Yes, there was a Saint Valentine. In fact it seems there were many early Christian martyrs named Valentine.
But people do not think of these saints when they celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. February 14 is a more superficial celebration of ‘romantic love’, popularised by Medieval artists, Renaissance poets and contemporary commercial entrepreneurs.
This is far from the witness of early Christian Valentines who died as martyrs in love of their God.
Don’t accept anything you find written here without first verifying it in your own experience.
Salvation is not the addition of a programme to our already full hard-drives, or a reboot, but the offer of abundant life
The central question is not about who is in, who is out, who is right or who is wrong, but Is there love?
I usually spend a day with the following day’s scripture so that in the evening I have something to share in these FFF posts.
We know, in solidarity with our Muslim sisters and brothers, that our only hope is in God. Our only hope is in God.
I’ve been a part of a few great end-of-year gatherings in recent weeks and there’s always some great conversations
And this is a problem we share. We are all runners – running from God’s love, escaping the relationship in which we are most loved
Then, before sundown that evening, something remarkable happened. We heard the Muslim family of faith in our city, wives and husbands, parents and children of those who had died, speaking of love
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
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It’s easy to make the mistake of seeing life as a treadmill, day after day ups and downs, a movement through time from youth to old age, then death and beyond.
Too often if feels as if we are helplessly captive carried along by the momentum of all that is expected of us and demanded from us, and we risk falling into an existence mode, a daily rhythm of survival, enduring, coping and so the treadmill rolls on.
Over the years, and even in recent months, weeks and days, I’ve prayed many prayers which have not been answered as I had hoped.
You’ve probably had the same experience: praying and wondering if and when or how your prayer will be answered.
Bible questions still pop up regularly in quiz shows and they often cost otherwise sharp players much needed points.
I’m ready for a question asking for the two names for the last book of the Bible. The book often known as Apocalypse is perhaps more often referred to as the Book of Revelation.
It’s common (thanks to movies) to think of an apocalypse as a devastating and unwelcome time of destruction.
The pics I use on these daily posts are sometimes snapped by me, and often borrowed from free-use websites. I thought it might be interesting to move towards using only my own snaps, and then only those taken in the past 24 hours. We’ll see how I go.
I took the pic above yesterday morning on an early walk.
Perhaps we find the miracles of Jesus too difficult to understand. How can we cope with what we may not have seen with our own eyes?
Many people cope with the miraculous by reducing it to what they can understand. They say Jesus just increased the blind man’s psychological vision, or opened his eyes of faith rather than actually giving him physical sight.