The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate our faithful friends
Mr. Fuzziwuz, my cat, stretches out on the bed each afternoon — soaking up sun like he’s snoozing on the beach. Nearby, orchids send out stalks reaching toward heaven.
As the days grow longer, I think about God’s first words in Genesis — “Let there be light” — implying that everything that came later — trees, flowers, animals and people — needed light to survive.
Later, Jesus is called the “light that shines in the darkness” in St. John’s Gospel — and when he died on the cross, we’re told darkness covered the Earth.
We can be the light illuminating other people’s lives, especially on Valentine’s Day — when chocolates and flowers abound.
True, it’s a day largely devoted to romance — but even folks without sweethearts can celebrate their faithful friends.
You know who they are: the ones who hold our hand in the hospital, cry with us at the cemetery — and save us from succumbing to despair.
They’ve seen us in our raggedy bathrobes, with hair disheveled and slippers askew — and haven’t run screaming away.
We can show up with the worst haircut in the history of mankind, and they will smile gently and say it looks fine. They’ll come to our rescue with chicken soup — and don’t forget prayers — when we have the flu.
The prayerful lyrics in one of my favorite songs, “H.O.L.Y.,” praise a woman who rescued the songwriter from darkness: “You’re an angel. … You’re the river bank where I was baptized — and cleansed from demons.”
The songwriter doesn’t specify which demons pursued him — but I imagine fear, loneliness and sorrow, which stalk us on the blackest nights, when we’re most vulnerable.
There was a dark time in my life, when I was, as another song puts it, “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Sadly, I didn’t realize everyone is made in God’s shining image — even me — so we all deserve respect and kindness.
Just when I despaired of ever meeting a dependable man, God sent me an angel of sorts. You see, my late husband — who was my best friend — rescued me by treating me with respect — and eventually leading me back to Christ, the true savior.
In “Confessions of a Guilty Bystander,” Trappist monk Thomas Merton had a stunning realization, as he stood on a busy sidewalk, watching the crowd.
Suddenly he saw the “secret beauty of their hearts … the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes ….”
He added, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
His insight reminds me of the 9-year-old girl, Annabel Beam — whose story is told in “Miracles From Heaven” — who fell headfirst into the trunk of a hollowed-out tree, where she remained unconscious for five hours before being rescued.
The girl was miraculously cured of an illness as a result of the fall — and told her mother she’d seen Jesus, whose eyes “shine like gold glory reflected in the sun.”
As for heaven, “Everything glowed. The light came from everywhere, from the flowers and the plants — even the grass gave off light as you walked on it.”
For me, this vision of heaven needs one ingredient to complete it — and that’s a friend.
And on Valentine’s Day, I’ll be praying for my friends, whose kindness and love remind me that, in God’s eyes, we’re all shining like the sun.