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 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. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. “I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.” Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. 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 the way in which they should break, so be it.
—C.S. Lewis (from The Four Loves)
For reflection — Matthew 25:14-30
Time flies! That is inevitable as long as we are on this side of eternity. Even though our present bodies continue to grow old and decay, we can be comforted by the fact that our spiritual being continues to grow strong.
Why is there such a frustration about time with most of us? I believe it is because we are not made for 'time' but 'eternity'. The spiritual man is still young and he will always be frustrated by the confinement of time
After more than half a century on this earth, I still feel like a curious child - always wanting to learn more, understand more, reach out for more and grow.
The spiritual child in us needs to be nourished and strengthened day by day. After all we are made for eternity and not for a mere three scores and ten on this earth.
Rev Albert Kang
