It sure seems like the "Odd Couple" to me - bloodthirsty vampires and romance. But several of the blockbuster books and movies of this past year manage to put them together.
The vampires aren't the old Bela Lugosi movie type - some crazy old guy in fangs and a tux. They're hunky young guys who just happen to have some unique dietary needs. And in the story, there's a young girl who falls madly in love with vampire boy, to the point of being willing to exchange her soul for a love that will last forever.
I don't get the vampire and Valentine thing. What I do get is an underlying romantic theme that runs deep in our culture - that someone out there is a love that will complete me, that will fill the hole in my heart. And many folks I've known have been willing to give or do almost anything for someone they hope will be "the one." Some of the biggest mistakes of our lives are the mistakes we make for love.
The sad discovery so many have made is that no human love - even a wonderful marriage - cannot fill that hole in our heart. The happily married, the unhappily married, the formerly married, the never married - they all know the incurable loneliness of a missing love. If you're expecting "Miss Right" or "Mr. Right" to complete and totally fulfill you, you're destined for disappointment. In fact, the romantic history of many lives might well be titled, "Disappointing Relationships."
If your heart seems to say, "What you're looking for will be found in a love relationship," your heart is right. But it's not a love any human can give us. We're made for more.
Speaking of Jesus Christ, The Bible, the greatest best-seller of all time, says, "All things were created by Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16). The only one who can tell us why we're here is the One who put us here. And He says we were created by Jesus, for Jesus, and we're going to have that hole in our heart until we have Jesus! That spiritual vacuum is God-shaped. Whether we realize it or not, it's His love we're made for. Our loneliness is cosmic loneliness.
It doesn't say we were made for a religion. It says we were made for a relationship! Sadly, it's His love we're missing because we're away from Him. As the Bible says, "We have all wandered away like sheep. Each of us has turned to his own way" (Isaiah 53:6). It's that thing called sin that has put a wall between us and the God we need. We were created for Him...we've lived pretty much for ourselves.
But in the greatest act of love in human history, "God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son" (John 3:16) to die on a cross, to pay the penalty for every wrong thing we've ever done. There's blood in the greatest Love Story ever told - the sin-forgiving, life-giving blood of Jesus. "The blood of Jesus His Son purifies us from all sin" (1 John 1:7).
I remember the day I embraced Jesus as my own Savior from my own sin. The great love search ends that day. For someone reading this, that day might even be Valentine's Day.
This Valentine's Day, there will be some who will judge how much someone loves them by how much that person is willing to spend on them. How much does Jesus love you? He spent His life for you. Nobody loves you like He does.