February! Valentine’s Day! Red roses and chocolates. Songs and poems about love. Love! I may overuse the word. Do I cheapen its meaning when I click on love for everything I like on Facebook? Do I really love not only what touches my heart or makes me laugh but also food, flowers, puppies, babies, scenery, scripture, essays on grief, Mr. Rogers, Peanuts, Maya Angelou? Posts by friends? Online services from my church? Other churches, choir concerts, and on and on? I can show my love for all these with the mere click of a button. Maybe I should say like, enjoy, or appreciate more often and love less often. But, I really, really do especially love Russell Wilson and the Seattle Seahawks!
The story/legend of St. Valentine is interesting. A priest in Rome, he espoused love and marriage, even marrying Christians, and was beheaded by Emperor Claudius II on February 14, 269 A.D. The emperor was trying to raise an army and young men preferred to stay home with their wives. Over the centuries we’ve continued to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day in ways that florists, candy makers and other merchants just love!
But love is so much more than this. We are told to love the Lord our God; to love our neighbor as ourselves. We can get hung up on loving ourselves. I don’t think this means we are to turn ourselves into a golden calf. At the beginning of our lives, even before we are born and well before we hear the word love, we were loved and cherished by our parents. And we grow to return that love. At least that’s the way it should be, the way I’m sure God intended it to be. Would that all children were so blessed. I never doubted my parents’ love, and I loved them.
Frank loved me and our children and grandchildren. I only wish he were here to know and love our precious, precocious great-grandchildren. Each generation seems more beautiful, brilliant and gifted than the previous. The longer Frank is gone, the more I realize what a special person he was; his kindness, patience, integrity, sense of humor and especially his devotion to family were there all day every day. I treasure these memories and fall in love with him all over again.
I love my Country. I’ve always been proud of (what I perceived as) our history and felt we were ‘one nation under God’. I pray for wisdom for our leaders. May we show His love in our concern for our neighbors.
And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13.13
Tess Todd
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