Learning to Fly

I recently picked up The Shack after scores of recommendations from friends. Within an hour, my cerebrum escaped our cosy apartment into a landscape of lush forests and into an author's unbashfully forthright conversation with God [depicted as a "She"] about the problem of pain and its relationship to love and freedom.

"Consider our friend over here," she began. "Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around...Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly...And if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place." (p. 97)

Reading this simple analogy triggered a universe of fear in loving and potentially losing again. Of unleashing 8-year old clippings on my wings. I had forgotten what it means to love without fear of death or anxiety.

After all, if I loved my mother, provider, protector and friend so dearly and couldn't change the circumstances of her death, am I willing to risk again and love this man who could devastate my heart again if he were to die?

Extreme as such thinking may appear to some, it's common, real and rooted in a fear founded on experience that can't be argued away, even by a fiance. It's the question a bride must ask herself prior to vowing "till death do us part" and it's the question she may ask every snowy night that her husband drives in a car, or every time he shows a sign of sickness.

Your thoughts, comments...?