The Church in Ephesus

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.

C.S. Lewis

When we are living at our best, with all our energies focused, all our abilities alert and involved, doing what we were created to do, we love. Yet there is another aspect to this consensus. That no matter what else we do—no matter if we come home with the Olympic gold or make a million dollars or pioneer the exploration of space or move the world with some artistic performance or discover the cure to cancer—if we do not love, it is not satisfactory.

Eugene Peterson

For love is not what we do after we get the other things done, if we have any energy left over. Love is what we do, period. It is not how we work; it is our work. Other things can support it, they can grow out of it, and they can lead up to it. But if we don’t love, we aren’t doing what we were created and saved to do.

Eugene Peterson