“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. 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 perterbations of love is Hell.”
C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960) 169.
The generous life calls us to take risks and to set aside selfishness and the perceived safety that luxuries offer. Are you willing to take risks to live and love generously? If not, what are you afraid of?
If Lewis were still with us, I think he would echo Jesus (Mark 8:36) and say: “Do not try to gain the whole world and lose your soul! And don’t say I didn’t warn you of the implications of such decisions.”