“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around 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. To love is to be vulnerable.” C.S. Lewis.

The other day I asked Scott if a girl had ever broken his heart. We were talking about teenagers in love, the heart wounds kids can carry into their future considering most young romances don’t work out.

“Just you,” Scott said, surprising me.

You broke my heart first, I wanted to tell him, but he’d stumped me there at our dinner table on date night. Never had he admitted I broke his heart back in the day. We met in our teens, and the three years before we married were tumultuous. Now after twenty-seven years together, I could still see the boy in him, and I ached for a moment that I wounded him when we were young.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. The past month had brought us to a place where we’d been more open and vulnerable with each other than ever before.

He smiled and said, “It’s okay. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. And we ate our dinner gently with Michael Buble’ singing Home in the background.

The following day I sat and cried with our nineteen-year-old daughter. She’s dealing with her first broken heart. It’s so painful to be a part of the tears, the grief, the regret. It’s hard enough to ride out heartbreak yourself. Watching your child bleed love is really painful.

Whose idea was it to make love hurt?

At first I guessed God since the ultimate expression of bleeding love is the Savior dying for us. But as I meditated on the cross, what it really meant, what it really did for us, I realized God didn’t make love painful. Betrayal in the garden birthed the pain. The cross bound it up.

So I take all this to the cross ~ the hurt I’ve caused to those I love, and the hurt they’ve done me. The shattered love affair breaking our daughter and perhaps how you might be hurting in some secret place in your heart my friend. Most of us have heart wounds, old and scarred or new and fresh. They’re there and they’re real and they bleed. Sometimes when we least expect it, the heart bleeds.

But the Lord binds up the broken-hearted. Ask for God’s healing today.