Love Lesson #1

Learning to hope. Learning to hurt.

Many of you know that I am on a mission this year: to learn to love. I want to be someone who loves others deeply and robustly. Needless to say, I have a ways to go in overcoming self-centeredness, but I have enrolled myself in the course and am learning from my Teacher. My first lesson in love: Learning to hope.

We all do things to protect ourselves from heartache and I think in many ways this is an important and healthy skill to learn. Proverbs tells us we need to guard our hearts because they are the wellspring of life. But I think I have gotten a little too good at this. I hate disappointment, HATE it. And I have learned that one pretty good way to avoid disappointment is not to get my hopes up. If I don't expect much, it's easier to avoid hurt.

This is one way to live, and not the worst way. But God is showing me that this is not the way of love. Love, after all, always hopes. The deepest love is susceptible to the deepest pain. God, who loves the most, in fact IS love, experiences the most pain as he watches those he loves make choices that hurt him, themselves, and others.

Working with high school students, I've seen some thrive, and some struggle, and some make bad choices and fall. I've ached as I've seen students I love walk down a path I wish I could protect them from. And I think somewhere along the way, I started hoping less for them, because then I wouldn't be so disappointed, I wouldn't hurt so much when they fell. If they did well, I could rejoice! But by not letting myself hope, I protected myself from the heartache. 

But now I'm making a choice to hope and pray the best for people. I'm going to let my heart hope, proceed with less caution, and let myself really feel the pain when life continues to be filled with brokenness. I would rather hope deeply and hurt deeply than continue to build walls around my heart that keep me from loving deeply.