Despite the roots of the holiday, Valentine’s Day is designed to be a celebration of love; a day that should we choose, we have the opportunity to express our feelings to the special people in our lives. Family, friends, neighbors, or people at work, everyone can at least gift someone with a kind word or with just a smile. Today we have an opportunity to rise above the disappointments and sorrows, the haunting memories and hopes left to die in the dust of time. This is a day to pursue real, true love.
Perhaps you are that person who’s showered with cards and gifts and wonderful expressions of love from those people who are special to you; or perhaps you are like Charlie Brown, waiting at the mailbox for that expression of love that never comes. What matters is when we experience these moments of love and recognition, or conversely of loneliness and abandonment; do we calculate our worth by the limits of our humanness to know and experience real love.
Today I read the words of the teacher of love who walked it out in life, who spoke to hearts, who transformed souls. Yeshua (Jesus), who in earthly life the Jewish rabbi a person hated, mocked, attacked and rejected by His own community, yet submitted to a death described in the ancient writings of His people. He taught that His death would conquer spiritual death for anyone who accepted this life. That kind of love is deeper than our understanding and is given freely. You don’t believe it? No problem, you can just ask for it and see what happens. You don’t agree with him? No problem, just follow and see what happens. Be ready to give the gift of the giving of yourself kind of love and start out with Him in the Spirit of His love you can prepare for a great adventure. Like today when I looked at His words this is what I found in the writing of John chapter 15. Yeshua said to stay in His love. To do that He said we just follow His teachings as He followed the teaching of the Word of life. That when we do that, His joy will live in us and our joy will be complete. His teaching is that we love as He loved. That amazing love that is not like the world’s understanding of love.
I have been married for fifty-four (not shades of gray) years to my husband. I believe in all the “traditional values” but those aren’t what kept us. Only our choice to follow a more perfect kind of love kept us. That love is for you and for everyone.
~ Kathy Nichols