Happy Valentine’s Day my friend!

I hope your Valentines Day is treating you well, whether or not you have someone to spend it with.

On this day that is meant to glorify love it is becoming more and more obvious that our culture has a warped sense of what love is. I don’t wish, in this post, to get into any debates about the appropriateness of certain films or relationships. Instead, today, all I’m going to share is a well known passage, not to condemn, because love should never be condemned, but just to share a snippet of the love letter that is His word.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a chalk, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

Happy Valentine’s Day

Joy Aletheia Stevens