Valentine’s Day has come and gone. The day we celebrate love and candy and flowers and candy and romantic dinners and candy and cards and chocolate. Has the day left you feeling glad or sad?

Like relationships, Valentine’s Day sometimes has its melancholy moments or full-on frustrations. Maybe like Charlie Brown, no one remembered you on Valentine’s Day. Or you accidentally gave a card that was too mushy to somebody with a bad case of cooties. Or your dog ate the beautifully frosted sugar cookie hearts you made for your special Valentine. Or you broke your shoulder delivering Valentine’s Day brownies to the boy you wanted to be your Valentine, only to find out he didn’t really like brownies.

A couple of those stories represent the ghost of Valentine’s Day present and Valentine’s Day past around the Engelland house.

Anna came home from college on Saturday to make some cookies for her beau. She found a delicious recipe for gluten-free “Jesus cookies.” My daughters call those really puffy, soft sugar cookies with lots of icing and sprinkles you find in the grocery store “Jesus cookies” because they seemed to get them during Sunday School A LOT. I’ve always been a chocolate girl, so I never bought those “Lofthouse” cookies until after my daughters developed a taste for them at church, hence the name. I hope Jesus doesn’t mind having cookies named for him. Anna absolutely adores them and was excited to try a GF version, since she can’t have gluten. Here’s the recipe she used.

Anna’s “Jesus cookies” were yummy gluten-free versions of the Lofthouse cookies that tempt you at the grocery store.

They turned out melt-in-your-mouth fluffy. Anna frosted them with canned buttercream she dyed pink and dusted them with red sprinkles. Her first batch she put in a container, but she left four large hearts and four small ones frosted and sitting on parchment paper on the kitchen table while we went to dinner. Bad idea.

When we returned, the little ones were there because they had been closer to the middle of the table. The big ones were gone. The only evidence of their existence was a few smears of pink frosting on the welcome mat by the back door. We have a cookie monster at our house named Elektra. But our pound puppy doesn’t limit her thieving to cookies. Ask me about the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie I left on the dining room table. The crust was there, but the inside had been licked clean.

Here’s our unrepentant cookie thief. I hosed down the mat in the driveway and scrubbed away the evidence while she watched.

Fortunately, Anna had some set aside for her boyfriend. Her friends, however, were out of luck.

I was reminded of a Valentine’s Day when I was in college at the University of Kansas. I made brownies in the basement kitchen of my scholarship hall during a winter storm. They were a special treat for a boy I wanted to impress (my now-husband Shawn) who lived in the hall across the street. I went out that night to deliver them and slipped on an icy sidewalk. I managed to keep the batch of brownies safe while I caught myself with one hand, but I chipped a bone in my shoulder and had my arm in a sling for a month. Adding insult to injury, Shawn gave a lukewarm reception to the brownies. After some prodding, I found out he’d rather have oatmeal or chocolate chip cookies.

All that is to say that the road to love is not paved with flowers and candy. Sometimes it’s hard, but we can’t let our hearts get hard. And we can’t let them go off in the wrong direction, like thinking a diamond bauble or a vacation home is better than perseverance and integrity.

The Bible has a lot to say about our hearts. For Northwood’s Ladies’ Bible Study, we’re using a book by Kelly Minter on Nehemiah. The subtitle of the lesson is “A heart that can break.”

Nehemiah’s heart was breaking for the destruction of Jerusalem, the holy city for the Jewish people. He left comfort in the Persian king’s court to lead the rebuilding of the city’s walls, despite ongoing opposition.

I was reminded of a passage in Ezekiel:

“I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” – Ezekiel 11:19

God wants us to care deeply about the struggles of others. He wants us to reach out to widows and orphans, to prisoners and the poor, to the sick and the outcast. After tending to immediate needs, we can share the hope we have because of Jesus, the greatest gift of all.

We also studied a passage in Proverbs about guarding your heart because it determines the course of your life.

“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.” – Proverbs 4:23

That reminded me of another verse, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” – Matt. 6:21

For me, I need to avoid the traps of materialistic thinking. Stuff is so much less important than people. I need to value my relationships with God, my family, my friends and anyone I encounter.

Nehemiah said in Chapter 2, verse 12: “I did not tell anyone what God had put in my heart to do.” For a while, he prayed. Then he prayed some more and fasted. He talked the King and prayed again. He surveyed the walls and prayed before telling others in Jerusalem of his plans. Then they got busy building and the praying continued. Opposition came and so did more praying.

Get the picture? What has God put in your heart? Pray. Do some planning. Pray some more. Take steps forward, and don’t forget to pray. Expect the journey to be challenging. We can’t do God’s work without God’s help.

Left to my own devices, I sometimes get it backwards. I guard my heart against the pain around me and soften it to unhealthy junk or pursuits that have no impact on eternity. I’m asking the Lord to help me press in close to those in need and keep materialism and entertainment from becoming too important.

So that’s what I pray for you as we look back on Valentine’s Day: a heart that is soft to the leading of God and guarded to the influence of the world.