Valentine's Day

I'm sure probably half of the bloggers in the world are blogging about Valentine's Day, so I'm going to join in with something wincingly personal, which I will probably regret in about half an hour:

I hate Valentine's Day! It has to one of the worst days of the year. For those of us who never receive anything, it's just plain miserable. We tell ourselves the whole thing's stupid but it is like walking around all day with a megaphone in your ear shouting "nobody loves you!". And even for those who have romantic options in their life, I can't help but think it brings silly expectations, which often lead to disappointment, and takes all the spontaneity (and thus some of the romance?) out of romance.

But back to us lonely hearts, and how, as Christians, we might deal with this most horrible of days: this year there's one thing I am going to try and remind myself of, and it's prompted by the end of Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven, a poem in which the subject goes running from God because "For, though I knew His love Who followèd, Yet was I sore adread / Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside" only to find that God is at his heels wherever he goes. But I'm going to take it slightly out of context (after all, it's a good poem but it's not the bible) to apply to me, and maybe you, as someone who is trying hard, not to run from God but to live in relationship to him:

How little worthy of any love thou art!

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,

Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for they harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

Rise, clasp My hand and come!

Sometimes I do get frustrated, and I even panic at the idea that God might want me to have naught beside him (ie no spouse or children). But, the reality is that God pursues us for relationship like no knight on a white stallion is ever going to. He loves us with a faithfulness greater than that of Lochinvar (if you're a true poetry reading romantic like me you know the line "So faithful in love and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar"). He sees our all our ignobleness and loves us all the same. Loves us with an everlasting love. And he has everything we could ever wish for waiting for us in heaven. And it is in this relationship with him, and the hope of heaven, that he wants us to find it. And indeed, what else has earth really got to offer? (Psalm 73:25)

So, might today be a day when my faith increases a little more in the character of God, and in grasping that the things that I don’t have are not kept away for my harm but because God has them for me and in fixing my eyes on the sure and certain hope … Deuteronomy 33:27a: The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.