Happy Valentine's Day.  It's a day for cards, candy, flowers, and kisses.  A day when we appreciate and celebrate all the people we love and who love us. 

But to be perfectly honest I've never been into Valentine's Day.  Maybe it's because the day is associated with things more than people.  Sure people are giving the things and people are getting the things...but it always seems to be about the stuff.

I don't know about you but I never feel more love on Valentine's day than other days.

It's a day heavy with expectations.  And for me, the most earnest moments of love have always occurred unexpectedly.  And if not unexpectedly then mundanely.

I remember being nervous and excited on my wedding day, and of course I loved Timmy.  But when I think about love and Timmy- I think about how when he was only 17 and I 16- he stuck by me as I hugely struggled with anxiety and depression.  I think about our first year of marriage where we literally ran out of money and bought groceries at Sears because we could use our Sears card.  I think about several months later when my period was late and I took a pregnancy test in the Clarion Walmart bathroom because we couldn't wait the 5 minutes to drive home.  It was positive- I took five more just to be certain.

There we were barely making ends meet and pregnant.  This was 8 years ago and there were no teaching jobs to speak of and despite having just graduated with a teaching degree...my husband began looking for a job that had nothing to do with what he had always wanted to do..teach.

I think about moving back to the South Hills of Pittsburgh with an 8 month old and moving in with my in-laws while Timmy started a new job.  I think about all the nights he got home late and all the times I asked him if he was ok with giving up on teaching.  And all the times he said yes.

I think about our first home and the first time we, as a married couple, weren't broke.  And how we looked back on those Clarion days with affection and even a little bit of envy.

I think of holding babies that just won't stop crying and hair back as toddlers puke- and I look to my side and there is my husband.

I think of bringing home a traumatized, neglected, drugged 2 1/2 year old and watching the life I knew tilt on it's axis.  And there is my husband.

We can set aside a day to acknowledge love with fancy dinners and grand gestures, and love can be found in the midst of those things, but love is not those things.

When I think about the times love has made my chest ache and feet move- it's been tucking my kids into bed as they tearfully tell me about having trouble with friends.  So the next day I set up the slip n slide and resign myself to having their friends over so relationships can be mended.  It's when I am feeling anxious and down and not pleasant to be around and Timmy runs out to get me my favorite burger.  It was holding kids who were dying from curable illness and still they were going to die.  But I was going to hold them.

The moments when I have known- I would take someone else's burden if I could.  And times when someone would take mine.

Is there any love that doesn't deny self?  Love is selfless.

I thought it so fitting that the beginning of Lent fell on Valentine's Day this year.  What a great reminder for me of what love is.


"My command is this: love each other as I have loved you"  John 15:12

How did He love us?

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" John 3:16

He gave...but it's not simply that he gave, it's what he gave.  He gave himself.  He laid down his life.  

Love is actionary and sacrificial.  It doesn't say and not do.  It doesn't feel and not move.
  
And whereas I know there are moments when love seems easy.  When I said, "I do", the first time I held my babies, when I committed to adopt Martina and Roman...and many other moments when love floods my heart.

I know that love is putting others before myself.  And I must be incredibly selfish because that, more often than not, isn't easy.  
But it is love.  And love is good. 

Happy Valentine's Day.