“Mum, you forgot my Valentines,” wails Miss 4, and I turn the pram with her younger sister around back to the car to get all those colourful pieces of paper that she’d stuffed in the front seat.  To me they are more scraps of art that we’re already drowning in and to her they are love .and kindness scripted on a page.   It’s her way of showing God’s love; she’s been counting down the days since Christmas.

And they light up the lives of the cashiers in the op shops we visit, and the lady on her scooter is so touched they chat for 5 minutes while I browse.

She’s coloured for days and stuck on doilies and threaded brown twine through red sparkly card, and I’ve pondered on love and life, and the sacrifice of St Valentine and wondered at our culture and the current ‘definition of marriage’.

We need a solid love.

I’ve never thought too much of Valentine’s Day; it wasn’t something we really did growing up, but my how Miss 4 is changing and setting up her own traditions.  Setting out candles on toilet paper as a runner down the table centre and organising her father to buy her a bouquet of flowers; and I don’t think he’s even managed to do that for me yet.

In the middle of that I want to teach her love from the Bible.

I wanted to take a minute to reflect on true love this Valentine, the love that is penned through the Bible . . . and so I whipped together just a few Scriptures of love, that I’m sharing here tonight, cause there is nothing like last minute ideas, 7 days out from Valentines Day.

I don’t know and understand all the Greek and Hebrew definitions of love . . . one day I’ll do that study and my mind will be blown,  I just know that even with all the other spiritual gifts, if we don’t have love, we are clanging gongs. . .  and that is scary.

I want to be like Heidi Baker, missionary to Mozambique who’s ‘learned to stop for the one’ who is Compelled by Love, and I share more of her story here.  We went to hear her speak once, sat in the halls of the church for hours waiting to get in and the message she brought still challenges me and I marvel at the ways God has moved through her.

And there is this prayer in Ephesians 3 by Paul that I just keep coming back to:

I pray that you being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s Holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled to the measure of ALL the fullness of God. 

Did you catch that?  We are to be rooted in love, we are to know this love and then we will be filled . . .

It’s one of the 6 powerful and profound prayers for personal growth that I’ve been praying over my life the start of this year, and I’d love to send the pretty, printable versions to you too.  Will you join the hundreds of us who’ve been praying this prayers to ground our lives?