Love

It's the great big holiday of love today. Happy Valentine's Day! While most of the world is indulging in chocolates, flowers, candlelight dinners, and more, we thought we would take it a little more low key this year. We still had chocolates and flowers, but realize that's not the most important part.

The love that we share cannot be purchased or bought with material items. It's a love that comes from God. A love that continues to grow with time and maturity. A love that seeks to build the other up. A love that encourages the other. A love that desires to bring God glory.

And yet, it is an imperfect love that we share. A love that can anger, upset, boast, disappoint, and fail. It is an imperfect love because it is human love.

But it is through that imperfect love that we see a reflection, a small glimpse, of the love of our Creator. Of a God, the One and Only Being, that has PERFECT love. It is His love that never fails. His love is always there for us. His love is unconditional. We can't buy it. We can't earn it. We don't have to do anything to receive it. He FREELY gives it to us- each and every day. A perfect love for an imperfect people. It is this love we think about today.

This is how God showed his love among us:
He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
This is love: not that we loved God,
but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another,
God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1 John 4:9-12 (NIV)

What a beautiful picture of perfect love. Perfect love from a God who is love. May you feel that love today- wherever you are and whomever you are spending the day with. God is love.