Love this Valentine’s

Plan a loved-filled evening with me. Which of the following four options sounds amazingly, powerfully, and completely full of love on Valentine’s Day?

• A corner table for two in an upscale restaurant surrounded by dozens of roses, a topnotch pianist nearby and a truly delicious meal you will long remember.
• A carriage ride with your love through one of the most romantic places you can imagine.
• A warm and beautiful beach scene complete with drinks and no agenda other than to enjoy the weather and views.
• Having ashes smeared across your forehead.

The greatest love we can experience, without question, is the last one. This Valentine’s Day—which aligns this year with Ash Wednesday—is all about love, the best love we can receive.

Ash Wednesday is a day to receive the greatest love. Ash Wednesday is also a day to give (or show) this greatest love in return.

The first three options on the list above are awesome. Like ah, wow, truly awesome. Did you want to choose all three?

So did I!

Love, while it does include such great things as dining out, delightful rides and great getaways, is always about intimacy, connection, honesty, safety, assurance, promise, deliverance, understanding, forgiveness, and joy—the deepest, greatest, most profound joy that the top three on the list may allude to but in and of themselves are not longstanding. They are also not everything.

But Ash Wednesday? Now that’s everything. And everything is just that—everything. Ash Wednesday is our every win and loss, our greatest triumphs and our greatest tumbles which land us in our deepest, darkest place. Sin.

Ash Wednesday recognizes that sin catches every single one of us. Ashes placed across our foreheads is an act and a sign of who we are: a sinful people in need of our Savior because we honestly cannot save ourselves. The ashes are a way of saying to our Great God that we indeed sinners in desperate and dire need of being saved.

On Ash Wednesday, we can hear God say through the prophet Joel, “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and with mourning—rending your hearts and not your garments (Joel 2:12-13).” From this honest place of acknowledging and purging our sinful souls, we can receive the greatest love.

We can also show the greatest love. How? We can return to the Lord.

What a gift. We can return to the Lord because our God “… is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6-7).”

This Valentine’s Day, this Ash Wednesday, we have the gift of just not receiving God’s beautiful, powerful, affirming and illuminating love. We will also give our love back to God. To do this—to show love back to God or to give love back to God—we will be real.

Two Hebrew words help us understand repentance. The first is the word nacham, which means to turn around or to change your mind. The second is the word sub. It is used over 600 times in the Old Testament and is translated by words such as “turn,” “return,” “seek,” or “restore.” We can see it in phrases like “to turn to the Lord with all your heart.”

Turn to the Lord with all your heart. Lent, the forty-day journey that begins with Ash Wednesday, is the perfect time to focus on Jesus’ life which is love, Jesus’ death which is love, and Jesus’ resurrection which is love.

I get it. Romance is nice.

But love? Real, deep, unshakeable, never-stopping, always reaching, healing and forever holding love?

Yes, let’s take that.