Today is the celebration of Valentine’s Day. Card companies, candy companies, florists, and restaurants rejoice. Servers not so much. Apparently, people spend so much on cards, candy, flowers and fancy dinners that they run low on funds by the time they get to servers.
Not sure how this celebration got started. Some tie it to a mid-February festival in ancient Rome that celebrated fertility. Other attribute it to a St. Valentine, although there are a few saints named Valentine in the Catholic church.
Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s, and in 1840 Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. If you google Valentine’s Day, you will get many different origins.
The world thinks of Valentine’s Day as a day of love, but it is more about romance than love. And while romance is great, and should be practiced, love is much more enduring.
We have probably all read 1 Corinthians 13, which describes what true love looks like. “Love is patient, love is kind.
Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited, does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” [HCSB]
This is the kind of love our Father has for us. It is the kind of love we are to have for each other. It takes us far beyond romance. It reaches out to the lonely, the unlovely, the sick, the dying, the forgotten, the misunderstood, the rebellious and the defiant. And yes, even reaches as far as our enemies. This kind of love changes everything in its path.
Amen
