pounding heart, pounding nails

One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes goes like this:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart 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."

I first read this during a Family Group study sometime during my junior year.  I don't remember what the study was about (sorry Josh...), but this quote stuck out to me.

I just don't understand why it's so hard to love and not get hurt.  Why can't everyone just love one another and be happy, all the time?  This sounds so... happy-go-lucky, it's sickening.  Of course I know why.  We all sin, we want what's best for ourselves, and in the end, whatever love we find with another person is only temporary.  If a host of other factors doesn't kill the relationship, death will.

In college, I screwed up a lot of friendships with my "open book" personality and habit of delving into everyone's personal lives to make sure they were "okay."  Even now, any defensive, flat, or hostile comments from friends are bound to set me off into a tailspin of "oh my God, what did I do wrong?  Why can't I love people?"  On the one hand, this is arrogant - and on the other, it's completely impractical - you simply can't live that way.

Many times, I have tried the opposite tactic - of nailing my heart in that coffin - of ignoring and breaking friendships in my head in drastic scenarios.  My thinking: if I can't love everybody equally well, and all the time, then I'm not going to love anyone - I can't deal with the hurt.  The problem?  Every single time I pound a nail into my coffin of security, I come up short.  Relationships, more often than not, revive, and it's only myself that I'm torturing.

Every single time I pound a nail into my coffin, I feel like I'm pounding one into Jesus, stretched out on that cross.  And this is why I cannot stop loving.  This is why love is "the greatest of these."  (1 Cor. 13:13).  This is why, even though it hurts like hell sometimes, I will keep loving - because Jesus did it first.  May all of us continue to follow His example.

Edit: The C.S. Lewis quote comes from his book The Four Loves.