Living in a Rubber Room (Part 3)
Among all the pain that a person may experience, emotional pain is perhaps the greatest. A stubbed toe stops hurting in a few moments, a small cut, a few days, a broken bone, several weeks, but emotional pain can last for years, decades, and even an entire lifetime. When we risk sincerely loving another person, we risk the consequences of a lifetime of emotional pain, but we also risk gaining great joy as well. True love produces both possibilities. Why must there be negative consequences to bad choices?
So that love can be shown to be genuinely love, and not just an insincere expression.
Is love worth the risk? Rejecting the possibility of having love in our life is just another “rubber room,” a place where we will be protected from emotional pain, but at the loss of real relationships, which everyone actually desires most in this world. When we refuse to love others, we also fall into a profound self-absorption, a selfishness from which we will never recover. But to learn to love, we must risk suffering, and to risk suffering, we need a world that is not safe, sanitized, and preventative of all harm.
Is it worth it to love anyway? Yes. As the poet says, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” A world with no risk, is a world with no love, and who wants to live in that world?
Love brings people together instead of separating them. Love causes us to draw nearer to God and to one another. Love gives us that which we long for most in this world, meaningful relationships with other people, and most of all, with God Himself. Love “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14 ESV).
God bless you, and I love you.
Kevin Cauley