ADVENT DAY 16: LESSONS FROM A CHILD'S STORY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
The_Velveteen_Rabbit

ADVENT Devotional Day 16: Luke 8: 5 - 16. "Jesus Taught with Stories."
Read a story to a younger child.
It is probably no surprise that an inspirational and children's author is a lover of stories. Asking me to name my favorite story would be like asking a botanist to name their favorite flower, or an astronomer to name their favorite star! Indeed, it is their passion and love for the array of the world they have immersed themselves that is the reason they do what they do! I won't bore you with the exhaustive list etched in my heart of wonderful children's literature, but I will tell you of one of my many favorites. Perhaps, since I have been collecting it in many editions, formats and even with a few puppets to engage the telling of it with children - it is on the shorter list of favorites ("shorter," being, all things considered, a relevant term).

I am going to tell you the story behind the story of my devotional today, as anything worth telling always has an elaborate backstory. My love of this children's story, at least stems from a poignant experience with my grandparents, set in one of many tumultuous moments of my young life.

One time I was privy to a discussion they were having about my father, a not long returned Viet Nam Veteran. More specifically, a POW. He was at the time, unbeknownst to me in terms, struggling with the lasting effects of untreated, self-medicated Post Traumatic Stress. This was a result of the physical, emotional and psychological sacrifices he made, the tortures he endured and the pain and suffering that wracked his soul even more than the physical injuries and scars that betrayed any privacy he may have wished to have with all of it.

My grandfather was a stoic WWII Veteran, who had had his own poignant and well-kept version of war-time experiences and lasting effects from his Navy time in the Pacific Theater. At the time, he was deeply frustrated with his son-in-law. He was carrying on about this, "generation of men that never grew up." He was doing so, in his passionate style that didn't just border on ranting when he was intimately angered with petty things like women and children being abandoned - especially his own. Times like these, he would talk of things like, "Peter Pan Syndrome," in a fashion that could be mistaken for anyone who didn't know him as nothing less than stark raving, or at least, mumbling - mad.

I will never forget, sitting there at the breakfast table with them, probably a wide-eyed child, whom he thought was too young to understand at four or five, what he was attempting to complain of in code. This is when my soft as a diamond of a grandmother handed him his crack of dawn fixings as she had for at least 4 decades, put her hand on his shoulder, and gently interjected, "Not Peter Pan, George. The Velveteen Rabbit."

In a rare moment of my grandfather's heartfelt, appreciative admission, if not in words, than expression, of who was really in charge in the family of anything of real substance - his painful disappointments for his heartbroken daughter, wide-eyed granddaughter, and (once again) incarcerated son-in-law...all muted.

As most everyone knows of this most inspired analogy, The Velveteen Rabbit, telling of wise things as only children stories can tell them - I won't explain the story. I will just leave you to think of all the ways it applies in life, and the importance of remembering, as Jesus taught - how LOVE is the greatest commandment. It is the universal key which unlocks all doors, and truly, the only true answer to everything. Indeed, it makes us all REAL.