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Risk & Beauty

A few weeks ago, I added another book to my half-read pile. I had to start The Four Loves by CS Lewis after my roommate shared this passage over a dinner discussion:

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 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 constantly fear tragedy. And not just romantic tragedy, but the general life-tragedy type.

Today over lunch, a friend commented that she's seen people walk away from Jesus - "one day turns into two days, and two days turns into three, and before you know it...you're gone." This is one of my biggest fears - because I don't know how it happens, but it does. And I don't want it to happen to me. This song is often my prayer.




BUT I refuse to be driven by fears. I think we need to recognize the risks and the possibilities that we cannot protect ourselves from (or only at great cost), and then recognize that God is bigger and better than all that.

My all-time favourite word is redemption. This song (via Francy) reminds me that there is always hope for redemption, because Jesus makes beautiful things out of dust (us).

Comments

  1. afro-chick3:45 PM

    i love you.
    i hope you enjoy reading "the four loves" by buddy Lewis.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Laura7:51 PM

    He's our only hope. Truly He is.

    ReplyDelete

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