Responsible Love

How responsible are you with your love? I discovered this question in my own life when I realized how selfish we can be with our love. With the greatest intentions to simply share our lives and love with those we care for most, we can be completely irresponsible. Love has a component of accountability that we often forget about. But more than that, we give our hearts and love to people in ways they are not ready for.

Like giving keys to a powerful automobile to a 12 year old, we entrust people with something they don’t know how to handle. We want to give them everything we have out of pure goodness. Why? It feels great to us! We rarely stop to think about whether that person is ready for it. Are they prepared to handle the responsibility and care that goes along with receiving the gift of our hearts? Instead we get caught up in how good it feels to just love and hope they can handle it.

Waiting for a person to be ready to receive our gifts of love is being responsible. We would never blame the child for wrecking the car we gave them before they were ready. Meanwhile, we routinely give our hearts to people who are unreliable, unprepared, and unwilling to receive such an amazing gift. Then in an effort to eliminate our ownership, we demonize them for breaking it. One of the wisest and toughest things to do is share love in ways that will help rather than hurt. After all, it’s your heart. You are the one who should know if they are ready to handle your heart, not them.