Risky Business

Risky Business

“Of all arguments against love,” writes C. S. Lewis, “none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’”^a Lewis readily admits his own preference for what he calls “safe investments and limited liabilities.”^b If only it were that easy. At the same time, he also sees the danger of nurturing a steadfastly cautious heart: “The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love,” he writes, “is Hell.”^c

Not much of a choice, is it?

Once you’ve loved deeply and lost—a friend, a significant other, a mate, a child, or even a pet—you’re undeniably vulnerable. To love again is no assignment for the weak or timid. Loving with abandon demands courage, but it is surely a risk worth taking. “Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it,” writes the apostle Paul, “because it does” (1 Corinthians 14:1, MSG).

God’s story abounds with courageous characters who went hard after love when it would have been easier to retreat. There is Mary, the unwed teenage mother of God-in-the-flesh who trusted God’s plan. Then there is Ruth the Moabite, who lost her husband then forsook her homeland to travel with her also-widowed mother-in-law to a place she’d never seen. She came to Israel as an exile and a beggar and became grafted into the lineage of Christ himself! Don’t even get me started on Abraham: asked to sacrifice his long-promised son, Isaac, on a bonfire of unquestioned devotion. I can’t fathom that kind of risky love.

I’ve read the stories. This kind of beyond-human-limits love is possible—but only when we know we are loved beyond all limits by God himself. We can be sure we are loved in just this way because God did for us what he did not, in the end, require of Abraham: he sacrificed his Son on our behalf.

Love is not safe. But God has loved us anyway. Will you take on the risky business of loving as you’ve been loved?

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.

1 John 4:7, NASB

^a C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991), 120.

^b Ibid.

^c Ibid., 121.