Life is messy. Relationships are messy. People are messy. Our choice is to live quiet sweet lives, uninvolved….or to get messy. If you don’t get messy, people won’t affect you…and you won’t affect people…..and that my friends….is a sad empty way to run this race.
C.S. Lewis writes of love and relationships:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it 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. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
I love how Charles Stanley describes a relationship without closeness, without an intimate depth: The lack of intimacy in a relationship with God is from an unwillingness to trust.
Can you trust your God for the messiness of being involved with people? Can you trust your God for the hurt and brokeness that comes sometimes from giving love to show people just how good God is?
Sure you can avoid the mess… But how will you affect people then? You can play it safe… You can be unaffected… It can even look good… A pretty, clean, un-entangled life…. I just don’t want to run the race that way. I want to say I made a difference. I want to know that I was in an intimate relationship with God to the point I trust Him in the messiness that is life …. affecting people
Kristan Russell 