Best Valentine's Ever

This is a week the world actually focuses on love – or at least that’s the general idea. It seems that St. Valentine’s Day has also met its doom in the commercial marketplace. It has become yet another day to spend, spend, and spend on anything from flowers, to candy, to romantic dinners. But couldn’t we really use a holiday to stop and think about real love?

One tradition says that Saint Valentine was a priest who helped to secretly marry Christians during the reign of Claudius, Emperor of Rome. At the time, it is said, it was forbidden to help Christians. And so, these benevolent acts of love became the reason for his arrest and subsequent martyrdom.

Many people point to fourteenth century author Geoffrey Chaucer, and a circle of his associates, for bringing us many of the traditions surrounding Valentine’s Day. It is said that Chaucer wrote a “fictional history” of acts of love throughout the ages to be celebrated and reenacted on February fourteenth. He evidently saw what I do. We need to have something to memorialize love. According to ancestry.com, I am a direct descendant of Chaucer. Maybe that accounts for my romantic streak.

But unfortunately, though Valentine’s Day is big business, like many holidays, it may be missing its intended mark. I asked my friends last week for some great Valentine’s Day memories in preparation for this article. No one really remembered a great Valentine’s Day – or any particular Valentine’s Day – except me. That particular Valentine’s Day I remember was only last year, but I know I’ll not forget it.

After enormous amounts of stressful things going on in my workplace, on February 13th of 2008, I was asked to leave. I met with the powers-that-be and tried to work out a way to keep my job. The next twenty-four hours were a blur of phone calls, meetings, and wrangling designed to keep my job. However, in the end, on February 14th, my wife and I decided to quit trying to fix something that would probably never be right again, walk away, and resign from the job.

What a Valentine’s Day that was. I can’t say that it was a happy day, but it was the best Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had. Even without a job and with no prospect of having a job – with all the uncertainty I’d ever faced in my life – at a time when I felt terrible about myself and my abilities – my wife stood beside me and continues to do so to this day. No amount of candy, cards, words, food, or gifts could have said “I love you” so much or demonstrated it so greatly.

A friend of mine did write and remind me of something that was said at his wedding – and mine. It was a quote attributed to Bible scholar Matthew Henry, who said,

“Woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved."

This is what real love is all about. This is what is missing from most of the hubbub and mushy cards and sentiments that we rush out the day of the holiday to find in a piece of heavy, folded paper printed in Kansas City by someone neither we nor our loved one knows. It is a partnership created by God to help us through the uncertain world. This Saturday, take the time to truly appreciate someone who is or who has been a person like that to you.