My children recently “borrowed” (stole) a copy of a storybook version of Toy Story 2 from a friend. They are obsessed. I was reading it to them for the 30th time, when a thought caught me so off guard that I nearly teared up. 

If you aren’t familiar, the basic story is that Woody (the cowboy toy) is mistakenly included in a yard sale by the mom of his kid, Andy, and is stolen by a toy collector. The collector brings Woody back to his apartment, which is filled with Woody merchandise and memorabilia. When Woody arrives in this strange new place filled with pictures of his own face, he meets the toys that were designed as his companions (sold separately). The “round-up gang” consists of Jessie, the cowgirl, Bullseye, Woody’s trusted horse, and Stinky Pete the Prospector.

While we learn that Jessie and Bullseye are secondhand finds like Woody, Stinky Pete the Prospector is still in the box. Stinky Pete explains that now that Woody has been found, they can finally be sold as a complete set to a Japanese museum, where they will be on display. For a while, Woody is entranced by this idea of fame and luxury – no more under-the-bed dust or risk of being forgotten by a boy who keeps getting older. But when Buzz Lightyear and the rest of Andy’s toys finally make their way to Woody to rescue him, he snaps out of it, and remembers that he is a toy. He is meant to be loved by a kid. 

For all the mess, the unpredictability, the painful inevitability of their getting older and leaving the toys behind, the greatest thing a toy can be is played with and loved by a kid. He looks to the rest of the round-up gang and calls for them to come with him. He reminds them that they are meant to be loved by a kid too, tells them that there is room in Andy’s home for all of them, that they don’t have be in a museum, they can still be toys. Jessie and Bullseye can hardly believe it, their hearts had been so broken by the kids before that they had never assumed they would be played with again. 

But Stinky Pete stops them. He climbs out of his box, for the very first time, in order to make sure that Jessie, Woody, and Bullseye don’t leave. He knows that they can’t be sold as a set with even one of them missing, so, on wobbly, unused legs, he stands between them and escape. This is the scene that got me. Because Stinky Pete doesn’t know. 

Stinky Pete has never been out of the box. He has never been played with. Stinky Pete the Prospector, the villain of this movie, is trying to keep Woody, Jessie and Bullseye away from a kid who does and will love them, trying to keep them in glass boxes for all time because he thinks that is the best they can hope for. He doesn’t know. 

He doesn’t know that the beautiful, messy, impermanent, reality of being loved by a kid is what toys are for. 

I thought of all of us in church work, in the work of ministry, missions, non-profit, who so often work alongside people who just don’t see what we see. Who don’t know how good it can be, who don’t know that life lived in loving, messy, devastatingly imperfect and impermanent institutions and people, life lived devoted to a Christ who calls into the middle of the mess, is what human souls are for. 

We all work alongside people who are so busy protecting what they have always known that they are unable to see the thing that they are really called to, the thing that is so much more beautiful than what they could have ever imagined.

Stinky Pete eventually gets shoved in the backpack of a little girl at the end of the movie. It’s played as comeuppance (the little girl’s backpack is filled with creatively re-painted Barbie dolls) but it makes me smile. Stinky Pete does eventually learn what it means to be loved by a kid. He learns kicking and screaming, but he learns nonetheless. 

We don’t get to shove people in backpacks, and we don’t always get neat endings for the people who we would wish could see what they were missing. But maybe we can hold on to that dream for all the people and institutions that we see as villains, the ones that we think fall short of the calling the Holy Spirit places on them, the ones that don’t see what they could be. 

Maybe we can hold the empathy it takes to remember that they are reaching for the best outcome they can imagine for themselves, that it might not be their fault they can’t imagine anything better. Maybe we can, like Woody, make the invitation into deeper ways of being, even if we know it probably won’t be heard. And maybe, we can hope against hope, that their love and calling will find their way to them, and they’ll come out of the box for good.