The Wound of Love

C. S. Lewis wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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.  To love is to be vulnerable.

There is a certain wound that is created when you find yourself in the place of saying goodbye to something or someone you love sooner than you expected.  This happened to our family this week as we said goodbye to our nine year old puppy, Shelby.  

In looking back it seems like it should be odd that it was unexpected.  We had been struggling with weight loss and had many more vet visits in the last 6 months than she had since she was a puppy.  Somehow though as you are actively working on issues, it seems you can lose sight of the extent of the change going on.  You get absorbed in the details of managing the problems caused by the illness and miss seeing the bigger picture.  

Suddenly, something happens to change your perspective and you can look back and see how so many things tie together.  For me, I think that has happened in the last 24 hours.  

All of the sudden the reality of what we have been living in as a family, while trying to walk through the experience we did not fully comprehend we were going through, made various reactions both my husband and myself have experienced over the past couple of weeks find perspective.  

I often times struggle with what to make of the drama that can be Facebook.  In the middle of our sick puppy struggles, I actually found myself doing that again, but somehow now on the other side of things I get some clarity as to why certain things triggered emotions.

My husband happens to be extremely logical.  There isn't really a lot of emotion tied to most of what he says or does.  He saves the emotion for the more important things: me, our daughter, our baby in waiting and our puppies are some of his top priorities for expressing emotion.  Fortunately for him, a Facebook status that gets attacked as insensitive has less impact then it does for me.  Last week one of my struggles in the middle of walking through this experience of declining health with our puppy, who would leave us too soon, was my husband experiencing some extremely emotional responses to a Facebook post.  Normally, I can shake it off and move on, but something about these responses have stayed with me even a week later.

I have realized as I have thought about it more how much we fail to stop and think before jumping in to give an opinion someone's observation.  To defend the fact that maybe the article we decided to share felt like a knife to someone else's chest because of what they were going through.  For me some of the comments left me feeling like my husband was being told that the one posting was hoping I would get cancer so he knew what it felt like.

Our reality...

We were dealing with the situation even if we weren't completely aware of it in the moment.  The pain associated with seeing the articles people thought of as inspiring were too real for us.  We were watching the energetic puppy we loved waste away.  We did not have the diagnosis of cancer so we were fighting something we did not even realize we were dealing with, but we were experiencing it very acutely.

And then came Wednesday, the day we had to say goodbye too soon to our once energetic, little Boston, Shelby.  The puppy, who prepared us for our just as energetic little girl, Myka.  Who loved to play tug-o-war, but also loved cuddling for naps and movies.  

It is amazing the capacity for love we have as humans.  I am completely convinced we never tap into it's full potential.  At times like this I think it is because of the gapping wounds that love leaves whenever we experience loss.  We then attempt to wrap our hearts carefully with things that just brush the surface and give us false feeling without ever really risking giving our love to something that could make us feel that deeply again.  We tap into others emotions through blog posts, magazine articles and even Facebook posts and think we have felt.

Wounds hurt, whether they are inflicted by others or whether they are experienced by loss.  

To love is to be vulnerable.  

As Lewis so beautifully put it:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.

It is true.  Whether it is a dog or cat, a child, spouse, even a church family.  To love means to be vulnerable.  It means to open yourself up to the emotional rollercoaster that reminds us we are alive.  To love is to connect to God through another, whether that other is animal or human.  To love also means to open yourself up to a portion of the pain that God feels in his interactions with us.

To truly love in that way is to touch the heart of God.

The Reflection in the Cross

Today I stopped.  

Exhaled.

And for a few stolen moments I allowed myself to walk through a nature park.  

In doing this, taking this time, I realized how much I push this to the back of my list even though I know I desperately need it.  I need that time alone to hear from God.  Somehow I convinced myself over the past few weeks that because I was at home with no one around that I should have been getting my soul fed by solitude.  However, there is something that I have discovered in the past few years about time alone in nature that draws me closer to God and irrevocably changes me.

Today, as I started my walk my head was full of white noise.  The what if's and what should I do's of life that clamor so loudly for my attention.  As I moved into the park I was greeted by the waterfall that has been created by the run off from the lake into a little creek.  While it was the sound of water moving through it's natural environment it had a loud sound that mimicked the sound of the white noise I had brought into the park with me.  

As I followed the path I had started on the loud sounds of the waterfall, moved to a gentler sound of the babble of the creek that ran to my left.  Less noisy, but still a busy sound that while quieter than the rush of the white noise and falls, it still carried a busyness with it.

As I moved a little further down the path, I arrived at the edge of the lake that creates a centerpiece for this little nature preserve.  It had a stillness, a quietness that was so beautiful it demanded emotion.  As I just listened though, I heard the slightest lapping of the water as the breeze skimmed across the otherwise still surface in front of me.  

As I stood there I recognized the need that my soul had been begging for the moment to experience the gentle brush of the breeze that is God's presence.  It has been begging me to move away from the waterfall of white noise and even the distraction of the babbling creek of activity and just be still.  

Introvert or extrovert, I am completely convinced that there moments when we can only truly connect to God in moments of stillness.  When we find those moments to stop the busyness that we choose to engage in that we fill our lives with and just let God show us how he sees us.  

When we run through life from one thing to the next, we fill our seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and even years with the white noise that sends us to look to others for our reflection.  When our life is the rushing waterfall or the babbling creek it is impossible for us to see our reflection as God intended us to see it.  We will always see a distorted version of ourselves that leaves us believing we are less than who we were created to be.  

We have entered the season of Lent.  

The time we remember the events leading up to Christ death on the cross.  

Have you ever stopped to reflect on the fact that Jesus, the Son of God, went away in solitude prior to the events we remember on Good Friday and Easter?  

Even Jesus needed a moment of silence, some relief from the white noise, an opportunity for whitespace before he could assume the burden of the cross.  

Today, on my walk I was struck by all of the burdens we take on ourselves.  The crosses we take on and carry.  Church work, children's activities, charity commitments, small groups and the list goes on.  Activities that are well intentioned, but do we actually stop to ask if they are the crosses God wants us to carry?  

Jesus went to Calvary with one specific cross.  It was the cross that God had planned for him from the beginning of time.   Even with that one cross, Jesus needed someone to help him with that particular burden.  God had also planned the exact person, who would help him carry that particular cross.

It makes me ask of myself, how many crosses have I tried to carry that were not mine to pick up?  Was I less than successful because they were never mine in the first place so that one person who I needed to help me with them was not there?  It makes me think that sometimes the moments we experience failure can be because we have picked up something we were never meant to pick up and it is impossible to find the reflection of what God sees in us through that cross.  Since God never intended it for us, there is no reflection of who he is molding us into represented there.  When we fail to find that we look to others for the reflection we hope to find and then we begin to become distracted by the babble of the creek.  When we carry the cross we were not intended to long enough, the babble turns into a waterfall of white noise and we then exhaust ourselves trying to find the reflection that can only be found in the stillness of the lake where God's breath can be felt.

Is there a cross that you are carrying that you might not have been intended to carry?  Are you in a place where you are overwhelmed by the waterfall of white noise?  What steps do you need to take to introduce the stillness of the lake where you can feel the breath of God so that you carry only the cross meant for you?