loving this side of eternity
May 5th, 2007
[The following is an old piece I never published.]
C.S. Lewis once wrote: There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglement; 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Tomorrow will be three months and my heart still bleeds. Love is a funny thing; without it, what would we have? With it, we become susceptible to pain. And we run from pain like it is something to be avoided at all costs. Karin from the band Over the Rhine sings, “And though we love to numb the pain; we come to learn that it’s in vain; pain is our mother; she makes us recognize each other.”
There’s something to be grappled with within those words.
It’s not until we experience deep pain that we learn to stop and consider others. Pain allows us to get outside of our self and our world and consider those around us. And it forces us to wrestle with the larger questions of life, starting with “Why?”
For some of us, pain makes us come face to face with our creator and many of us would rather not do that. We don’t want to acknowledge that we’re eternal beings; that this pain is a sign that things are not the way they should be. For others, we want to numb the pain, fill our life with convenient hobbies, experience as much “fun” as we possibly can. Pain, in essence, is an inconvenience to our lives, and so we seek to avoid it at all costs.
Oftentimes, pain comes from having loved, so we learn early on to build walls around our hearts so that others cannot hurt us, or if we do allow someone into our castle, and in turn, are hurt, we throw up our walls again, building a stronger fortress this time. We refuse to be hurt again. Simultaneously we try to rationalize our pain away. We blame the other person, we try to make sense of it, we try to make it fit into the puzzle of our lives, but the reality is, sometimes life just hurts and there’s no making sense of it this side of eternity.
So I assess myself; I’m healed; I’ve moved on, but I won’t pretend that the wound on my heart is not there; I am stronger because of it — because God has shown me His love and strength through carrying me through this time.
I would have it no other way.
For to love means one has something to lose, and yes, when one loses it, it can feel like hell. But we should not be afraid to love for the fear of experiencing pain; for it is through our pain that we grow, that we know God more intimately, that God’s strength is exemplified in our brokenness. The Apostle Paul quotes the Lord: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” So, along with Paul, I, too will “boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2 Corinthians 12:9 NASB).
So be it.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:57 am
I grieve with you. I hurt like that once, and it lasted many Many years. I want to tell you this though: You will be healed of that pain. It is like childbirth. Once the child is there and you are holding him in your arms, all the past pain is instintly forgotten.
May 12th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Thanks, Cynthia; God’s faithfulness through the healing process never fails to astound me. I love your analogy; thanks for sharing it.
September 14th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Thank you very much for that awesome piece of text.
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