A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, "Please God, save my only grandson. I beg of you, bring him back." And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up to heaven and says: "He had a hat!"
Grandchildren bring us closer to God, if it's only their innocence and beauty we remember once having. Holding a sleeping child for a few moments fills us with feelings of real love and tenderness.
Like little children, we need to rest in our Father's arms daily. We need to let Him love us tenderly, and when we awake, we need to smile. After all, God loves us! We are his real children.
Margaret Williams, in "The Velveteen Rabbit," tells the story of a stuffed rabbit and the boy who received it as a Christmas gift. At first, the simple toy was snubbed by all the other more expensive mechanical toys that flaunted their complexity and regarded themselves as real.
When the rabbit asked if being real means having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle, the wise old toy, the Skin Horse replied, "Real isn't how you are made. It is something that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with you but really loves you then you become real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Velveteen Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the skin horse, for he was always honest and truthful with his answers. "When you are real," he said, "you don't mind being hurt because you are loved."
"Does it happen all at once like being wound up," asked the Rabbit, "or does it happen bit by bit." "It doesn't happen all at once," said the skin horse. "It takes a long time. That is why it doesn't happen to those who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be kept carefully. It doesn't happen to those who are so fragile.
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 your joints and all shabby and wobbly. But these things don't matter at all because once you are real, you cannot be ugly except to those people who don't understand. And it doesn't matter to the one who loves you. That is when you know you are real," said the skin horse.
Thank you, Lord, for giving us time; not just to enjoy, but to work out our salvation.
Keep us in your loving embrace until we are real.
