HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!

Saint Valentine's Day or Feast of Saint Valentine, commonly known as Valentine's Day, is observed on February 14 each year.

St. Valentine's Day began as a liturgical celebration the early Christian saint named Valentinus. The most popular martyrology associated with Saint Valentine was that he was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry and for ministering to Christians, who were persecuted under the Roman Empire; during his imprisonment, he is said to have healed the daughter of his jailer Asterius. Legend states that before his execution he wrote "from your Valentine" as a farewell to her.

The day was first associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. By the 15th century, it had evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering Sweets, and sending greeting Cards - known as valentines. 

If you want to read the whole story of St. Valentine, here is a link http://www.olrl.org/lives/valentine.shtml  

Valentine did not see her as his jailer's daughter but as a daughter of God. His story always touches my heart because the love he felt for her was not a romantic kind of love. His love was pure, simple and unconditional love – like the kind God has for each of us. The kind of love we should have for each other.

This Valentines day I challenge you to love others unconditionally even if it is for a day. 

If we look at each person, we can see the beauty in them. Each of us has God-like quality planted in us and it grows amid the thrones of our faults and shortcomings. Many times we look at others and see only the thrones, the defects. 

We never realize their potential. We dismiss them easily and effortlessly. Believing how could anything good possibly come out of them. We are lazy lovers, so we neglect to water the good in them and hammer in the negatives. And, eventually we will get our self-fulfilled prophesy, by golly we were right, by our attitude and action, we killed whatever is good in them.   

The truth is some of us don't see the beauty within us; we need someone else to show it to us. One of the greatest gifts we possess is to be able to reach past their thrones and find the rose within them.  

This is one of the characteristic of love... to look at a person, to know their hopes and dreams, to know their deep dark secrets and character defects, and still love and accept that person into our lives.  To let them know that we love the 'rose' within, in spite of their thorns - maybe even because of their thorns. Only then will they blossom many times over.

Let us try to do this if not for them, for us. Because at the end of the day we are the one who would enjoy their many years of blossom.

Have a Happy Valentine's Day!!!!