“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 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 Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
I can guarantee that you won't find this quote on any of the vast array of Valentine's day cards at Target.
As I have walked through different difficult seasons of life, I have often felt that I would love not to "care so much" and be able to numb the pain in this sinful, broken world for myself and others.
But God, in His graciousness, has not given me that. He has allowed me to experience a fraction of the brokenness that He sees. He has used it to give me love, compassion, selflessness (still very much in process on this one!), and a tiny piece of sharing in the suffering that Christ experienced on my behalf.
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