Valentine’s Day and wedding planning and life with others has had me thinking a lot about vulnerability and love and in thinking about those things, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis’ brilliant observation about love.

“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.” - C.S. Lewis

I think often we confuse love with romantic feelings or sensations. We get swept up in the emotion of it all, especially when in a relationship and we hyper focus on the before and after. We remember life sans “love” and how it’s exponentially different now that we have this previously elusive feeling in our life. But love isn’t how someone makes me feel.

“People don’t like love, they like that flittery flirty feeling. They don’t love love - love is sacrificial, love is ferocious, it’s not emotive. Our culture doesn’t love love, it loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without paying anything for it.” - Matt Chandler

I don’t love Adrian because of how he makes me feel. I love Adrian because he has daily sacrificed himself for me. I love him because for the past 1255 days it has been since I’ve known him, he has shown me kindness and grace and reminded me to turn to Christ. He hasn’t shied away from hard conversations or conflict. He hasn’t withheld anything. He has been vulnerable and honest and has relentlessly shown me grace and mercy.

I think we’re lucky because to some extent, I’ve never felt that “flittery flirty feeling” that Chandler describes. We were friends first, best friends next and then decided that we were better together than we would ever be apart and so there really was no time for any of that. It was brotherly-sisterly love which grew into deep respect and admiration for one another and our walks with God and it was moments of vulnerability that grew into the richest love I’ve ever known.

We’re not perfect. At all. We hurt each other intentionally and unintentionally. We are selfish and impatient and unkind. And that’s okay because what unites us isn’t “being in love” or any of those feelings, because as Lewis again puts it, that is not the highest thing.

“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. …Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

Committed, sacrificial love requires intense vulnerability. It requires you to lay yourself out there for all to see. It is naked and raw and uncomfortable at times but that is love. As the Bible says, we love because He first loved us. And in His ultimate act of love He was literally naked and exposed. He was beaten and bruised and murdered all because He loves us.

Vulnerability is hard. It’s hard to admit to yourself what the darkest, sinful parts of your soul are, let alone to someone else. But the brilliant part is, we already are loved. We are loved and intimately known. There is nothing hidden from God. He knows the shameful parts and the parts were proud of and He loves us all the same. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with Christ and with ourselves then allows us to be vulnerable with others, whether friends or our partner or family.

People will hurt you. They will let you down. But God never will.

Protecting yourself by refusing to be vulnerable is preventing yourself from being loved. That is not the life that Jesus won for you. He defeated death so that you may be free. Free to love without abandon. Free to wear your heart on your sleeve and not live in fear of others because your security is in the shadows of His wings. You can forgive and love with abandon regardless of how others treat you because you’re secure in who He has made you to be and His promises over your life.

Friends, if that’s not the way you’re living can I encourage you to seek help? If you’re experience with love is conditional and protected and kept tight to your soul can I encourage you to practice vulnerability first with yourself and then with trusted love ones until you’re able to love with abandon the people God has put in your lives?

Single or not - we have so much more love to experience than feelings. We have deep, sacrificial, radical love that dies for us so that we may have life and love others with that life.

Let’s live in that love friends.