My Views on Love-New addition

It was a year ago that I first posted a blog about love. As life is a process of learning,  I feel like posting a simple quote that has extended my understanding.  I read it this year in a book called, The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis.

"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, not even to 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."

This Year I have named the "Year of Charity."  As we all know, love applies to much more than just a significant other.  We love our families and our friends and yes, even our animals.  I have learned what it means to love my co-workers and to love the children I teach.  And, I have completely been hurt, scratched, bruised and broken.  The list of songs about how love hurts is almost as long as the songs about how great love feels.

 But, I think C.S. Lewis is saying God wants us to have love.  He wants us to experience it and he wants us to go through every aspect of it. He wants us to be vulnerable and sick and ancy and joyful and tearful and prayerful.  He loves us and Charity is His pure love.  He wants us to feel it and give it as he has given it.  But, like all gifts, one party must give and another must receive. I have been guilty of not receiving. But living an open life... one that will receive love, will hurt.  I never realized how vulnerable love makes us, yet the bible says,"perfect love casteth out all fear."  

I decided this year would be the year of Charity when in Sunday school, I read in the Book of Mormon 2nd Nephi 26:30, "All men should have charity, which charity is love.  And except they have charity, they are nothing."  What else is Hell than nothing?  To me, hell would be an empty place...void, and soundless, and cold. 

On this Valentine's Day, I wanted to share my limited understanding of something we are blessed to feel, if we are willing to allow ourselves to be vulnerable... and that is love.