Pastor's Blog: Something We Can't Afford to Forget
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Just to give you ample notice, this coming Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. So, if you have a special person in your life and somehow this signal date has slipped up on you, then you’d better get a move on. Otherwise, that special person may not consider you so very special if you fail to remember them at this time of the year.
All of that is to say that love is best expressed in deeds. You can tell someone you love them until you run out of words, but one loving deed speaks volumes. That’s why even a simple Valentine’s card can so easily lift our spirit. It’s a tangible expression of someone else’s affection and a powerful statement of how we matter to someone else enough that they went to the trouble of buying us a card.
When I was growing up, we used to exchange Valentine’s Day cards in elementary school. Everyone in the class was expected to give everyone else a Valentine. I can still remember the anxiety I felt about making sure I made the right card to give to the right person. After all, it seemed like there was always one classmate whom I thought merited a special expression, and there were others whom, while I wanted to show appreciation, I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea. Many of you will understand what I’m talking about, and you can still recall staying up on February 13, weighing those monumental decisions, even though you were only 10 years of age.
Now that I’ve grown up a bit and whittled my devotion down to one person, I’ve also come to understand the vulnerability that is always a part of any expression of our love. When we give our love to someone else, we make ourselves vulnerable to that person. Perhaps the reason some people forget to show their love at Valentine’s is not because they don’t care; maybe they fear showing their vulnerability.
But there is no love without such vulnerability, not really. We even see that in terms of God’s love for us, when God took the risk of offering His Only Begotten Son as a show of His love for us. God couldn’t have shown greater vulnerability than what He did on our behalf at Calvary.
Maybe that’s how we can keep reminding ourselves of the importance of showing love for others and taking the risk of doing so. Otherwise, we are only depriving ourselves of experiencing the most powerful of emotions and the most potent of remedies, which is the power of love.
So, begin by embracing God’s love for you and then respond to those whom God puts in your life by taking the risk of expressing your love for them also. Some may be important to you than others, but everyone deserves to be told that someone else cares. You become that person and you’ll come to discover that love blesses not only the recipient of love but also the giver, and how love truly is the power that makes this world go around. Now, when you think about it in those terms, how could anyone ever forget something as beautiful as that?
“Dear children, let us not love with words and speech, but with actions and truth” (1 Jn. 3:18).