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The Crawford Stand. With Valentine’s Day this past Friday, all this week the president of Crawford Media Group, Don Crawford, has been focusing on love. Both spiritual, the greatest, the love of God, and love that inspires movies and music and poetry.

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We celebrate the love of Valentine’s Day, and appropriately so. That loving celebration is fun, romantic, even emotional. It is a day set aside once to live love and to express our love to all, but especially so to someone special. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence, so said Sidney Smith. If you had no one to love, you would never be hurt. But you would never grow. You would never venture outside your own self and your own self-centered needs and perceptions. Your heart would never be cracked open, as one poet said, so that God could enter. To love and love unconditionally is to take risks, and especially the risk of rejection. But then again, nothing energizes and cleanses like love. And hear these profound words about love from a poet unknown. To love another, large or small, is the only real way that one can grow as a human being. Charles Dickens said that a loving heart is the truest wisdom. Robert Shuler said that in the presence of love, miracles happen. Benjamin Disraeli, the great English prime minister, said the following, We are all born to love. It is the highest principle of our existence and its only end. Born to love, genetic, all that we really are, the very highest principle itself of existence, of us, of you and me. And really, says Disraeli, its only end. like the highest and greatest spiritual commandment that we should love the Lord our God with all of our heart and our soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact, we are known as Christians, followers of the Christ, if we have love one for another. Do you? for all mankind? God says to us in love, I hold you in my mind. I remember you. I hold all of the pieces of you, the past wounds and the present. And in love, I knit them together. I knit them together into the person I love, the person I created to give me joy, you, you. Aren’t they great words? Love frees us of the weight and the pain of life. True love always lightens life’s heaviest burdens. True love is a force far more powerful than the weapons of any enemy. Amen to that. Life is a flower of which love is the honey, so said Victor Hugo. Love is knit into the very cells of our bodies. It is written into our DNA. It is encoded in the chemicals that make plants green. It is that which makes the sky blue, the substance of the song of the birds in summer, the whisper of the wind in the trees, the silence of the snow as it falls. Love is the voice of God calling to us endlessly and passionately through all his marvelous creation. Ah, how wonderful and how powerful. There is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out fear. The more one loves, the less there is to be afraid of. Take away love, said Robert Browning, and our earth is a tomb. And if you wish to be loved, said Browning, Love. To be loved is to love. And any time that is not spent on love is time wasted. True love is a durable fire in the mind, ever burning. Never sick, never old, never dead, from itself never turning. So said Sir Walter Raleigh. The great artist Vincent van Gogh said, The heart that loves is always young. Love is a marvelous beautifier. Love is art at work. I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Amen. So said the great artist Vincent van Gogh. Hear the words of Thomas Merton. He said, the beginning of love is to let those who love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Love cures people, the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. Love conquers all things, so said the ancient poet Virgil. Love allows us to believe so fully and firmly in God even when he is silent. The great thinker theologian Soren Kierkegaard profoundly stated that when one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world no matter how imperfect, becomes rich and beautiful. It consists solely of opportunities for love. Isn’t that the truth? Every minute of every day, you can give love and you can experience it if you have eyes to see and an open loving heart at work. It is love, said Thomas Mann, not reason that is stronger than death. And that love, stronger than and which conquers death, is the love of the Christ on the cross and the resurrection which followed. There is no greater love than that. To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others, said Francois Mauriac. And if you love somebody, tell them, so said Rod McKeown. Or perhaps better yet, show them. But the telling, the telling of the loving words unleashes the energy and the power of love in another. So do it. The heart has its reasons which reason alone cannot understand. So said the thinker Blaise Pascal. Love is a dimension in life different from and beyond reason itself. The more the mind, the less the heart, and consequently, the less love. Reason, no matter how wise, can never really fully understand love, much less transcend it. The great theologian Paul Tillich said that the first duty, duty, of love is to listen. Listening, really listening in a caring way may very well be the highest attribute of true love. For those who love, time is eternity. Love is God’s finger on man’s shoulder. Love is like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. to wake at dawn with a winged heart, and to give thanks for another day of loving. Love is a symbol of eternity. In fact, it is eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson said the following, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Amen to that. because love indeed is risky, the risk of rejection. But a life lived without true love is a life never really lived at all. Go for it. Open up your heart. I love you, says Anna Corbin, as you are, not as you wish to be or I wish you to be. I love you for the real person you are, not the imaginary one perhaps I fantasize you could be. Isn’t that wonderful? I love the real, amazing, utterly unique you. If you love until it hurts, really hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love, so said the wonderfully loving Mother Teresa. True love at work drives away the hurt, and then there is only love left. Looking back, said one poet, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so. Love uncommunicated is love aborted. It is there, but it’s never shared. More time is spent judging people, which leaves less time to love them. Zelda Fitzgerald said that nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much love the heart can hold. Love’s greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred. Love at work produces the holiest of the holies. The great English statesman William E. Gladstone said the following, We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace. Power kills love, and without love there is no peace. There is nothing more powerful before and ever again than love. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said the following, “…we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. Forgiving and forgetting are the highest acts of love resulting in our salvation. There was one years ago driven to the cross by the love of mankind, providing in his death The life and the love we lead. The cross. The cross was the final and forgiving form of love. Amen to that. The crucifixion of the Christ on the cross was indeed the ultimate act of love. The great writer C.S. Lewis said the following, To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. Boy. Boy. Has that happened to you? Love breaks down all barriers, and it opens wide the heart, exposes true innocence, and risks the ringing and the breaking of this more prized possession. Real love demands this constantly. Sir Arthur Pinero said that those who love deeply never grow old. They may die of old age, but they die young at heart. They die young at heart with love. That deep love, here and now, is but a prelude to the perfect love, there. There. In fact, they are one love. The love here and the love there. Present and eternal. Contiguous and continuous. Love is both earthly and eternal. Love never dies. Never. For there is only one real happiness in life and the life to come, and that is to love and to be loved. The great writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said the following, Never self-possessed or prudent, love is all abandonment. Isn’t that great? Hear then the marvelous words of the great poet William Wordsworth, A person can be so changed by love as to be unrecognizable as the same person. Love transforms. regenerates. Love produces change everywhere and in everyone. Love betters what is best. The great philosopher Plato said that love is the best friend of humankind, the helper and the healer of all ills that stand in the way of human happiness. Plato. Again from Plato, without love, humanity can not survive. Wow. Powerful. Truth way back then in the days of Plato. And for some further real definition of the word love, hear the words of St. Augustine. He said, What does love look like? Why, it has hands to help others. It has feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has ears to hear the sighs and sorrows. of humankind. That is what love looks like. Amen and amen. But you know, my friends, love comes supreme and most innocently from a child. A child. A child’s love is pure, it’s uncomplicated, unconditional, fully trusting. Such innocence opens deep the world of feeling and emotion, and it is a return to that childlike love, no barriers, no defenses, and that ability to love which alone can make complete the adult version of that child. You could say that the more a child loves, the more the adult version will love. May we all be wise enough to return to the innocent love of a little child. And so, my friends, my fellow Americans, we, the Crawford Broadcasting Company, wish you all of the love possible on Valentine’s Day and during Valentine’s Week, during Love Week. May love in all its forms permeate your life and may you know the supreme love of the one who laid down his life for you. Live love every day and know the real and true meaning of life. And finally, the profound words of poet Emily Dickinson. If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting robin into his nest again, I shall not live in vain. Great words of love. Love is the greatest.

SPEAKER 01 : 15:16

Please let Mr. Crawford know that you appreciate these daily visits here on the Crawford Stand in your email to him at stand at CrawfordMediaGroup.net When you write, be sure to tell Mr. Crawford on what station you hear the stand. His email address again, stand at CrawfordMediaGroup.net When you want to review what you hear, go to our website, CrawfordMediaGroup.net The Crawford Stand is a public affairs presentation of Crawford Media Group and this station, serving God and country. I’m Bill McCormick.