I’ve always rather liked Valentine’s Day.
In elementary school we had those great parties where everyone put Jem and the Holograms, Barbie, Transformers and He-Man cards in each other’s valentine bags. (You’d have to be careful not to give the opposite sex a card that read, “I love you” or “Be My Valentine” because that would be just too embarrassing. So, for me personally, I’d reserve the “You’re a great friend” cards for the guys.) Then the room mothers or whatever you call those ambitious, PTA Mom-of-the-Year types would bring us chocolate cupcakes with heart sprinkles and bags of barbeque chips to feast on. Those were the days!
The Haun household always celebrated in style too. My mom, quite the Martha Stewart connoisseur, always came up with “good things” of her own. The dinner table would look very festive with candles, flowers, garland and tiny confetti hearts, and she would always make a fancy dessert worthy of half a roll of film. Each year my sweet father would give my three sisters and me a small violet or other potted plant which we all managed to kill in about three months. Last year he gave us all cacti, hoping that these hardy plants would survive us. Alas, these too, met their demise at the hands of the Haun girls.
Much as I like Valentine’s Day, I’ve become a bit disenchanted with some of the ideas surrounding it.
First of all, I think it is a reflection of our culture’s take on love, which is oftentimes used synonymously with sex or romance. Love is so much more than this, and to reduce it to mere feelings is cheap and incomplete. Patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control and humility (1 Corinthians 13) are just a few of the hallmarks of authentic love. Secondly, I take issue with the prevailing notion that one can find absolute fulfillment in another person’s love. Valentine’s Day is an extension, I think, of that fallacy.
You’re looked upon as an object of pity if you’re not in a romantic relationship, and Valentine’s Day is cause for a pity party, complete with a showing of ‘Ol Yeller and a half a gallon of Moose Tracks if you are single.This is wrong.
Completeness doesn’t come as a result of being in love with another person. Yes, I agree that it was exceedingly romantic when, in Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise tells Renee Zellweger she completes him. I felt swooney myself and I love that sort of thing, but it just ain’t true.
As a Christian, I believe fulfillment comes in not being in a relationship with a guy or girl, but being in a love relationship with Jesus Christ, the author of exquisite and perfect love.
God pursued me, when in my natural condition, I was rebellious, even his enemy. The sacrificial love of Christ for me is the ultimate demonstration of true love. Now that’s something to get swooney over! A relationship such as this, isn’t characterized by an aloof, standoffish God who is merely some distant cosmic force. Scripture tells me that Christ is characterized as a Bridegroom, the Lover of My Soul who is intimately acquainted with all my ways and in whom I HAVE BEEN MADE COMPLETE.
Certainly a relationship with a guy or girl is a tremendous gift, but it isn’t the source of all fulfillment, and I’m definitely not trying to devalue romance or sex in marriage (anyone who’s read Song of Solomon knows that God’s all for both!), but these are secondary to a relationship with Christ.
So, Valentine’s Day is all well and good, but it’s been important for me to think about what I know to be authentic love and to recognize that it’s okay to be single. For now, I’m excited about the day I meet “the one,” but he’ll have to appreciate that there’s another Man in my life who will always be my first love!

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