Finding Heart

The love we hold back is the love we lose.  I was painfully shy when I was a child.  I found it very difficult to allow myself to trust people.  I found it easier to keep people at arms length.  I always held part of myself back.  However, I have learned that in holding back, I was the one who lost.

When we live our lives as slaves to fear, we miss out on many opportunities to mature as a person.  Measures  taken to avoid the pain of rejection and heartache, often prevent us from becoming fully functional mature adults. We go through life like wounded children, never quite certain of ourselves or our circumstances.

This insecurity heightens our fears, and we build up a persona to mask our terror.  All the while, we anxiously await the moment when the veil drops, and we are exposed for who we are.  If you have ever experienced these feelings, you understand how this vicious cycle spirals down deeper and deeper.  It feels as if there is never a moment when you can just relax and be yourself.

The time comes (repeatedly) when you have to decide whether or not you will stand or run.  If you decide to stand, then you have to risk trusting someone who may stab you in the back, or who may rip your heart right out of your chest, or who may love you unconditionally just the way you are.  They may see your neurosis for what it is: fear, and they may decide to love you through it.  If you decide to stand, then you might have to risk losing the very object of your love.

How can you mature without the risk?  If you play it safe, who wins.  Do you win, even though you're emotionally immature, insecure, and riddled with anxiety? Is that winning?  Does the person who needed your love win, even though you never gave it?  No, the love you keep is the love you lose.

God has blessed me with many wonderful people who have loved me just as I am.  He has also allowed me to be in situations where I had to learn a deeper love through the experience of loss or betrayal.  Before Ellie was born, I could not imagine how parents could endure prolonged illness in their child or how they would survive their child's death.  I didn't know how unimportant I could become (to myself), or that I could totally re-prioritize my life around the needs of another.  Yet, God, in his grace, enabled me to do these things.  

Ellie's premature birth, physical complications, and her subsequent death were so bitterly painful.  Looking back on the situation, I see how God was stretching and growing me each day we had with her.  In a lot of ways, I think my encounter with Ellie brought me into manhood.  Her complications forced me to take on a level of responsibility that I had never faced.  I was responsible for her life, and in that moment I decided I would do whatever it took.  It is a decision I will never regret, even though things didn't turn out as planned.

I could have protected myself.  I could have said no to the idea of adoption.  I could have abandoned Ellie, and left the decisions up to her birth mother, a frightened teenage girl alone in the world.  In God's providence, I took the risk.  I stepped out in faith, and opened my heart to love.  But instead of losing everything, I found a heart.  It was a heart that was deeper and wider, a heart that understood the cost of tough choices and was ready to make them, a heart that rested in knowing God's heart.  I also found a man, who was unwilling to live in fear any longer, a man willing to love no matter what the risk, because he now knows: the love we keep is the love we lose.