A Generational Valentine
On Saturdays I have been sharing art from Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Today I’d like to share a Valentine from 1882 instead. The verse reads:
My love is like the steadfast sun,
Or streams that deepen as they run.
I think of thee, dear love of mine,
The best of all that’s not divine.
Most parents dream of the day that their children marry and have children of their own. Childhood is the time for children to learn that their love for their husband or wife must be steadfast and that their love for one another must deepen through the years.
Every generation needs families that hold together with steadfast fathers and mothers whose love for each other and their children and grandchildren deepens through the years.
Childhood is also the time to learn that, as precious as a lifelong companion is, their relationship with their divine Father is even more precious.
So husbands also ought to love their own wives
as their own bodies.
He who loves his own wife loves himself;
for no one ever hated his own flesh,
but nourishes and cherishes it,
just as Christ also does the church,
because we are parts of His body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
Ephesians 5:28-31
And this I pray,
that your love may overflow still more and more
in real knowledge and all discernment,
so that you may discover the things that are excellent,
that you may be sincere and blameless for the day of Christ…
Philippians 1:9-10