How to Avoid Pain

In church we are wrestiling through questions that people have submitted. The series is called Real Questions. Next week we tackle "why is life so painful?" Here is C.S. Lewis' comment on heart break.

Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one - not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safely in the casket or the 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, unredeemable. The only place outside heaven where you can be safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I think what Lewis was saying is the price tag is too high to avoid heart break. I wonder if that is part of God's answer to pain (His and ours)as well.