vulnerability on Risks

If we want the advantages of love, then we must be willing to take the risks of love. And that requires vulnerability. Of course, we can refuse this path and trod another one devoid of openness. But t...

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wo...

After C. S. Lewis lost his wife Joy to cancer, he wrote these words about the inextricable link between love, suffering, and vulnerability: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your...

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities...

The weaknesses we see in the people of the Bible are the very weaknesses we ought to recognize in ourselves. Like Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit, we are vulnerable to temptation when we act on our o...

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging an...

“I’ve made myself vulnerable I’ve let myself care. I’ve opened my firmly closed heart. My safety is gone It’s no longer there My protection is falling apart. Nobody promised Our hearts would be safe O...

What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started, vulnerability was not a high value. Things have changed. But with a higher value on transparency, authenticity, and vulnerability in the church,...

Vulnerability is not weakness. . . . It is the birthplace of creativity, innovation and change.

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, ...

Society has taught us that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness—but it’s just the opposite. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes. Th...

At some point, the two worlds of who we pretend to be and who we really are must collide. It is, however, better to let those two worlds collide rather than have everything snap under the tension of k...

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 i...

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control o...

Above all is the centrality of love at the heart of vulnerable faith. Vulnerability will thrive only where love abounds—a love that is generous, gracious, patient, compassionate, humble, curious, joyf...

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other...

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

The mystery I wish to explore…is this: vulnerability as the condition, the enabling condition, for covenant relationship with God…Vulnerability, the capacity to be wounded—what does that mean for us w...

C.S. Lewis indicated that if he wanted something easy and pain-free, he would have chosen a bottle of wine over Jesus. There is no question that biblical love leaves us more vulnerable. But this will ...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me.

We can only experience the true beauty of vulnerability when we're courageous enough to crack open the fractures in our mask and allow the light to shine in.

I don’t have the nerve to stand up on Christmas Eve and preach about the choreography of childbirth, but I wish I did. I wish I had the nerve to preach about Mary’s increased estrogen production, a...

[With a gun pointed at his heart] "That is my least vulnerable spot.

Read with a vulnerable heart. Expect to be blessed in the reading. Read as one awake, one waiting for the beloved. Read with reverence.

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...