Loving Hearts!

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God because God is love – so you can’t know Him if you do not love, for God is love. John 4:7-8

This week we celebrate Valentine’s Day with the traditional hearts, candy, cards, flowers, and “I love you’s”. It’s all about these things these days, but it didn’t start out that way. Valentine was a Roman Catholic Priest who was martyred on February 14, 270 AD, during the persecution of Emperor Claudius II. Claudius was determined to eradicate Christianity from his empire, and so he began putting to death highly visible and important Christian leaders. Father Valentine was seized, severely beaten, and thrown in jail.

Claudius said to Valentine, “Either renounce the Lord Jesus Christ in front of all this people or be put to death.” Valentine would not, and so on February 14, the jailers came to put him to death by beheading him. As he left the cell, he gave the jailer’s daughter a piece of paper torn into the shape of a heart bearing his name. Years later, the Catholic church made Valentine a saint and dedicated February 14 as a day to remember someone who was willing to die for his love of Jesus Christ. This day, which began with Christians putting special messages on hearts and sharing them, continues to this day.

The heart symbol is the universal symbol of love, affection and care often used to express fondness and emotional connection. On Valentine’s Day, we tend to see a lot of messages of love between sweethearts, friends, and lovers. The words I love you; however, shouldn’t be restricted to one day of the year. The story is told of a wife who dragged her husband to a marriage counseler in an attempt to save their marriage. During their session, the counselor asked, “Do you tell your wife you love her?” The man growled back, “I told her when we got married that I loved her and that if I ever changed my mind, I’d let her know.”

The older we get, the more we realize that people know you love them when you show them and when you tell them. The heart we think about, especially at this time of year, is a loving heart, a heart full of compassion, kindness and care for others. It is gracious and sensitive to others while showing empathy, kindness, generosity and unselfishness. We can’t just think with our head about having a loving heart, but we have to feel with our heart. Fred Craddock says, “The longest journey we will ever take is from our head to our heart.”

While the loving heart is the most desirable, things in life can change the way our heart works for us. When we’ve been hurt, it’s easy to put up barriers around our broken heart to prevent another hurt. However, a protective heart can turn into a heart of stone. We can allow our heart to become resistant, unreceptive, and impenetrable even to God. One writer said, “The only thing more painful and with more serious ramifications than a broken heart is a frozen one.” This heart is incapable of tearing down the barriers it has put up and replacing them with forgiveness and love. The trouble with a frozen heart is that it feels nothing – no pain, but also no love. It is a trap that feels like self preservation, but it is actually self destruction.

In his book, Lee, The Last Years Charles Bracelen Flood reports that after the Civil War, Robert E. Lee visited a Kentucky lady who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in her front yard. There she cried bitterly as she told how its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Federal Artillery Fire. She looked to Lee to confirm her frozen heart, but instead, he said, “Cut it down, my dear Madame, and forget it.”

Jesus taught his disciples many things, but all of his teaching can be summed up in His command to love God and love others. (Mark 12:31) The heart is meant for love not bitterness. The love it holds needs to be shared so that it never becomes frozen.

Alan Jackson says it this way: The Older I Get the more I think, You only get a minute better live while you’re in it Cause it’s gone in a blink. And the older I get, the truer it gets, It‘s the people you love, not the money and stuff that makes you rich.

The loving heart is one which is not afraid to love others, and one which loves God above all else.

Happy Valentine’s Day!