Valentine’s Day is looming, people!  For some, the day is anticipated with delight like a kid waiting to hear if the snow has accumulated enough to cancel school.  For others, well, not so much–Valentine’s Day becomes one more day (but magnified) to be reminded that no one has chosen you.

It’s like the scene in the movie “While You were Sleeping.”  You know the line.

Lucy: Every day I go and I sit in a booth like a veal.
I work every holiday and go home to a cat.
And now a rich and handsome man has asked me to marry him,
and l have said yes.
Okay, okay. That makes me a raving, total lunatic.

Boss: The wedding is tomorrow, Lucy.

Lucy:  I know it’s tomorrow, Jerry. But you know what? I even wish it were yesterday. Because you know what? That would mean that today I would be on my honeymoon, that l would finally have a stamp in my passport, and that it would say “Italy” on it!

Boss: What happened with the other guy?

And then Lucy achingly utters the words that so, so many broken people have felt, have cried:

“He didn’t want me.”

Autobiographical admission here:  No line in a movie gets me as much as that one.  I want to be wanted.  I want someone to take me to dinner.  I want someone to sit with me at church. I crave hearing the words, “I’m with you.”  Too many days I channel the 8-year-old kid who just wants to be picked for a sandlot game of baseball, but who expects to drag out to right field without hearing her name.

This is a burden, and not one uncommon to all humans. It’s the burden for the wife whose husband has left her for another woman, or for pornography. It’s the burden of the pastor of the tiny church who wants to shut the doors. It’s the burden of the mother whose children never call, or the child whose parent has committed suicide. “He didn’t want me.” It’s the burden of the single woman at Valentine’s Day.

Life never seems to resolve as neatly as it did for Lucy and Jack. A little mistletoe, a little leaning. . . The ache, the loneliness, the disappointment linger. All are reminders that we live in a broken world, but were created for something grander, something sweeter than all the Russell Stover chocolate hearts in the world.

So this I recall to mind: I have been wanted, pursued, and chosen by the great God of the Universe. He is ever present, bringing joy, lifting my eyes to His promises, causing me to say with Paul:

 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+1&version=ESV