You've gotta gamble everything for love.

The title today comes form a lyric by Ben Lee from the song Gamble Everything For Love, sure to be a 2006 camp song. Click the title to visit his website.

Love. I suppose more than any other word, more than any other concept, that I hold in high regard I have the most to learn still about love. I had a couple hour conversation with one of my favorite youth Sunday night. She has kind of disappeared the last few months and so we finally got to talk. She expressed that she knew she was pushing people away. She was scared of being hurt and losing people she loved. I reminded her of this quote.

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 to 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves

Yestreday wasn't a very good day for me emotionally. I was irritable and distracted. I attended a meeting with people whose opinion I don't really value and heard some discouraging news from two or three people I care about-seems life is hard for everybody these days.

Have you ever seen the movie As Good As It Gets? It stars Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear as a man with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a woman with a sick son and a longing to be loved, and a gay man with estranged parents respectively. They are traveling together in a car to meet the gay man's parents (he's been hospitalized and has considerable medical bills) and he's sharing his story with them, much to the woman's interest and Jack's characters annoyance. She says that they should listen because they all have these horrible stories and he quips, "That's not true. Some of us have great stories, with friends at the lake, and noodle salad. That's our story-great times, noodles salad. Just nobody in this car. What makes it bad is not that you have it so bad, but that you're so pissed that some people have it so good."

I don't know if that's true, if some people have lives unjaded by living. I think I probably would be pissed if I knew any of them. I can't change how my life has unfolded or the lives of anyone else. So I'm left trying to learn as much as I can from my own experiences and the accumulated wisdom of others.

In light of the profound wisdom of Mr. Lewis and the common sensical truth of Mr. Nocholson I offer this affirmation to you, to the kid afraid to love, to me on my darker days:

I would rather be a crazy man who loves with reckless abandon, wounded and broken at times but still longing, than be a sane and scarless man alone at the end of the day. (This line I've heard somewhere) Love is the only sane act.

And so in that spirit I approach these days with a new sense of commitment. There are calls I need to make to people I love that are hurting, at least one hospital visit I need to make, and several emails I want to return to people I've missed in recent weeks. It is a slow climb out of darkness. But at the top of this heap awaits a renewed sens of hope and the fulfillment of all that I have come to believe:

LOVE ALWAYS WINS!