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.