Today is an interesting dichotomy of a day, at least to me. Not only is it Valentine’s Day (a holiday I have a lot of mixed feelings about), but it’s also Ash Wednesday.
Let’s discuss Valentine’s Day. As it is now, it’s a heavily commercialized holiday partially manufactured by greeting card, chocolate, and jewelry companies. It’s a day that singles out single people by focusing on the romantic love of couples, and it has been a day of heartache for me in the past. Now, I’m kinda over all the heartache, but I’m the worst at finding ways to celebrate it. Just ask my husband! As a mother, though, I want to protect my kids from this “you must have a significant other on Valentine’s Day.” That’s not true. I’m ok promoting love on Valentine’s Day but in a way that includes, not excludes, people.
Ash Wednesday also happens to be today. It’s symbolic of Christ’s wandering in the desert for 40 days and it’s an invitation for us to join Him as we remember His suffering. Many people will fast, some from red meat, some (like me) from substances they rely too much on (bye, coffee! See you again in April!). I do not come from a Catholic background so I admit I don’t understand all the nuances of this season. I recognize that it, like Advent, is a season of anticipation. We know that Christ died, and in preparing our hearts to remember that sacrifice, we suffer alongside Him. It’s a time of heart posturing, of humbling ourselves, to come to a more intimate relationship with Christ, to learn to love as He loves… and the Bible says a lot about love.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:1 ESV
“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 ESV
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13 ESV
“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” Matthew 5:44 ESV
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” 1 John 3:1 ESV
I could go on and on and on about what the Bible says, quoting verse after verse, but one thing is clear to me. God’s love is not dependent on me, or you, for that matter. He lavished it on us, gave us more than we deserve, and He wants us to love others, regardless of their friendship status to us. God loves you as you are, right now, and wants to have a relationship with YOU. You are loved so much deeper than any person can love you because the God of the universe loves you. Deeply. Beyond measure. Unconditionally. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, where you’ve put your allegiance, how you identify politically, whether you’re straight or LGBTQ, whether you’ve gone to church and done it all right from the beginning or the idea of organized religion scares you. He sees you and calls you Beloved. You are His child. And He laid down His own life to break down barriers to be with you. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet craziness kind of love. This love is self-sacrificing, barrier-breaking, life-changing, I’d-do-it-all-again, unconditional love. A love that that is wide and long and high and deep. A love that surpasses all understanding. A love that is unbreakable.
I seriously cannot get my head around a love that would give up literally everything just to be with me.
As we begin this journey into Lent, my prayer for you is this: that the love of God would permeate your hearts so that you have no choice but to sing, to shout, to tell everyone about it, and that He would become not only our King, but our True North kind of Love, where we are centered in Him and the ways of the world kind of fall apart. May the God who loves show you His love in a very real and tangible way this season.
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