After a week when the Valentine is moved by the scent of flowers, jewelry, or a candle-lit restaurant, you can almost hear John Paul, that's Young not the Pope, singing Love is in the Air. But can the Valentine experience prove a moment of disillusionment and disappointment?
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Of course it can. With feelings running hot and passions aflame, many have stumbled and fallen short of the line when it comes to love.
Love is a Many Splendored Thing, but what many people may not know is that St Valentine's Day is a feast day in the Anglican Communion. How about that!
Not only did we Christians provide Christmas and the giving of gifts, Easter and the eating of hot cross buns, Christianity also feasts on the celebration of love.
I really like the fact that Christians can celebrate the good things of life and particularly love. I also treasure the fact that God provides the foundations for love to be successful.
Of course like all things, disappointment follows when the key ingredients are missing. A Christ-less Christmas or Easter is like a loveless Valentine.
Chaucer captured the Valentine in a time when courtship played a role. Valentine himself was imprisoned in Rome for marrying soldiers forbidden to do so because he knew the value and power of love.
If I go back a little further, no one could imagine the joyful “whoopee” of Adam when introduced to his Valentine, Eve, when God, in perfection, made a man and a woman for love. Of course that is hardly surprising for God to do when the Bible says, "God is love".
And if love defines who God is, therein lies our education in love if one is prepared to consider God.
Perhaps it's in the history where the disappointments of love lie.
Impatience gives way not to love but to urges that wait through no season of courtship. Dangerously selfish people seek Valentine sex that knows nothing of love and life is filled with people duped by flowers.
Marriage is no longer a compulsory and its boundaries are not kept. Sadly, some Valentines sent a week ago might even be a breach of one’s marriage vows, exposing a world that misses the very point of love and fails in knowing how to love.
If you sent such a Valentine, you need to get help to save your marriage and to avoid the hurt only a loveless soul can inflict.
It is no surprise that God has lost His place when we see the misunderstanding and perversions of love masked by blow-up hearts, flowers, candle-lit rendezvous and the loss of, or taking of, something precious for the price of a box of chocolates.
In the week leading up to February 14, I played golf with a young father of three daughters. I had never met him before. Such was the importance of his girls, that irrespective of his own past behavior, I am certain a patient courtship, a sacrificial wait for marriage and the kind of love God offers was what he wanted for his children.
Humorously, he admitted that he had not bought a shot gun yet. What does a comment like that mean but that he wants his daughters protected from the loveless and selfish and given away ultimately to the patient, loyal, respectful, sacrificial and faithful lover?
The great sadness to me is that some will think this article ridiculous, while for others, it’s wisdom they regretfully see as coming too late.
You may misunderstand me as you read this article. I am for Valentine's Day and happily married to my Valentine, but the age we live in has a love affair with the feelings of love but often completely misses the substance of love.
Feelings can indicate love but they can also be notoriously fickle. True love does not reside in feelings but in the decisions of the will to love.
There is no better example of love that holds both feelings and the will together than that which is seen in Christ. He took no advantage of others, not pursuing their favours but always looking in favour on others.
His love was loyal, truthful, unflinching in devotion, unassailable by temptations, selfless, sacrificial, forgiving, tender, kind, slow to anger, never taking what belongs to another but always leaving more by way of gift than another could reciprocate.
The only attempt ever made to stop the love of Jesus Christ was to crucify Him. Thankfully it was a failed attempt.
Rick Lewers
Bishop Armidale Anglican Diocese