If someone hasn’t told you yet today, Happy Valentine’s Day!
I am neither giddy about Valentine’s Day or perturbed by it. In my mind, it’s just another one of those funny traditions our culture embraces and assigns a dominant color scheme and marketing ploy to. With such ambiguous origins, I’m amazed that Valentine’s Day can produce emotional responses running the gamut between ecstatic joy and despairing tears. If you are tempted by the latter emotion today or merely confused about the holiday itself, check out some of the history here.
Various reports attribute the origins of Valentine’s Day to St. Valentine’s daring advocacy for marriage, his personal story of love won and lost, and even a Roman fertility festival taken over by the church. Since even the History Channel can't seem to nail down the exact catalyst for the holiday, I'll trust God's word on the subject:
We love because God first loved us. 1 John 4:19
We don't love because commercials remind us to or our emotions want to. We don't love because we want something in exchange for it.
We love sacrificially with words and actions, compassion and grace, because we've been loved first by the King. That's the way He does it.
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