“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. 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.” C. S. Lewis

Why love, when losing hurts so much? To me it’s like saying ‘why eat, when you’re just going to get hungry again?’ The answer is simple, we need food to survive. As such, we humans are built to need love. We can’t help it. The unfortunate thing is loving can hurt. Love makes us vulnerable to heart break of all depths. This, of course, is because of our fallen sinful world. And yet, all of us, every person on the face of the planet that has ever existed, wants to, and even needs to, love and be loved. But choosing to love, in a deep way, in a steadfast way, is asking for hurting, it is choosing the possibility of suffering over safety. And it is worth it. Why?

 “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Alfred Lord Tennyson

Husbands/Wives, realize that God only gives us so much time on this earth. Be vulnerable and love each other more and with boldness this week, knowing that in one another you have a gift from God. Simply choose to love more. How?

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” Ephesians 5:22-33

Grace and Peace,

Josh