If you can’t handle thorns, how can you ever expect to hold a woman?

A rose is an odd mismatch of beauty and pain and yet God blends these two things
together in the same plant. This cannot be a mistake – an oversight along the
production line of creation. Roses were meant to come out this way. To
entangle their beauty and delicacy in a maize of twisted barbed wire. Perhaps
to protect as much as anything. Perhaps to injure those who try to approach
the beauty carelessly, or even those who are careful, for love is never
without injury.

Love means to be misunderstood.
Love means being rejected.
Love means the things that are important to you will not always be
treated by another with the same value and care that you put to them.
Love means sacrifice.
Love means being vulnerable and being vulnerable almost always means you
will get hurt.

Love means giving up yourself — having your selfishness torn from you in a
manner that leaves you defenseless. This is perhaps the most painful of all
the activities of love, since we are all so protective of ourselves. We have
all found comfort in ourselves — in our own ways of doing things. The
proverbial marital battle over how to properly squeeze toothpaste out of a
tube is not insignificant. It is a small picture of the larger struggles of
ways and means.

There is comfort in the self. With years of self-talk, we have talked
ourselves out of our guilt and our shame. We have developed ways of dodging
the truth that shield us from truth’s double-edged probing. We can perpetuate
almost any reality in our own minds. In the safety of our own personal
self-propaganda, there is no one to challenge us, no one to disagree.
Elaborate schemes and intricate systems of rationalization go uncontested.
And since we will stop at nothing to ensure our own comfort, we will learn
little of love should we remain invulnerable.

But it is a thin membrane that protects the self, and love’s thorns can
puncture it with ease and tear it open. This is the painful service that love
provides for us: it strips away our protective layer leaving us open to both
hurt and love, and since we are human and fallible, we cannot love without
hurting or be loved without being hurt.

Hold the rose and feel the thorns.
Next week will be week three in a five-part series on “What is Worship?” I am teaching in an adult education class at Irvine Presbyterian Church, 4445 Alton Parkway, Irvine, California. The class is in the Jack Davis room at 9 a.m. on Sundays. Those of you in southern California are invited to attend. We’re over a little after 10:00 so you might have time to get to your own church service, or you are certainly welcome to attend the morning service at IPC at 10:30 a.m.. The sessions are being recorded so if the rest of you would like to listen in, the audio can be found by clicking HERE. Hope to see some of you there next Sunday.