By Emily Salerno-Oswald
Columnist
January is almost over, and we are approaching February … the month of Valentine’s Day. I myself am currently on my way to a friend’s wedding.
In this season of love, I contemplate the relationship between love, uncertainty and fear.
How do you know when you love someone? One thing I know for sure is that vulnerability is a necessary component of love both with God and others.
God is relentless in His loving pursuit of us, and others who love us will often be very persistent too. The hard part is letting God and others in.
For my column this week, I will be switching gears and entering the territory of creative writing, rather than only doing reflective writing. I will share a little allegory that I wrote as a meditation on love and the challenge of vulnerability.
Once upon a time, there was a small village in which just one villager named Norm lived.
Whether or not one could truly call it a “village” is unknown, but Norm called his home “the village” even though no one else lived there. That was fine by him, and there was no one else around to correct him.
Norm’s village felt very safe to him. The way he saw it, if he was the only one who lived there, then he could relax.
After all, there was no one around who could hurt him, and there was no one around who he could accidentally end up hurting.
Norm had not always lived in a village of one. He used to live in a village that had an open gate to let others in.
Norm loved to swing the gate wide open and welcome in visitors and friends. Their company and community brought him great joy.
But one day, he found to his horror that his beloved village was under siege. One of the very friends whom he had welcomed and grown to love had started to light fires all over the village.
“Why are you doing this?” Norm asked his friend. His friend did not answer him, for he himself did not know why he did what he did.
As Norm looked around and watched everything he had taken such care to build crumble to the ground, he saw only one solution: to cast his former friend and all of the other villagers out of the village.
No one could be trusted anymore. Norm locked the gate and has never opened it since.
Being alone and self-enclosed became what Norm was used to. He felt comfortable this way.
There was no longer anyone Norm needed to trust, which meant that there was no longer anyone who could let him down. He breathed a sigh of relief because he felt he had escaped his fear.
However, there came a day when Norm’s fear crept up once again. Years after he had locked his village gates, Norm noticed something unusual one quiet morning.
He saw a white, spear-like object flying through the air like a bird. From far away, the object resembled an animal, but as it got closer, Norm could tell that it was man-made.
The object landed at his feet, and Norm immediately understood: someone had decided to throw paper airplanes over the locked gate of his village. But why?
For some reason that Norm could not explain, he decided to pick the paper airplane up off of the ground and examine it. As he unfolded the paper plane, he saw a note that was written on the inside.
The note read, “You are loved”. Norm immediately disregarded the note and threw it in the trash.
It must have been a mistake, he thought to himself. That note wasn’t intended for me.
However, for the next several days, the paper planes kept coming – one plane per day, and each with the same message inside.
Norm began to get scared. Is someone toying with me? Who would play such a sick joke on me?
Norm could not believe that it was real. He knew that whatever hooligan had decided to send him these planes must be quite cold-hearted indeed, to tell him such lies.
Norm continued to throw the planes away, but they just kept coming … and in greater and greater quantities. So he built a shield.
Ha, I’ve outsmarted them! Norm thought to himself smugly. But he was far from correct.
The shield blocked the planes for a little while, but eventually Norm found himself and his village under siege once again.
But it was a different type of siege this time. Instead of a siege of fire, betrayal and destruction, it was a siege of love.
Love notes in the form of planes soared through the sky in innumerable amounts. They fell all around Norm like rain, and, despite his best efforts, he could not stop them from coming.
“Stop!” he cried out. “Whoever you are, just stop! Your planes are too much for me!”
But the planes still would not stop coming. Norm was very scared because he realized that he had started to look forward to when the planes would come.
Great, Norm thought, now I am unsafe. I like the planes now, but one day, they will stop coming.
And, on that day, I will feel just as defeated as when my old friend burned my village, thought Norm.
Norm tried as hard as he could to fight against the persistent planes, but eventually he grew tired.
He decided that he didn’t have the energy to fight them anymore. There were just too many of them.
Norm sat down on the ground and decided to just let the paper planes come. And when they did, he was incredibly surprised.
Instead of everything going up in flames as it had before, this time, Norm experienced something different. The planes that flew all around him caused him to feel happy and refreshed now that he had fully allowed them to come.
The more Norm let the planes come, the more he started to believe that their message was true. In the act of being flooded with this overwhelming and unexpected love, he made the shocking decision to unlock the village gate once more.
The instant Norm unlocked the gate, he saw that the throngs of villagers who he had cast away had all been working together to make the planes and send them his way. They flooded back into their home and shouted for joy that Norm had let them back in.
Norm realized that he had allowed his heart to become closed to love after being betrayed by just one villager. What a mistake!
It was clear that Norm was surrounded by love and that one betrayal did not mean love as a whole could not be trusted. Because Norm took a risk and opened his heart to love once again, he was able to receive love in a way like never before.
Ezekiel 36: 26 NLT – “And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.”