A VALENTINE PRAYER
Tricky day Valentines. Obviously, if you're all loved-up - enjoy. Have fun! But if you've been secretly dreading today, well, here's a little prayer, poem thing...
I pray today for those in love, those out of love, and those in between. I remember especially those who find themselves a little bit lonelier than normal.
Lord, I do not pray today for loved-up couples, exchanging overpriced flowers and foil-wrapped hearts, leaking pheromones like diesel fumes at candlelit dinners. I’m pretty sure they will be OK (for now).
Instead, I hereby dedicate this happy-crappy day to anyone caring for a loved-one with a chronic illness of body, mind or soul. Lord let them be a little bit more okay because I prayed.
Flame of Love, melt our tiny, tinny chocolate hearts. Wherever marriages have grown cold, calloused with conflict or mired in the mundane, would you please rekindle the fires of true romance?
Attend to the elderly gentleman gazing at a fading sepia photograph in a silver frame of a wedding in another time. Look at him and look with him and be with him in the remembering and the unremembering too.
And, on this day named after one of your unmarried saints, would you please bring a little unexpected joy to anyone wistfully buying flowers for themselves? Let their daffodils last longer and shine brighter than the overpriced red roses that also caught their eye.
God of all comfort, strengthen single parents on this difficult day. Let their kids be kind, let their teens tidy their bedrooms, and if that's a miracle too far (I realise you've got a lot on in the world right now), could they at least be less grumpy and initiate a hug at bedtime?
And so, may the arms of love, flung wide on the cross, embrace the unlovely and unloving parts of my world, my workplace, and my life today. Forgive me, I pray, for this cheap, hysterical, isolating thing I have sometimes made of love, of life, and of You.
Amen.