Children/Communications Pastor
Jesus answered, "The most important is, 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."
As seen in this passage from Mark 12, love is multi-dimensional. It's also inherently risky.
Augustine wrote that in every new love there is contained, "the seeds of fresh sorrows."
C.S. Lewis famously stated, "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 of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; instead 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 disturbances of love is Hell."
It costs to love God and to love our neighbor. It involves suffering, and we like to be safe and comfortable. We have a case of risk aversion to the extreme.
Are you willing to learn to love? To love your God with everything you are? To love your neighbor as yourself? It will cost you something. Maybe everything. The seeds of fresh sorrows will be planted and who can know what what will grow in the watering of your heart?
But it's worth the uncertainty. It's what we're called to do as followers of Jesus. To love unreservedly. And we'll never be alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment