The Four Loves

“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”  –C.S. Lewis

We all go through times when the wringing and breaking happen. The temptation to bury our love in our hobbies and interests is especially strong at those moments of pain. Boy, there are days when I look across the room at my stained glass table and think “you know, I’d be very happy to lose myself in my stained glass work and forget that people even exist.” I imagine you’ve had a day or two like that yourself … or maybe a whole lifetime??

Then I think about the vulnerability of the love of Christ. Not just His death on the cross, but the fact that He ever walked the earth in the first place. He left the realm where the angels worshipped day and night to spend 30 odd years in a broken world where He was loved one minute and reviled the next. Just the incarnation alone was a magnificent statement of His willingness to be vulnerable in His love. He is the King of Kings. Why on earth would He subject Himself to such a humiliating pilgrimage, to die the death of a thief? It was a characteristic of His love to make Himself vulnerable at a level we can’t even comprehend. That’s the same love that we are made the carry, the one that will grow stale and unbendable if we, in our pain, suffocate the life out of it. We will not know, perhaps, until we reach heaven what it will be like to be vulnerable in love without pain. Probably our entire understanding of love will be transformed. But we do know, that here, on earth, Christ demonstrated this important characteristic of love.

So, when that urge comes to bury your love in your hobbies, or work, or whatever else, remember that you are burying it in a coffin. Take the pain to Christ instead and let Him show you how to breathe life into it once again.