Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday this year with all its accoutrements of hearts and flowers and candies passed about in expressions of love.  I recall facing those early Valentine’s Days in first grade with little enthusiasm and lots of trepidation. We were all given a paper sack the day before Valentine’s Day and instructed to color hearts and such on it and then to put our name as best that first graders could.

Then Miss Hardin, our teacher, taped our decorated sacks up around the classroom walls.  We were to bring Valentine’s for all our classmates.  My friend Spud and I agreed that the prospect of giving Valentine’s to girls was pretty yucky.

There was only one girl we loved in our first-grade class and that was our teacher, Miss Hardin. She was so pretty and so nice, so Spud and I decided we would just give her our Valentine’s cards. Needless to say, Miss Hardin broke our hearts when she announced that she was engaged to be married at the end of the school year.  Love’s hopes and dreams lost…

It was some years later, as my high school years were coming to an end, that I learned the fullest and most important meaning of love.  I experienced the love of God for us poor lost sinners and the great expression of that love in sending the Saviour to give Himself the supreme sacrifice to redeem us.

As the great hymn expresses it…

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

  And were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

  And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

  Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

  Though stretched from sky to sky.

Happy Valentine’s Day!