Vulnerable

"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 an animal. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and luxuries, avoid all entanglements and keep it safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in the casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." CS Lewis The Four Loves

I've given my heart to men. I've given it to family. I've given it to friends near and far. I've had it broken by infidelity, I've had it broken by shattered hopes and dreams, I've had it broken by unmet expectations of friendship. No doubt along the way I've shattered others' hopes and let down friends' expectations of close relationship. And yet I refuse to see heart break as a position of victimhood but instead view it as a consequence of love - not an easy state to understand, even harder to control but a proof, if you like, of an ability to love freely, to relinquish control for however fleeting the moment and be vulnerable. I remain resolute that to love is to live, inspite of the risk of heart break because to live without love is to live without God and that I cannot do.