The Best Love of All

Today is Valentine’s Day.  As if you needed me to tell you.  I spent part of my morning with my daughter’s preschool class.  Nothing says love like a group of two-year and three-year-old children dressed in red and pink consuming more sugar than they should eat in a week!  That’s not true, of course.  The hug of a two-year-old girl who still thinks I’m the perfect Valentine is a pretty good reminder.  The smile of a two-month-old boy does the trick, too.  For that matter, the love of my wife who is fully aware of the fact that I’m not perfect is just about the best love of all.

I am, needless to say, blessed with an abundance of love.  On this Valentine’s Day, I am mindful that each of these loves is a gift of the One who loves me beyond all measure.  Each of our imperfect human relationships, when marked with love, is sign of the perfect love that God has shown to us in his Son, Jesus Christ.  I also know that today is not a good day for many people, serving instead as a poignant reminder of that which is most yearned for but least present.  How much more is God’s love present in such times!

So if you’re hoping for candy hearts and flowers today, I hope you get them.  But even more – whether you’re swooning in love of suffering from a broken heart – I pray that you might know and feel the love of Jesus today.  Then may we each in turn reach beyond our own lives to show that love to one another in Christian community.  May our imperfect loves be transformed into the perfect love of God, who loved us even when we were pretty unlovable.  May that love sustain you on Valentine’s Day and each day to come.

“Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.  God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”  1 John 4:7-12