You are loved!

Valentine’s Day is a holiday that is hard for so many. It makes us focus on romantic love and also, on any lack of romance in our lives.

But that is just ridiculous!

Life is a wonderful gift from God! Let us savor it and enjoy it and appreciate what we do have rather than mourn what we don’t!

We are on a grand adventure ladies – an adventure with the Father. Some of our adventure is pleasing and fulfilling and exciting. Other parts are painful, discouraging, and just plain hard. But isn’t that the way adventures are? Aren’t they a mix of good and bad? Magellan and Vasco de Game and other explorers of old had a mix of great days and awful ones, huge discoveries and successes mixed with utter failure. So why would we expect the adventure of our lives to be any different?

We are lured into false expectations that can ultimately do us in, emotionally at least. We feel we want a love in our life, a man. We have an expectation of that. We expect we’ll get married and live happily-ever-after like the heroines in stories do. We expect roses and romance and fairy tales. But life is an adventure story, and adventures have trials and tragedy as well as love and hope.

So here is your February 14th challenge: Whatever your circumstance, whether pleasing or disappointing to you, hang onto it and savor it in any way you can as part of your grand adventure with God!

Does that seem impossible for your situation? Try these thought changers.

• No matter how badly you feel yourself, show love by giving a single flower to someone else.
• Feeling left out because you don’t have a date? Call a friend and initiate an outing.
• Make a handmade Valentine’s card for a child in your life to speak truth, peace, love, and encouragement into their life.
• Make your co-worker’s day brighter in any small way: bring them coffee, cover some of their work load for them, give them a small box of “conversation hearts,” … Use your imagination.
• Be the friend to someone else that you long to have. Take them a cupcake!
• Text everyone in your phone list and tell them you love them and that they are special!
• Pass out boxes of Little Debbie heart-shaped cakes to the homeless you pass on the streets each day.
• Cut out dozens of red and pink hearts, write encouragement on each one, and use them to decorate someone’s room, car, or office.
• Share the Gospel of Jesus (a gospel of love and redemption) with one who is feeling unloved.

The bottom line – Get your mind off yourself and show God’s love in small tangible ways to people around you. Even strangers!

We can sit and mourn not having a Romantic Valentine in our life, or we can be that Gal-entine or Pal-entine that makes someone else feel loved. You are guaranteed to feel better yourself if you take time to show love to another. And your Father God will be pleased.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. 1 John 4:7-12