The Valentine I miss most...URLUVED....


"There is in all of us an apparently infinite, and certainly, ultimate need for a rich, abiding, trustworthy love. This is a love that reaches in and through the self, outward to others, and upward to the highest in the universe. In the ordinary world, even the world of religion, this craving finds extremely rare fulfillment. But a dawning understanding is the key to its creative source and the beginning of its increase and transformation:that man was known and loved profoundly even prior to mortal birth;that love, indeed, drew him and his Eternal Father together in a sphere of perfected light and glory; that he, distinct from all other beings, animate or inanimate, in the universe, is chosen and begotten spirit of the Divine...there is a flame that is rekindled when a prophet testifies in the 20th century as Jesus Christ did in the first, "God is our Father" AN intuitive flash dissipates theological and psychological speculation. A luminous nostalgia arises in us. And as if from a far off center, the glow of an evanescent past reawakens responses of awesome love we find it impossible to describe." Eternal Man ----Truman Madsen



  I had been TOO busy, working full-time, home-schooling the kids, looking at my piles of laundry
and wondering if I even made a difference.  Jess was reading the Velveteen Rabbit as part of another school assignment...I think I was half listening, having heard this story many times, and then something happened. I heard this part...
"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.

When I heard this part, I started crying. Maybe I  had been worried I had seen too much, been through too much and maybe wondered if I was even "myself"  anymore. In someways, maybe I even  worried that I was a broken toy.  
"Does it hurt?" I am SO glad the horse did not lie, because the trials that stretch ourselves and mold us certainly are not comfortable.  When Jess, read this silly rabbit story to me, though, something stirred in my heart...it was a strong memory, certainly almost a sense of homesickness. And then an overwhelming sense of my Heavenly Father's love  came rushing in and whispered, "You are REAL and you are MINE!."

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