Songs of Love
Both the gift and the burden of the Christian vocation is to love, to love others into wholeness.

So when you and I look at the world around us, at the heartbreaking suffering of it and at the heartbreaking beauty of it, are we able to refuse our calling? Are we able not to love?

God needs us. God needs our eyes to see through and our hands to work through and our voices to speak the words of comfort and companionship. God needs our tears to express the passion of his heart.

And giving ourselves to God to use this way is precisely how we can sing to God our love song, our most beautiful and bursting love song.

And all of this is also how we can do our part to begin to transform the suffering of the world into the great, swelling anthem of rejoicing for which it was intended.

by The Rev. Margaret Gunness
from "The Gift and the Burden of Love"

Sit back now for a minute and journey with me to when you were a kid. ... Remember something like this?

There was a girl or a boy in [your] ... class you never noticed before. Along about the fifth grade, you began to say, "She's kind of nice or he's kind of nice," and you found yourself making sure you were somewhere in the hall where she or he was. ...

You thought a few times about picking up the phone and calling her, but you wouldn't dare do that. ...

Then came Valentine's Day ...

by The Rev. Dr. Daniel Matthews
former Rector, Trinity Church, Wall Street
from "A Valentine from God"

As a single person with two failed marriages (one of which ended on Valentine's Day), I don't relish the focus on the delights of romantic love. ... I tend to face the day by pulling the covers over my head. ...

by Anne Robertson
from "Signposts: Daily Devotions" for February 14, 2006
Read this entire signpost on Feb. 14