A Valentine’s Day Prayer to Find True Love
By Gregory Coles
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
Dear God, Help me today to understand what love really means.
I need a love that’s big enough to include all of us. Big enough for the dating and engaged couples, of course, with their giddy daydreams of a future together. But also big enough for the married folks, whether their passion for each other is still blazing brightly or barely more than a smoldering wick. Big enough for the singles toasting their independence, and for the singles wishing someone would come along and make that independence disappear.
For the lonely and widowed and brokenhearted, I need a love that understands, a love that welcomes in hurt and sorrow instead of excluding them. I need a love that knows how to weep.
The love I need more than anything is Your love. Without Your love, no other love will ever be sufficient. And with it, every other love becomes richer and truer and more life-giving than it could have been otherwise. We have learned all our best loves from You: the love of faithful friends, of spouses and significant others, of parents and siblings and children. Love that commits. Love that sacrifices. Love that lays down its life. You authored each of these loves, taught us how to recognize them and long for them and give them away. Our best efforts at Valentine’s Day are just a fraction of the wholeness of love.
So today, I ask that you would refresh my vision of love. Remind me of the love that fashioned me in my mother’s womb and dreamed up beautiful plans for my life. Remind me of the love that wept when humanity fell, the love that still weeps each time I break Your heart. Remind me of the love that sent heaven’s royal Son to inhabit our humble Earth. Remind me of the love that died to carry me home.
Today, let everything I see remind me of Your love.
Fill me with that love until I am saturated. And then keep on pouring, until I’m overflowing and flooding my surroundings, until I can’t help but give Your love away to others.
Give me love for those who are easy to love and for those who are difficult. Give me love for my enemies, a love that confounds feelings and explanations. Make me love You so deeply that it becomes impossible not to love anyone created in Your image.
Let today be a day for love. Real love. Big love. Your love.
Editor’s Note: Content taken from “A Valentine’s Day Prayer to Find True Love” by Gregory Coles. You can read that piece in full here. All rights reserved.
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Originally published Friday, 14 February 2020.
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