Having been the beneficiary of many, I believe in second chances. What a different world we would live in were it not for second chances. Were it not for the divine gift of second chances, I would have been stone cold dead years ago.
I often think of Easter as symbolic of second chances. There is the dark morass of crucifixion, followed by a sunrise of hope on Easter morning. That is the Easter everyone talks about. There is, I believe, a second kind of Easter that some people are fortunate enough to experience, a personal one, a resurrection of the soul. These are people whose lives have been transformed by love. God, in his magnificent omnipotence, takes a broken life and replaces it with a spirit of renewal.
Margery Williams' well-loved children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit, poignantly illustrates the renewal that comes through love.
“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.”
Love brings the kind of renewal that effects changes. Easter's message of hope and renewal ensures that there will be new life, one that promises to be profound, yet not without some pain as one progresses. This, then, is a second chance at having a new life. Those that have been graced with second chances, as Ms. Williams so sweetly illustrates, " become Real."
