A Man Named Valentine

Have you ever considered the rather striking parallels between aspects of Christmas and Valentines Day as commonly celebrated?

A man named Nicholas, a devoted Christ follower, lives a life of love and caring for others and becomes especially known for his generosity, which he practiced through secret gift giving so that the recipients would not know where those gifts were coming from. The world gets a hold of it and now we have a mythic, know it all, god substitute that inspires wild materialism.

A man named Valentine, again a devoted Christ follower, who also lives a life of love and caring for others, even laying down his life as a martyr rather than deny His Lord, and on his dying day writes a farewell letter to the daughter of his jailor, to encourage her in Christ no doubt. The world gets a hold of it and now we have a billion dollar greeting card extravaganza.  

The Valentine legend, which grew up around certain historical facts, comes to us from the 3^rd century AD, but it wasn’t until the days of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Middle Ages that it became associated with romantic love.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for Valentine’s day as a celebration of love. And I’m all in for the whole romance thing too. My wife is the love of my life. But just as we fight against the commercialization of Christmas, we should also resist the trivialization of Valentines. It’s not about romance really. It’s about love. And the world really needs to know what real love is – not the mushy, feel good, here today and gone tomorrow, ‘I love myself and I want you’, kind of love that is so very prevalent everywhere you look today. But love that involves genuinely caring about others and being willing to sacrifice if need be for their welfare. That’s the kind of love that inspired men like Nicholas and Valentine. That’s the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus.