Here it is Valentine's Day...well tomorrow is anyway! Love is in the air. I can just see Peppy Le Pue hopping around while the cat runs crazy trying to get away from him. That's the vision I have when I think of Valentine's Day. I guess I'm not much of romantic! (haha)
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Kristina has been racking her brain trying to come up with a gift for her boyfriend. Oh to be 16 again....actually....I think I'll stay where I am! (haha) But, she has been thinking and planning Valentine's Day for a few weeks now. Everything has to be perfect! She finally came up with this idea to make Jason a blanket. He is a huge Tennessee Titans fan and she wanted to make him a fleece blanket. You know the kind I'm talking about. You take two different things of fleece fabric, cut slits all the way around and then tie the two together. That is about the extent of mine and Kristina's "sewing" abilities. But, anyway, she thought this would be the perfect gift so off we went to Wal-Mart last night. (And, for the record, I must say, the place was a nut house! Every teenager this side of the Mississippi was in there last night trying to buy Valentine gifts!)
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We found the fleece fabric she was looking for, found the perfect card she wanted and then she asked if she could also buy some fabric paint. I didn't think anything about it and we walked back to the crafts department, found a pretty white color and checked out.
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When we got home she plopped down in the living room floor and started working on her blanket. She was meticulous about cutting the strips and then spent about an hour tying it all together. When she was finished she flipped the blanket over to the solid gray fleece that she had bought and started tracing the outline of her hand with the white fabric paint. I watched her as she worked never saying a word. She carefully placed the outline of her hand in each corner of this blanket. When she was finished she laid the blanket out in the middle of the floor to dry and started cleaning up after herself.
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"Why did you put the outline of your hand in the corners?" I asked.
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She grinned and her face turned red as if I had just said the most embarassing thing ever. "Ummm, I just wanted to" she answered.
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I looked at her and then looked back down at the blanket and said "No, seriously, I'm just curious why did you do that?"
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"I just thought that if I put my hands in each corner of the blanket he could see that my arms are stretched out saying 'I love you this much' and when he wraps up in the blanket my arms are always around him." She answered me so shyly with her head hanging down and her eyes looking up at me through her blonde hair while she twisted back and forth like a three year old that was in desperate need of a bathroom break.
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I grinned at her and smiled because out of all the teddy bears and candy she could have bought she was giving a gift from her heart!
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As I was walking through my office building this morning I was looking around at all the red balloons and flowers and cards. The color red just kept standing out to me. As I looked at each Valentine hanging around the building I began to see the red as Jesus' blood. He gave the ultimate gift from his heart, he gave his own blood. Mark 15:37 says "With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last." His death was painful, it hurt him, he gave everything he had, there was nothing left. With a loud cry he took his last breath. He died for me, for you, for your children, for that co-worker that drives you insane every day, for the lady in front of you in traffic that keeps tapping her brakes for no reason, he died on that cross for everyone. And, with his arms stretched beyond what they should have been he said "I love you this much!"
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