Alcatraz
There is no safe investment.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly 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 of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960), 169-170
Love C.S. Lewis…The words that ring in my ears as I read this Tim, are from Isaiah 61:1, “He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives, And the opening of the prison to [those who are] bound;” Jesus is the only One Who is capable of freeing the captives from their prisons. He is not always ‘safe’. He is love and was broken, because of His great love.
Thanks Kathy. I like Lewis because he tends to meddle with the present. He speaks to lives which are distant from God and shows the undeniable relevance of faith–that it is foundational, not peripheral. He helps me remember that God is not as interested in getting us into heaven as He is getting heaven into us.