You are not alone on Valentine’s Day

Well, I hope y'all had a wonderful Valentine's Day.

Today was a normal day for me. Studying mostly. Nothing special. In fact, I almost forgot it was Valentine's Day until I saw a lot of people with roses, chocolates, and teddy bears around campus.

I was eating at the PGH building at U of H. I ran into a friend, whom I haven't seen in a while. We talked for a little bit about Valentine's Day. She asked if I had a "special someone" that I was going to be with today. I told her no, I was by myself. She kinda gave me a sympathetic look, it was a caring demeanor. She is my friend after all. She would love to see me be with someone. She has a romantic relationship right now, so she (like a lot of people) thinks that I would be happier with someone as well.

I am happy, which is weird, because I feel like I have the entire world on my shoulders lately. Things have been hard.

But my happiness does not come from having a partner or having everything go my way. My happiness has a divine source.

Mary Baker Eddy, a woman whose writings I have been studying, experienced some rocky relationships. She was a woman that lived in the Victorian era, a time when women had little rights and depended on their husbands for financial support. She married someone, who died only a few months after their marriage and before the birth of their son. And because she experience health problems, she had to give up her son. She remarried only to find herself deserted by her second husband a few years later.

She almost died at one point from a serious accident. Doctors said that she would not recover. She could have given up and died at that point, when she was a middle-aged woman. She had no one to love her. No one to protect and provide for her. She lost two loves and her son. She was alone. How would she make it in the world? How would she survive? And, after all, she would have lived the ideal amount of time in those days, when people had shorter life spans. She could be done with life and not face its challenges.

But after reading the Scriptures and reaching out to God, she was healed. And she dedicated her life at that point to studying the Scriptures and discovering what healed her.

In her study, she eventually wrote a book called "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." And one of the chapters in her book is titled "Marriage." And she had a lot of good ideas about love and marriage, drawn from her experience and her relationship with God. God healed her loneliness, and replaced it with a satisfaction of knowing God as her Divine Husband, the source of all love. She never remarried or had more children afterwards, at least from what is known about her. Yes she lived a life full of purpose and meaning.

So I take what she had to say about love seriously. And she wrote this, after all her bitter disappointments in the area of love, which has brought healing to my life and to so many others:

"Human affection is not poured forth vainly, even though it meet no return. Love enriches the nature, enlarging, purifying, and elevating it. The wintery blasts of earth may uproot the flowers of affection, and scatter them to the winds; but this severance of fleshy ties serves to unite thought more closely to God, for Love supports the struggling heart until it ceases to sigh over the world and begins to unfold its wings for heaven." S&H p. 57

And somewhere else she wrote…

>> " Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love. When this hour of development comes, even if you cling to a sense of personal joys, spiritual Love will force you to accept what best promotes your growth." S&H p. 266

She discovered that God was her true source of happiness, companionship, and peace. Since I read those passages and others in her writings, they made me realize that I am never alone, never without love or companionship. These I can find in God, Divine Love. And this is where true happiness springs forth.

So don't feel sorry for me if I don't have someone to share Valentine's Day with. In fact, I do have someone to share with…the source of Love itself, the reason we celebrate this day!

You are loved by that very same source!