Love

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken....To love is to be vulnerable.  -- CS Lewis


Love is a scary thing!! That is what I have found for myself.  Simply put...."Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. " — Fyodor Dostoyevsky 


Why is it such a scary thing? Well I think for myself it is because i have to trust my heart to another.  I have to be vulnerable before another and let go of myself and let God enter that moment! Let God lead that moment and be the center and functioning of it..which is love itself.  That is hard when I like to know what is happening and in control. 
For me I am afraid to be hurt...I am afraid that if I let go completely I will be crushed and duped by another. Thinking things were one way and they were another.  Yet again finding myself trusting how I feel and then finding that how I feel was not reciprocated.  I think that that makes love hard for me as well...the lack of reciprication! If I love another I want that love in return.  Basically, I want to get what I give out! I want to know that I am safe in sharing my heart...Love would not be scary, if I knew I would get a return. 


Sometimes I think, God allows the lack of return to see the heart risk itself--to see the heart sacrifice itself for another.  God wants to see what we are made of at times.  Not that he does not want to see us happy, but he sometimes wants us to see what we are capable of.  He knows that it hurts but by His grace he allows us to see the beauty of the risk to love.  As Christ died for us he took a great risk, that many of the people He would selflessly die for would not love him in return.  That they would scoff and walk away...yes, indeed he was dead on about that! The beauty of the risk Christ took and the example he is to us in our own risk is that, he opened the door for the most unlikely people to embrace the love he died for. So as for us, we learn to live when we learn to die and we learn to love when we learn to risk and be vulnerable!!


What a hard and beautiful gift!  I feel like God is all about giving us good things...he builds a place for them in each one of our hearts, through experience and disappointment.  Then we find one day that through all that stuff, that we felt was fair or unfair, unhealthy or not, a beautiful garden was cultivated, a garden transformed into great love! A love that can either be given or received!  I know that every broken dream, every betrayal, every heart break, rejection, abandonment,  etc all of it God uses to recreate the person that cannot be anything without him.   


The image i get from the words above are of a  potter and the potters wheel.  When you get your clay ready to be formed sometimes you use old pieces of clay to form the new mound to be placed on the wheel.  There is nothing wrong with those old pieces they were just part of pieces that were not strong enough or walls that were not thick enough or pots that were not centered.  What is awesome is that you can take that clay, save it and reuse it to make something again!! God does not throw away our experiences or hurts, he reuses them, and recreates new life from them.  He continues to build us and rebuild us so that we can learn to love and be loved properly.  


Love is scary because we really don't know what we are made of sometimes until put before the proper force!  So love is dreadful and yet beautiful, love brings so much joy and yet at the risk of bringing so much suffering and pain! I do have to say I will take the risk of the suffering, knowing the joy of Love if so sweet.  That although I hurt, at least I loved!