There Is No Safe Investment

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. 

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. 

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart 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."

I think of these words and I think of how easy they are to say and how much harder they are to live. I think of the false security we feel when we hold ourselves back from uncertain investments, and the false realities we create when we take on too many of them. I tend to be guilty of the latter. But whatever end of the spectrum you fall on, the real truth lies C.S. Lewis' first sentence- there are no safe investments. No matter how safe you feel, no matter how vulnerable you are, nothing is safe and nothing is certain. 

As a person who does not shy away at most uncertainties, I feel fine about this. But it's that same appetite for uncertainty that makes me feel less than fine when others play it more safe than myself. To me, I see that and I want to kick and scream and say "see above! It's not safe, it's never been safe, and the safer you try to make your life, the less of it there is to live." And that is where, while I feel like I am right, I am wrong. 

Because I can't tell you how to love and I can't tell you how to feel  and I can't tell you what to do in the face of uncertainty and it's not my job to make those calls for anyone but myself. But I can love, and I can continue to love, knowing that there is no safe investment and that nothing is certain, but that its worth it in the end because to feel that much means that I'm alive. And while it may not change anything, when has the world ever been worse off because there's a little more love in it than there was before?  

"It is not the critic who counts; not the

man who points out how the strong man

stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could

have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually

in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and

sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who

errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and

shortcoming; but who does actually strive to

do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms,

the great devotions; who spends himself in a

worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph

of high achievement, and who at the worst, if

he fails, at least fails while daring greatly..."

Theodore Roosevelt

I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks 

for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses 

in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers 

that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and 

all the good things that a good God gives.

| Ann Voskamp |

This season has been one of thanks. There's been lots of good and there's been lots of learning, and I am filled with thankfulness for it all. Thankful for all that God has been doing, thankful for seeing His hands in everything. Thankful for being given open eyes and an open heart that wants to seek Him. Thankful for wanting to be present in life. Thankful that even though it's been a long past couple of years and in spite of everything that has happened, God has brought me here, to this place, in this moment, where I can see that it wasn't for nothing and that there is a purpose behind it all.