WE ARE ABOUT TO GET 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 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 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."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

(Taken from "The Velveteen Rabbit" )

Sometimes being Real hurts. Sometimes it really hurts a lot. But being real makes you beautiful inside and out. Becoming real for me is and has been a really hard road. Being real means becoming who and what God wants me to be even when I don't understand Him or the process to get there. Being real means seeing myself truly the way I am and hopefully by the time I become completely "real" I will see myself as He really sees me and I will see Him as He really is.

I am about to get really real with all of you on this blog. I am going to tell you the story of great growth and great pain. This will be an on going story and the moods will change as often as the pages of a good book. It won't always be easy to read. It may often be painful in fact. But it will be very very real and it will be the complete truth of how God is growing me and making me the woman he wants me to be.

Please understand as we go along and you read this in process story that I am not looking for your sympathies. I do not expect you to have the answers I am looking for. I know that those answers will only come from God in His perfect time. I am going to write this story to help bring healing to myself and hopefully to others as the story unfolds. In the end may we all look back and see what God has done and give Him great glory because we have all become a little more real and because as is His promise.....He worked it all out for our good.

Come back soon and hold on tight .... the story is about to begin......