There Is A Cost
“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 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. To love is to be vulnerable.”
— C.S. Lewis
A friend recently told me that I was “a tough emotional nut to crack.” As with most hard truths, at first, it pissed me off. Then, I felt hurt. Then, in classic overthinker fashion, I spun myself out about it for a while, panicking about what to do if what he said is true and wondering how many other people feel that I’m closed off towards them when it comes to matters of the heart. Finally, I realized that he was right (he usually is) and that, even if it stung, it was said out of care.
Ok fine, the friend was Sam. And like I said, he was right. I am, in fact, a tough emotional nut to crack. You may or may not relate, but when enough emotional damage is sustained in a human heart, it becomes a hell of a lot easier to get through each day by simply choosing not to feel anything. At all. As C.S. Lewis more poetically puts it, locking up our hearts to try and protect them will ultimately just harden them. To love is to be vulnerable.
Vulnerability is more than just being open. I would consider myself an open book. I am pretty willing to share most any parts of my story with people. But to truly be vulnerable is to not only share those parts, but to allow others into them with me. To be vulnerable is to be willing to feel things, even hard things, around those who have the choice to either sit in the hurt with me or reject me and bring further brokenness. It’s not easy. But it’s the only way to move forward in wholeness.
Noble Workshops exist as an invitation for people to be truly vulnerable with others by way of inviting them into the deepest, rawest parts of their story and choosing to trust how they’ll respond. It is risky. There is a cost. But for those of us who have any kind of pain in our past, there is a different cost if we don’t do this worthy work. We run the far scarier risk of being unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Is that what I want for my life? Is it what you want for yours?
Most things that matter come at a cost. There is a cost to attend a workshop. There is a cost to trust our hearts in the hands of others. There is a cost to bravely risking being seen. But if we want to be open, to be well, to continue to move towards wholeness and healing, the cost is more than worthwhile. What are you willing to pay?
