Until you really love, you can’t be really hurt. You won’t sacrifice time, money, emotion to someone you are not committed to. The enemy of love and all that is good and pure uses those who don’t know how to commit themselves to the work of love to harm those who seek to love.
The dynamics of love is what makes living the Christian life most difficult. Only the wisest people can navigate the choppy waters of life, neither being a weakling nor a bully, with understanding that love is not optional, yet it must be handled like a young child.
Young children must be exposed to all sorts of experiences and even dangers to grow up and become a physically and mentally healthy person. The child that has never played with other kids has neither an immune system to protect his body nor the social skills to play at the games of life that make or break an individual human life.
In the process of being exposed, children get sick and hurt. Other kids hurt their feelings, teachers leave them behind or scold harshly.
Love is felt as an emotion but also experienced as action.
Expressing and exercising your love does not diminish it but expands and grows it. Only avoiding or not expressing love causes it to shrink. But love is yet fragile because people are complex and fragile beings. We have great power to hurt or heal one another. Those who have been hurt or have never been willing to risk love can develop habits of hurting others who attempt to love them.
If I have offered you my love over and over and your response is to mock or misuse that love, my remedy is not to keep coming back with the same love. The answer is to forgive the hurt and keep an attitude of love. But if continue offering my love to you in the same manner as before then I am living out the definition of insanity and casting pearls before swine.
Or to use one of my choice analogies, don’t hate a snake for being a snake, but don’t pick him up expecting not to be bitten.
Matthew 7:6
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.