Love Above All — Part Two

From Chris Price

JULY 9, 2026

“We love because God first loved us.”
But what does love look like practically?

Here are three thoughts:

First
Love means making yourself vulnerable.

Listen to what C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, The Four Loves:
“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.”

There is a paradox to love.
Love can make people feel safe.
And it should.
I’ve heard it said that when a woman is loved well, she opens up like a flower.
Part of the reason is because she feels safe.

But love is not safe, if by safety you mean the avoidance of all suffering and pain.

Love might plunge you into the very heart of it!
Love is good, but it is not safe.

The person you love will fail.
The person you love will disappoint.
The person you love will sin against you.

The more you love them the more vulnerable you will be to them causing you pain.
And the more vulnerable you will be to any harm done to them.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.

That feels scary.
That requires courage.

But what other option is there?
A casket for our heart?
To live without living?
To collapse into ourselves.
To become hard and calloused.
We are keeping ourselves safe.

But safe from love.
Safe from God.
Because God is love.
And He has made humans to know and experience His love.

But love requires choice.
And we have chosen to sin and plunged this world into brokenness. We’ve made this world a dangerous place for love.

In spite of our choices, God doesn’t hide His heart away.
He doesn’t break off His love affair with humanity.
Instead God chooses to become vulnerable.
As vulnerable as an infant cradled in the arms of a teenage mother.
As vulnerable as a man with skin and bones—a man who gets hungry and thirsty.
As vulnerable as a man who can be rejected, slandered and betrayed.
As vulnerable as a man who can be let down by his closest friends in his time of greatest need.
As vulnerable as a naked man, strung up on a cross, nailed to a killing tree, enduring shame; dying of a broken heart.
God, in Jesus, plunges headfirst into the vulnerability that love requires.
Through the cross, God shows us the very nature and cost of love, in a fallen world.

As the lion Aslan once said to Digory in response to sin entering Narnia,
“Evil will come of that evil…and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself.”

And Jesus does see to it that the worst falls on him—in the real world, on the cross.

Which means that, in the midst of our woundedness, when this God invites us to love again, to risk again, to open our hearts up again, even though we have been hurt, He is only ever inviting us to do something that He has already done.

“We love because He first loved us.”
And to love at all is to be vulnerable.

Second
Love means paying attention.

I know someone whose daughter has gone through some tough times.
At nighttime she got into the habit of asking for the sweatshirt, hoodie, or T-shirt her dad wore that day because it would smell like him.
She would wear it to bed for comfort, it would remind her he was near.
You might have heard that story before.
What I’ve never told you is that during that season, almost every night for two years, he would go on drives with her.
Sometimes she would talk a lot.
Sometimes there would be silence with music playing.

Night after night.
Present.

He’s failed often, but he got that part right.
He showed up.
And he listened.
And he looked her in the eyes.
And he said, “it is very good that you are here.”

To quote Alan Noble:
“The choice to attend to someone before you is a great act of love. You are giving your life (measured in time) to this person. This is why it is so powerful when someone looks you in the eyes when they are talking to you. In that moment you feel their attention on you. You know that they are giving you a piece of their life, even while everything and everyone else demands their attention, they are putting their gaze on you….in love attention makes you aware of the goodness of your existence.”

He goes on to write,
“The ideal form of love is God's gaze upon us.….all human gazes of love are shadows of his loving gaze.”

“We love because He first loved us.”

Third
This love is embodied.

It comes to us with hugs and meals and rides and words. It comes to us with skin and bones on.

Anne Lamott tells the story of a young girl who was having a hard time falling asleep at night.
The first night it happened she called out for her mom.
The mom entered the bedroom and tucked her back under the sheets and told her that Jesus was there in the room with her.

Jesus is with you. Don’t be afraid.

But night after night the troubled sleep continued.
The mom was getting tired and a little annoyed, but she kept saying the same thing: “Jesus is with you. Don’t be afraid”.
Until finally in the dark the little girl looked up at her mom and said plainly, “I need someone with skin on.”

When it comes to following Jesus, there is an invitation to be “love with skin” on.
To embody the virtue of love in community.

Love comes with a wanted hug, a needed meal, a kind word, interruptions and the clearing of a schedule.
Love comes with eye contact and good questions.
It comes to us and then it shines through us.
Such is the nature of love.

“We love because He first loved us.”

This is part two of the two-part article "Love Above All" by Chris Price.