I just finished reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. Interestingly enough, I am also studying 1st John which is, in a great part, about love. Here is one of my favorite quotes from Lewis.
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly 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; aviod all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in the 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 of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
He continues later...
"God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He e creates the universe, already forseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffoctaion as the body droops, the repeasted torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. ...This is Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. - C.S. Lewis
Where will my love lie? Will I attempt to protect my heart by burying it in a "casket of my own selfishness" or will make myself vulnerable to hurt and pain as I share the love God has shown me?
"...if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another..."
1 John 4:11
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