our own real, messy lives with everyone else’s facebook-life – a kind of sepia-tone, photo-shopped, only-the-best-bits version, where we get a status update for every hilarious happening, every big success, and every time a massive thank you is in order to all my amazing friends and my gorgeous boyfriend and my awesome family, but we never get to read the dark moments. No one’s tweeting “I’m really lonely” so we think it’s just us – but it’s not. And at this point, I’d like to apologise for the fact that often I choose to write this blog at the end of a good story – so that every thing that’s difficult gets written about in the past tense, and I give the impression that my life always finds itself at these meaningful, pleasant happy endings. It’s not normally that simple, and I’m sorry.

I was chatting to my mate the other day about this, about what we do to ourselves with the whole facebook comparison thing, and then she said something that really hit me – it’s not just facebook. We live our whole lives like this. She said to me, the only time we ever talk about how we actually feel, is when we’re drunk. And I think a lot of the time that’s true. And it’s tragic isn’t it? And I think it’s because we’re scared that if people see the ‘real’ version of us, they’ll think we’re ugly. They’ll think we’re weird. They’ll put us in the box of people who’ve ‘got issues’ and never look at us in the same way again. Maybe, even worse, we’re afraid that they’ll use our wounds as a weapon and hurt us. So we just never talk about it. We have friends, and they’re good friends, and we love them, and they seem to love us, but we always have this thing in our heads reminding us that they don’t love the real us, they love the version of us that we’ve shown them – the one with all the messy parts and the ‘issues’ edited out, the one without the loneliness, without the fears. And that’s not quite the same. But it’s better than nothing, so we settle for it.

Well, this is me saying, let’s not settle for it. This is me saying – are we not better than that? Can we not all just agree that we will refuse to put each other in boxes, that we will refuse to label our friends as ‘weird’, that we will refuse to think even the slightest bit less of someone because they’ve told us the truth, and they’re life turns out not to be shiny or perfect? Because none of our lives are very shiny once you take the filter off. None of us are actually perfect. If there’s a ‘weird’ box, then we’re all in it. We’re all in the ‘weird’ box together. So why don’t we just stop being scared of it and have a party in the box? Let’s stop pretending so that we can stop being lonely. Let’s stop closing the door on each other. Let’s live our real lives together. Because “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.”

But the problem is, that I type this, and I hope that lots of people will read it and be nodding and saying ‘Yes, that would be so much better’, but at the same time I know that its not that simple. You can’t just become Real all at once, just because you’d like to be. But here’s the thing, the one thing that gives me so much hope:

“Real is a thing that happens to you. When someone loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

Here’s what I want to say, and you’ve probably heard it a hundred times, but I hope you’ll hear it differently this time. Jesus loves you. And I mean really loves you – not just to play with, not just because he pities you, not just in a generic, ‘God cares about people’ kind of way, he specifically, especially, loves you. He knows your name. I remember someone saying once, that if he had a wallet, your picture would be in it. And it would. And even better than that, he loves the real you. He loves you with all of your issues and your mess and your loneliness – he knows exactly how you feel, all your thoughts and fears and worries and the stupid things that you’d never say out loud, and he utterly, utterly loves you. He longs for you. He thinks about you all day. And that seems ridiculous to us because we can’t imagine someone being able to think about every single person at once – but this is God, he can and he really, really does. He smiles when you smile. He weeps when you weep. And my point is this: when you realise that he loves you, and he’s loved you for a really, really long time, something changes. You’re willing to admit to him that you’re not shiny and you’re not perfect. You start to tell him that you need him - that you need him to forgive you, and heal all the bits of you that are broken and that you don’t like to show people. You start to open the door, and uncross your arms, and let him come in and pick you up. And it’s then – when you admit that you’re “loose in the joints and very shabby”, and you need a God that can see past that and love you anyway – that he can start to set you free. When you let him love you, when you let him tell you what he thinks of you and how much he thinks of you; then you become Real.

And once he’s made you Real, its not so scary to be real with other people – because the idea that people will think you’re weird is a lot less frightening when you know that God himself calls you his child, his beloved, and his delight. And it helps you to let other people be real as well – because when you’ve admitted how shabby you are, it gets easier to love shabby people. It gets harder to judge them, or put labels on them, because you know that God loves this person as fiercely and completely as he loves you. And sometimes being Real will hurt, like the Skin Horse says. But then again, “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

So really, this is just me saying, can we be real together please? I think it would be better. And this is me promising that I, for one, will never think less of you if you’re real with me; I’ll never think that you’re weird or that you’ve got issues and I’ll never put you in a box and stay away from you. Because I’ve got issues, and God did not stay away from me, he came and he picked me up, and told me that he loves me anyway. This is just me, asking you if you want to come with me, and try to start living Real life.