“to love at all is to be vulnerable”

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 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 believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness…We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.
~ C.S. Lewis

God has taught me so graciously this year about my ability to trust. It has taken years and years of hesitation — and prayer — to finally get to the point where I am now. For years… and through many many relationships… I was so brokenhearted and so tender that I would let no one get near my wounds. Not my closest “friends,” not my past boyfriends, or even my parents or… myself.

I was too proud to admit that I had problems trusting. I locked away my heart and did not let myself get hurt in the ways that were still hurting. I promised myself that I wouldn’t open up that part of me. It was a tacit promise — but it was lived through each encounter and relationship that I had. I didn’t trust people to be kind to me, to love me, to want to be around me, to be sincere. I didn’t trust myself to not get hurt again. I would feign trust, feign true love and giving when I wouldn’t give the most important parts of me. And I grew cold and I grew absolutely skeptical of the ability of people to really love me — and of my ability to trust that they love me.

And after one of the worst heartbreaks experienced this past year, I learned a lot about myself. I consciously realized what I was doing and I made a firm resolution that I was going to change it. Unfortunately — I didn’t know how. I didn’t know one bit how I was going to trust people deeper than the surface. So I prayed and prayed for the ability to trust.

To trust God. To trust myself. To trust others.

I am learning to trust and feeling that ability stronger than ever before — but I guess I just didn’t know if it would ever happen. I believed in the power of my prayer so much more than I believed in myself to change. I believed in God to do what is best for me. And I guess that was the first step of trusting — being able to offer to God all of my fears and hesitations and letting Him do with them what He will.

I’m not scared.

I know that to love at all is to be vulnerable.
But love is sacrifice.

And there’s something about trusting God with your heart that truly opens you up to whatever may come down the difficult road that love leads you down.

“if you want it,
come and get it.
crying out loud,
‘the love that i was
giving you was
never in doubt’
let go of your heart
let go of your head
and feel it now”

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