29 Hearts for Valentines day

Lisa and I have been married for 29 Valentines days now so I arranged to give her a little bag with 29 hearts to remind her of this year as well as all of our past ones.  As you can tell some have been plain and some fancy.  I expect that if each one of those hearts represented a year that we have been married that she would have some good memories to go with each of those hearts.

Valentines can be tricky for men in particular.  This graphic below gives some ideas of things that have been done, mostly by men, for their sweethearts.  There is a site that has a lot of statistics that might make Valentines interesting for you at this site like Valentines spending in 2011 was 15.7 billion dollars.  Yikes!

Songs that make me think of my wife

Here are some musical thoughts that remind me of our relationship:

"We Are One" by Kelly Sweet:
"I am you, you are me, we are one."
"All the beauty I have ever dreamed is right here in front of me."

"When Did You Fall" by Chris Rice:
This album was given to me by Lisa for some gift giving occasion. 
"Make your way over here and sit down by this fool, let's rewind.  Let's go back and replay all our scenes."
"My beautiful surprise!"
"The day at the beach...the night with the scary thunderstorm"
"My lips are free!"



"For Lisa" by David Tolk:
If I could write music this is the song I would have written.

"Everything" by Michael Buble
"When you smile at me you know exactly what you do."
"In this crazy life, and through these crazy times its you, it's you, you make me sing, you're every line, you're every word, you're everything, you're every song and I sing along, you're everything."

"I Will Be Here For You" by Michael W. Smith
"I will be your shelter, I'll give you my shoulder."

Enjoy the Music!  Happy Valentines!

Happy Valentines!

Be sure to tell those that you love...well tell them that you love them of course! 

Give them a kiss and a hug and act loving toward them, so that they don't only hear it but see it as well.  If all works out well then they will feel it too!




As for me and my wife, and my youngest daughter and my Mom, we are going out to eat for Valentines evening and then watching a movie together for the big day.  Hope you have a big time planned as well. 

Love is like a rock

Love is a good thing!  Isn't it?  By definition if we do something unloving like then it isn't love. So if we manipulate and try to control others and call it love...well it's not love no matter what we call it.  So that is why I feel safe in saying that love is always good.

These heart stones are ones I have purchased over the years for my wife.  This is a portion of her collection.  The heart shape itself represents love in our culture.  These stones, when I give them to my wife, represent my love for her.  Naturally she needs more than the symbol of my love, I have to actually act loving and to tell her that I love her at appropriate times.  (There are inappropriate times to say "I love you".  Like little kids do to try to get out of consequences of their behavior.)  So love--the real thing is always good.  So now I can tell you the caption to the picture.

Love, no matter how its stacked, is good!

Since my wife and I have been married for a long time, we have been able to find ways to keep loving each other.  That, I think, is the lesson of love.  It is work, work to keep choosing love.  Work when something you loved about her changes or is lost.  Work to not let love get lost in the daily hassles of survival and raising children, or for that matter getting old. 


Love will change because we are people and people change.  We choose to love and consequently that doesn't allow us to use the excuse that we've changed and no longer love.  We continue to love because we choose to love.  We choose to love the person we remember from the past and the person that we each are now, and the person we will become.  That's the commitment I made when I married my wife.


I know there are some catastrophic things that can harm and maybe kill love.  Barring those hopefully rare events, lets find excuses to love rather than excuses to lose love.


So regardless of where Valentines day came from or who first started it and all that; lets just allow it to be a reminder, maybe a re-commitment to continue choosing to love each other. 

In Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card the main character Rigg remembers being taught by his father:

"For children love is a feeling; for adults it is a decision.  Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment."

(p. 360)