so be it.

"Of all the arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you to suffering.'

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Jesus. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything that pleases Him less.

We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus. Even if it were granted that insurances against heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Jesus comes at last to say, 'why have You forsaken me?'

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. 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.

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 armor. If our hearts need be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."

-excerpts, cs lewis.

what God is.

"As long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain - as long as he is thinking of claims and counterclaims between himself and God - he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy." -cs lewis.