“Love anything and your heart will be broken and wrung out. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact, you must give it to no one. Wrap it up carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, and airless..it will change. And maybe it will not be broken.. but it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis
A sermon I heard lately brought up an awakening question to me. The pastor was talking about grieving. Not just grieving big losses in our lives, such as losing someone close to us…but grieving over even the small experiences in our lives and in the lives of those we are close to. An idea was posed that if we are not “grieving” or feeling even the slightest hurt in our hearts for the things in our lives, then we might not be loving fully.
Hearing this was extremely difficult, because the second I absorbed the concept, it absolutely resonated with me. I questioned if it resonated with others as well. Were they curious about how they were loving too? Could you be bad at loving others?
This made me wonder..
- When was the last time I was really upset or effected by a shocking news story that popped up on my news feed?
- When did I last feel deeply hurt when a friend or family member was hurting?
- When was the last time I felt true remorse for an environment or human being I was giving to?
Just as I sat worrying about how the heck I was going to learn to “love more fully”.. God began to expose me to the idea of vulnerability…and loving others openly, mutually, and limitlessly through this vulnerability.
So what is vulnerability?
I see vulnerability to be when we reactivate all of the areas in our lives that we have potentially gone numb to. Numbness coming from being overly busy, just going through the motions, living for the next moment, or even from self-protecting.
The struggle is that these things can unknowingly build walls in us. Walls that block us from intimacy within our relationships, therefore possibly even resulting in a lack of intimacy with God.
I was numb. Numb because I had thrown my relationships into the same category as my tasks and goals. The effort I put into loving others was reflecting the minimal effort that I was putting into my to-do-list-centered days. The default responses that were present in my daily life were now seeping into my relationships. And love is not a default response.
I think that God wants us to live in a way where we are connected to Him through our relationships with others. But what if we are not connecting fully with others? Is that then not connecting us to God? If we are numb and cannot accept love in our relationships with others are we therefore numb to accepting God’s love fully?
I believe that God wants us to love vulnerably for many reasons, but one of them most obviously being the resemblance of vulnerability that God offers us through Jesus. God became a baby-through Jesus- an extremely dependent, needy, and vulnerable infant. Rather than building up our pride and independence, distancing us from others, shouldn’t we seek to be what God resembles? If God was vulnerable, shouldn’t we aim to be too?
Growing up as a teen I would cling to my independence and believe I was just awesome, taking so much pride in living alone, accomplishing my dreams alone, overcoming darkness alone… until one day it hit me that I was becoming bitter, resentful, cold, distant, and self-centered. Avoiding love in my relationships was causing my heart to change. As C.S. Lewis brought up, my heart might have been safe and comfortable, but it was motionless. It needed to be revived.
I had created a self-imposed prison for myself because I wasn’t taking even the smallest risks in my relationships. I had created a prison from comfort.
So how can we revive ourselves?
By being vulnerable.
We live in a society of individualism where some of us fear looking “weak” or “too emotional”. We fear asking for help and seeming incapable and dependent.
I am surrounded by many beautifully strong, independent, and selfless women on campus, and sometimes when we are all talking about our weeks, I notice that we all are guilty of doing the same thing before we begin talking. We warn and we apologize. “I’m sorry…just warning you.. I might get emotional.”
Are we programmed so much by a society that encourages to not need anyone but yourself that we truly forget that it is okay to vulnerably share ourselves, to feel, to open up?
One of my psychology classes coincidentally brought up recently that we shame ourselves for feeling and for allowing ourselves to get close to others.. because of this culture of individualism.
Brene Brown, author of “Daring Greatly”, states that we are in an empathy deficit today because we are numb and are not revealing our full selves in our relationships. Because we feel shameful by our culture’s expectations to be tough and strong, this lack ofvulnerability becomes the center of emotional difficulties in our lives.
Brene says that although this is true, vulnerability is also the birthplace of every single positive emotion that leads us to truly live rather than simply exist. Being vulnerable will lead us to true joy, authentic closeness with others, belonging, and unconditioned love without limits.
And if our relationships here on earth are an extension of our relationship with God, then I truly believe we will then achieve this joy, closeness, belonging, and unconditioned love with Him too. But you cannot have one without the other.
We can convince ourselves that we don’t need this closeness in all of our relationships and ignore the fact that we are longing for it deep down.
I spent so many years of my life convincing myself of this, aiming to be the most self-sufficient person there ever was. Needing no one. And I thought this was great, because I was building my identity…which I thought would eventually make it so much easier to find my true friends and my “soul mate”. But what no one tells you is that having this mindset is also dangerous. If you live your life believing that only yourself can sustain you, then this mindset might seep into your relationships with others and with God. And then there is no true need to have either relationship in your life. So your relationships sit, dangling by a thin strand, because neither one of you actually needs each other.
But we do need each other. To grow in ourselves. To grow in our faith. To become better. To learn to adopt God’s love.
Like C.S. Lewis quoted, we can choose to be vulnerable and uncomfortable, or to do the opposite. We can have surface level relationships and distance ourselves, wanting to be independent or just wanting to avoid the risk that relationships offer. We can choose to really open up and love others, risking to hurt when they hurt, or risking being hurt by them… or we can choose to avoid hurt at all costs.
I think that God wants us to break, bend, and hurt.. and come to Him through it all. If we are vulnerable and uncomfortable we are more likely to need Him. If we are comfortable, safe and secure, with an untouchable heart, the need for God lessens.
This is all so much easier said than done. I would personally still like to ignore this all and just go back to living my life as it was- comfortable and secure. But I know that this is not living.
So maybe we should go the extra step..
-Really hear someone’s story and allow it to open you up about a time you felt the same way. Don’t just appease them. Listen and express that hurt too.
-Ask for help, even if you desperately want to prove you can do it all on your own.
-Look someone right in the eyes rather than diverting your gaze and tell them exactly what’s sitting in the back of your mind, even if doing so makes you the “weaker” person.
-Don’t apologize, just express how you feel and be okay with it.
“To be loved is to be known. And to be known is to be loved”
Without vulnerability we cannot be fully known or know others. Therefore we cannot fully love or be loved.
