Hi fellow dater and maters… As a Christmas gift to myself, I am re-sharing my favorite quote. It seems very appropriate for the season — when we get all wrapped up in gifts, decorations and command performances. I’ve decided to slow down enough to really seek to LOVE my family as I get to spend time with them this year and to try not to let all the holiday hooplah get in the way.

Happy Holidays and enjoy…

How do you hide from love? Do you even admit to yourself that your business, distractions, hobbies, walls, gossip, busy-ness, activities, charities and addictions hide you from the possibility of loving and being loved?

Each thing that fills life to the point of pushing others out is a way to a slow death by attrition. Killing yourself hobby by hobby and word by word. Hiding your heart away from any possibility of being changed, vulnerable, broken, loved and redeemed. There is no safe way to find love. And yet, it is the one thing that life yearns for beyond anything else. At times to the point of literal death in the face of loving and protecting someone from harm.

C.S. Lewis puts it better than anyone I’ve ever seen in this quote from his book “The Four Loves”

“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 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 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.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness…We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.

If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.What I know about love and believe about love and giving ones heart began in this.”

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