Love Was Never Meant to Be Safe

Ever since I was a kid born in a Catholic Christian home, the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30) was one of those passages I heard often. It appeared in sermons, catechism classes, and quiet moral instructions about responsibility, discipline, and making use of what God has given. For years, I understood it in that familiar way. Clear. Structured. Almost obvious.

But understanding has a way of sitting in you long before it becomes personal. And recently, something in that parable shifted for me. It stopped being only about responsibility and started feeling like a mirror for something far more intimate: how we love.

The parable tells of a master who entrusts his servants with talents before leaving on a journey. To one he gives five, to another two, to another one. When he returns, he finds two of them have taken what they were given and put it to work. They risked it. Engaged with it. Allowed it to move beyond its original state. Their talents multiplied, and they are commended not for safety, but for growth.

The third servant does something different. He buries his talent. Not because he misused it, but because he feared losing it. When the master returns, he presents it exactly as he received it. Nothing missing. Nothing gained. And it is precisely this that is judged.

For a long time, I read this as a story about stewardship. But when I began to sit with it differently, it started to resemble something closer to emotional life than economics. Because love behaves in strangely similar ways.

Some people receive love and invest it. Like the first two servants, they respond to what they are given. They speak when it is easier to stay silent. They forgive when pride would justify distance. They stay present when discomfort would suggest withdrawal. They take emotional risks, and in doing so, love does not remain static. It expands through expression, through misunderstanding, through repair, through choice.

But others receive love and bury it. Not out of indifference, but out of protection. Fear of rejection. Fear of being too much. Fear of losing what they cannot control. So they hold back. They measure themselves. They stay guarded, careful, contained. And like the third servant, they return love unchanged. Preserved, but untouched.

At first, I assumed the difference was effort. But that explanation eventually felt too simple. Because what the parable seems to confront is not the absence of effort, but the absence of engagement. The refusal to risk what has been entrusted.

That is where it becomes uncomfortable.

Because in love, inaction is not neutral. Silence still communicates. Distance still shapes meaning. Emotional restraint still produces an outcome. What is not expressed does not remain suspended; it slowly defines the relationship in its absence.

 “The sun doesn’t care if the grass appreciates its rays.”

This is a quote by Ethan Hawke, spoken during a red carpet interview at the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026, that stayed with me.

On the surface, it sounds like independence. But when placed alongside the parable, it reveals something deeper. Like the sun, love and kindness are not meant to be conditional on recognition. They exist because they are meant to exist. Because they are your nature, not your transaction.

And yet, the parable resists letting this become sentimental. The third servant is not condemned for loss, but for fear that prevented participation. The issue is not that he failed in effort, but that he never entered the movement of what was given to him.

That is where the reflection turns inward. Because it raises unavoidable questions.

Are we investing what we have been given, or carefully burying it in the name of safety?

Are we allowing love to move through expression, risk, and repair, or are we protecting it so much that it never becomes anything more than what it already is?

Because love, like the talents in the parable, was never meant to be returned in the same form it was received. It was meant to be entered into. And what is not entered into does not remain preserved. It quietly begins to fade, not because it was taken away, but because it was never fully lived.