Single Girl Mentality

It is a verse I remember highlighting in a hot stuffy dorm room at camp; ideal for one of those 5 minute devotionals, and a likely candidate to become cliché, if not treated with care. Proverbs 4:23 Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Now as I look at that spot in my Bible, the purple pen ink has faded, and the heart sticker placed in the margin isn’t looking so hot. It is peeling at the edge.
I believe the most common take on this verse for girls, if I may so generalize, is that we are supposed to barricade our hearts. This involves resurrecting a chain link fence, and digging a deep mote around the perimeter for a line of defense. And if our hearts get hurt, we tend to kick into high security mode, complete with barbed wire loop-dee-doos, watch towers, illuminating lights and slobbering hounds on steroids. Pity the man that dare take a shot at this! He is going to get scratched by the barbed wire, attacked by those mangy dogs, and most likely have to be Superman in order to succeed on his mission.
I think we have missed the point. I am not proposing that we are not to protect our hearts at all, leaving them unsheltered from the elements. They are not something we want stolen or trampled. On the other hand, we don’t want that organ to become a museum piece either; an artifact that only gets dusted off every few months. Who wants to be guarding a dry well? Our hearts need to be exercised, and more importantly than that, they need to be functioning.
Another verse I’ve been thinking about: John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. I believe this would hint that love by nature is vulnerable. There is a cost involved here.
In the next week I will have three friends kicking their heels and moving away. It’s not easy to see them go, but I am glad that I have had the opportunity to know them. It isn’t always easy to reach out your hand in friendship to people when you know they won’t be in the same vicinity (or country) for very long, but I think it is important to do so. It goes back to that barricading idea again. Who is really missing out when we don’t love people the way we should? Maybe the answer is more complex than we realize or can know, but we know that we ourselves miss out to a certain extent.
So here again, I write out some rambling for another post. Sorry if it is too preachy or too… something or another. It is just something I have been churning around in my head, and sometimes wonder if any other people feel the same way.