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“I’ll be honest with you,” a friend said as we waited for our food at our favorite restaurant. “I want true love. I want to cry out, ‘Help, I’m married to a man made of stone.’ I wish just once, on Valentine’s Day he would display a little romance.”
Is romance what she really wanted?
The Cambridge dictionary gives a definition of romance as: “a close relationship between two people who are in love with each other.” (Reference: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/romance)
Who wants romance associated with love? We want true love, complete and everlasting. Let’s be real. From the beginning we women have been fooled by the longing for romance and mixed it up with love.
The woman at the well mentioned in the Bible has no name, possibly because she bears the name of most women today. She’s hungry for acceptance, fulfillment, and wholeness; desperate for nurturing and lasting commitment.
But many Valentine’s Days today go by and the emptiness still aches.
Here are seven ways to find true love, the sincere kind of love that goes beyond Valentine’s Day’s fancy dinners and red roses.
1. Remember that what you want is not the feeling romance brings, but the love that commitment holds.
2. Resist the Hollywood kind of love; and choose instead the forever kind of love from the Holy One.
3. Refrain from believing the lies that romance fills the emptiness.
4. Realize the lover of your soul waits for you.
5. Receive the never-ending love that Jesus offers you.
6. Revive the passion of love for Him who loved you first.
7. Reject Satan’s lies that lure you to relationships empty of love.
The woman standing beside the well missed all of the above.
She longed for the human kind of love to soothe her lonely nights. Thus, her thirst was constant.
Jesus knew. He answered, “‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.’” (John 4:13-14 NIV)
As the woman at the well did, we need to put down that jar. When she did, Jesus, the lover of her soul, arrived. He spoke into her emptiness, He set her free. And with the living water He offered her, He quenched her thirst for security and misguided romance.
Let’s Pray: Father, how often we keep reaching out to the world for satisfaction and cling to another human being to find true love. I choose to drink the water that will keep my heart hydrated, not only on Valentine’s Day but every moment where loneliness tries to come in. In Jesus name. Amen.
What is your heart thirsty for? Who loves you with an everlasting love? Have you found true love yet?
Bonus article on today’s topic.
Janet P. Eckles
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