Valentine’s Day: the glorified holiday of love with cheap candy, heartfelt messages, and broken hearts. Society often fills the mind with strong, false meanings of love through music, games, and movies. What makes Chick-Flicks so popular after all? They play out the ideal love story; what everyone wants to see. Generally, a popular, hot, athletic teenage boy ends up with the unexpectedly actually beautiful outcast girl. Probably at one point, he will miraculously save her, sweep her up in his arms and a tear will roll from the audience at the satisfying ending.

1 John 4:19 says that “we love because God first loved us.” God, the literal creator of love itself,  gives the strongest example of true love: He gave us His only Son. He sent Jesus in the flesh, to come rescue this fallen, messed up, sinful world just for the chance of getting to hang out with us forever—the opposite of superficial romance and cheap Walmart chocolate.

This Valentine’s Day, no matter whether you have a Valentine or not, take a second to remember that the ultimate Valentine, the truest gift of love ever shown to man, is all yours. Christ stands at the door of our hearts knocking, “Be mine?”