Last Valentine’s Day, I remember I took a long walk over to the Luxembourg Gardens. Like most winter days in Paris, it was chilly and misty with a grey fog hovering just above our heads. Holidays can be hard when you’re away from most everything you’ve spent your life getting accustomed to. Even if you normally aren’t lonely, there’s something about those days that can pull it out of you, to the point that it feels like it’s hovering all around you just like the fog. But what I experienced over and over again while living in Paris was that in those moments when loneliness started to fill me up, if I called to Him, God would rush in and take its place. It was in those days and moments that I learned what Nehemiah meant when he said, “…for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

This Valentine’s Day is a lot different – I’m in Texas and headed towards one of my favorite places – a city that pulls like a magnet to my very spirit. The sun is shining and it’s nearly warm. My head and heart are in a different place too. Instead of spiraling down to massive projects and the end of graduate school, it feels like they’re sweeping up to new dreams and plans. Both days have their good and their not so, but His love is still the same.  His love is what sustains us no matter our circumstances.

For He is our first love from whom all other things flow and through whom all other things make sense. I think that’s what Paul was getting at when in 1 Corinthians 13 he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

God’s love makes all the difference, friends. It’s a force that is impossible to fully capture with words, but if you’ve felt it, you know it’s power and tenacity. It changes people, it moves people. It breaks people and then rebuilds them into who they were created to be.

And all of the love that we might posses for one another is just a glint of His for us. Take heart friends, whomever you are loving today, you are loved by Him, more fiercely and fully, over and under and all around.