For Wilshire Baptist Church
Valentine’s Day can deliver a mixed bag of emotions and experiences depending on who you are and where you are on the journey of life.
For children, it’s a friendship day, and for adolescents a potential first blush of feeling the gyrations of something more than friendship. For lovers it’s a day to share and express their love. For happily marrieds, a day to renew and recharge; for older marrieds, a time to remember and rekindle. And, realistically, for many it can be a day of regret and reflection over mistakes and miscues, broken hearts, shattered hopes and dreams that never came true.
I’ve experienced Valentine’s Day all along that spectrum. My earliest Valentine’s Day memories are of grade school parties where little cards to classmates were delivered to desktop mailboxes made of decorated shoeboxes, and then we’d gorge on messy cupcakes topped with foamy red icing. Later, it was nervously handing a carefully selected store-bought card – one worded with just enough compliments to attract but not too much that would frighten or repel – to a classmate or friend who had mysteriously risen above the rest in my imagination.
In high school there were Valentine’s dances with girlfriends and “steadies” until graduation pulled us apart. College offered a reboot with group dates among gaggles of friends that over time broke out into couples, with some of us getting serious, getting engaged, getting married and moving on to spend life together. For most of those couples, the Valentine’s Day expressions shared with each other were redirected and shared with children as their love created families.
In my own life, that didn’t happen – a source of some of those Valentine’s regrets and reflections I mentioned – but love endured until illness and death had me sitting alone on Valentine’s Day. I was just 50 with plenty of life ahead, but I was certain there’d be no more reason to buy flowers and chocolates. In fact, I was tired and had no interest in starting over with cards and cupcakes, but God had other plans and introduced me to LeAnn. Like I said, Valentine’s Day can deliver a mixed bag through the years.
As it turns out, Saint Valentine himself was a mixed bag. According to various sources, Valentine is the patron saint of engaged couples, beekeepers, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travelers and young people. Born in Italy in about 226 A.D., Valentine was a priest known for ministering to persecuted Christians, including soldiers who were banned by Roman Emperor Claudius ll from having Christian weddings. Valentine secretly performed those weddings, and when found out, he was executed on February 14, 269.
As a patron saint, Valentine covers a lot of ground if you buy the idea there are saints designated with special abilities to deliver blessings and protect us from harm. I’ve been blessed, and I’ve been disappointed, and I still believe the one God who created everything — including love itself — is our end-all go-to for everything in life and beyond.