Skip to main content

Risky Business

To love someone is very risky business. It means giving your heart to someone. We hope to not have it broken, but instead have it nurtured and cared for in return. This requires trusting the person you've chosen and yourself. This means allowing yourself to be vulnerable to being let down, but also to being happily surprised. I was looking through my poetry, songs, and journals from many years ago. I wrote mostly about love. How it made me feel, what I wanted from it, what I got from it, how it hurt, how it moved me. In reading these old things, I can relate to some and to other parts I think I could see the melodrama oozing off the pages...literally! I rolled my eyes more than once. Some stuff I still really liked because of the cadence of what I had written. I could still hear it in my head just as I had when I'd written it. And then, I found a favorite piece I'd copied down as a reminder of why we love even at the risk of having our hearts broken.

“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, 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 . . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers. . . .of love. . .is Hell.”
CS Lewis, "The Four Loves"

CS Lewis wrote my favorite books, the Narnia Series. He is impassioned by the Lord and about the reality of the world in which we live and the lives we've created. With tongue-in-cheek he says to "give your heart to no one" as the only means of keeping it protected from being broken. Doing that will allow your heart to become "unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable"...that seems a hefty price to pay. Instead, I agree with Tennyson and would rather to have known love and lost it than to have never loved at all.

We are reminded of the power of our hearts in Proverbs 4:23, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." We're not told to stop loving or giving our hearts away, but to "guard" our hearts. This is a reminder that love is a serious emotion. It is not to be entered into lightly. The heart of another person and your own are at stake here. People have died from a broken heart, taken their own life over their broken heart and have taken the lives of others in the name of it and because of it.

I agree wholeheartedly (pun intended) with Robert Tizon, "I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love." And I ask us all to remember what Mary Schmich said as we pursue affairs of the heart: "Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, don't put up with those who are reckless with yours."

Happy Valentine's Day!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Join the Navy, See the World!

There are things we want in life and make happen, but they don't always happen as we'd planned or imagined. My dad had gone to Ohio University in Athens, OH on a wrestling scholarship. I, too, wanted to go to OU, but since he'd dropped out and it had a reputation as a huge party school, it was going to be a tough sell. So, I did my homework and sell I did. At the time (1990), OU was one of the top 10 colleges for Communications in the U.S. That was the degree I wanted and I wanted to go to OU to get my degree. I graduated early and during the time between my acceptance to OU and the College of Communications and pre-college, I had become further enamored with marine life and sharks specifically and wanted to change my major to Marine Biology which at OU was actually a Zoology degree. The girl tried to talk me out of changing my major because it was so hard to get into the College of Communication and if I left, I would have to reapply and hope for the best in my junior year

Struggles

Struggles. We all have them. My (latest) favorite saying is, "We all have our things." And for me, my "thing" is wanting to eat to fill the emptiness inside. And not like carrots and apples and good for you stuff. Oh, No! The really bad for you stuff. I crave sugary treats. I have been doing so well with my eating lately and have been exercising for the last few weeks as well, but last night nearly took me down. I was struggling with wanting to run--not walk--into the kitchen and make myself a bowl of cereal with some Craisins or a fruit smoothie or a PB&J. I prayed instead. Almost to the point of tears, I begged God for this to pass. I ate some carrots. I drank some more water. I contemplated some tea. I got out my swiss ball and did some wall squats as I watched TV. I had already been out for a walk earlier with ML, too, but I felt like I was coming out of my skin. OBSESSING about eating something. It wasn't food that I wanted, though. I wanted to feed t

Sometimes, Reality is Worse

What if I told you that Joseph/SAM was created to hurt me? Made up to be everything I'd ever want and more? What if I told you everything I believed and knew him to be was an enormous hoax? All because someone wanted to give me what she felt I had given her. All that she felt I had taken from her. I have to admit that while people have hurt me before with their actions and decisions it has been for their own personal and selfish reasons. Usually not with malicious intent.  There has to be a lot of pain and hurt within a person to invest so much into the creation of a fictional character. Someone who would really take the time to know me. Someone who would enlist others to make the ruse real. To call me on the phone, to send me cards from the web, to pick out a card and leave it at a bar where the bartender who gave it to me told me how cute my guy was, to create a Facebook account with pictures and friends, to bring an ex-wife into the mix, pictures from the desert and your trave