"What Manner of [Vulnerability] is this?"

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 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 chance. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves


I read this part of C. S. Lewis' Book this week and was blown away. How many times do we look at love like this? Or forget to look at love like this? From my perception, human nature teaches us one of two things about what love is like:


We must guard ourselves. Don't let anyone get too close or they might truly know you and find there is nothing worth loving. Don't dare make yourself appear weak or in need of love, because then people may abuse you.


Or.


We have to "love" everything and everyone: and that meaning being thrown around from relationship to relationship until one special somebody sticks. We cannot avoid being used and broken before finding worth. And hopefully in finding that person, we can get the most out of them, while bandaging our hearts from the past "special someones."


Love, being God's greatest gift to us is perverted in the worst way - in every area - by the enemy. Satan desires to cut us off from God's enraptured heart for us. God desires freedom from the enemy. If purity can be snatched from intimacy, the enemy gains an advantage. One thing that I love about the love of God is that he knows the ways we are attacked, and comes against those attacks with His jealousy. We often forget or don't even realize God's emotions and that he is always longing, always patient, always contending... Even in the midst of what seems to be our biggest failures. 


 Lewis emphasizes in this paragraph that it requires vulnerability to love. The greatest example of vulnerability to me is the act of God creating people. You, me, and everyone. Each one made with a purpose and an extravagant plan in mind. God dreamed the most beautiful dream when he knit our flesh and hearts at our conception. The dream is alive and possible in his heart at any moment of rebellion in our life. He can start with anyone, at any point. 


The Lord is the God of vulnerable love.