“To love at all is to be vulnerable. 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.”
Consider those words with me.
Lewis is not admonishing us to stop loving or being loved. He does not seek to turn us into robots who are only task oriented. Instead he is illustrating for us what happens when do not apply the love, from God, we have properly. We know, and we can affirm, that human love involves taking a risk. When we are vulnerable in that way we run the risk of having our love rejected or not reciprocated by the other person.
But what about our love of, and for, God? We may feel that this type of love is not the same thing as the love we express humanly from person to person. But consider what God’s love meant for God and the great lengths God was willing to go in order to continue to love those who did not express, or maybe feel, love for God in themselves or in their choices.
God was willing to be vulnerable in order to love us. God’s vulnerable love, is a love that takes God to the cross for humanity and the ultimate place of separation. It is a love that causes Jesus to constantly be placed into a position of choice in his earthly ministry—to love or admonish and rebuke those who do not understand the gospel’s message. But the love that Jesus shows to his critics is a vulnerable love as well, if we think about it for a second. He cared for them, he loved them, when they may have rejected him.
I wonder how you can express a vulnerable love today? And if you express it, I wonder who it will call you to be present for?
Blessings
Rev. Derek
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