Valentine's Day is here.
The worship songs are about love. The sermon is about love.
Someone on the children’s team stopped by the grocery store to pick up heart-shaped cupcakes.
And you know that someone is going to ask you to program pink lights.
If your spouse has a day job, you’d better send flowers. (Not because the flowers are important, but because you know it would feel awful to have to watch deliveries arrive for others and never have one land on your desk.) Of course, flowers are expensive. Ridiculously expensive. And you didn’t jump into ministry to waste money on things that are going to die in three days, but you also don’t want to have the conversation that ends with the questionable reply: “I’m fine.”
If you are single, well, that has its own weird twist, but it’s the worst if you are in a new relationship. You know, the one where there’s been no defining conversation. You can’t overdo it and you can’t underdo it, so how are you supposed to figure out where to land?
If you’ve been in a relationship for awhile, you don’t dare watch a show on network television. The flood of diamond commercials gets beyond awkward.
The whole sticky, sweet, expectation-laden ordeal is enough to make the best of us complain that it’s a made-up holiday and start longing for Easter.
The whole sticky, sweet, expectation-laden ordeal is enough to make the best of us complain that it’s a made-up holiday and start longing for Easter.
So why is Valentine's Day so awkward for church techs? Three reasons:
1. People in ministry aren’t allowed to fail at relationships.
Everything about church revolves around relationships. And your closest relationships are the ones where there is the most pressure to succeed.
It isn’t that you aren’t allowed to fight. You are.
But not on the way to church. (Which I’m pretty sure is statistically when most fights happen.)
You don’t have time to resolve it before you have to slap a smile on and get to your post. (As your spouse gets to their post and the kids are dropped off somewhere in between.)
There’s also pressure as to what you get to fight about. It can’t be too petty or you’ll look bad in small group. And sometimes it feels like it can’t get too real or your boss might get involved.
Romantic relationships are the training grounds for our hardest life lessons. And Valentine’s Day can seem to shine a glaring spotlight on everything that isn’t perfect.
And “don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” (Which happens to be great advice.) But what happens when your spouse’s defense mechanism makes them shut down and hide from every single conflict so that nothing gets resolved?
Romantic relationships are the training grounds for our hardest life lessons. And Valentine’s Day can seem to shine a glaring spotlight on everything that isn’t perfect.
2. Quality time is a myth.
Let’s face it. Church technical ministry isn’t exactly designed for work-life balance. In fact, it’s possible that the only people with worse hours are farm workers and obstetricians.
But that’s okay, right? We have “quality time.”
The problem is that there’s no such thing as quality time. Intimacy gets built with quantity time.
It’s the mundane that creates the connectedness of inside jokes, little touches, and shared moments.
It’s the mundane that creates the connectedness of inside jokes, little touches, and shared moments.
Besides, if someone is a workaholic in the corporate world, the spouse knows who to blame. But in ministry, it gets convoluted. After all, is your spouse supposed to be mad at the ministry? At God?
I once had a job working for marriage counselors who only met with people in full-time Christian service. One of the big issues for the spouses of the people serving in ministry was that they were lonely. They felt like the lowest priority when it came to time and attention. Most of the time they didn’t complain about it, because they valued what their spouses were doing. (Until they wound up in marriage counseling because their heart’s survival instinct kicked in and something had to change.)
There is nothing in our culture that is wired to create extra space in our calendars.
As it turns out, date night—while a good practice—just isn’t enough. We can’t budget three hours a week to sustain our most important relationship. There has to be something that is daily. And creating that margin is on us. There is nothing in our culture that is wired to create extra space in our calendars.
And a single hyped-up holiday doesn’t solve the long-term problem.
3. Flowers, candy, and stuffed teddy bears don’t really make us belong.
Somewhere along the line, Valentine’s Day became an aisle at Walgreens. And while a plastic heart-shaped box may make a 12-year-old girl feel loved, it doesn’t last very long for people who are wired for ministry.
We need more than a temporary badge as proof that someone loves us.
What if Valentine’s Day isn’t really about love at all? (Otherwise we could just quote the Apostle Paul and call it a day.)
What if the best gift we could give each other has nothing to do with the trappings of the holiday and everything to do with deeply seeing each other?
What if the problem with Valentine’s Day is that it trips all of our baggage about belonging?
After all, when advertising shows us romance, it features impossibly beautiful people, with ridiculously white teeth, driving expensive cars, eating gourmet food, paired with gorgeous significant others.
We know we don’t belong in that scene.
And while we know intellectually that God loves us, we still feel like He might like us a little better if we hadn’t sworn at that guy who cut us off in traffic yesterday. Our imperfection in light of God’s perfection makes our sense of belonging uneasy.
Our imperfection in light of God’s perfection makes our sense of belonging uneasy.
That need for belonging is why it’s such magic when we find that one human who really, truly gets us and wants to be with us anyway. It’s the reason it tears our hearts out when it doesn’t work out.
What if the best gift we could give each other has nothing to do with the trappings of the holiday and everything to do with deeply seeing each other? We can give each other the gift of belonging—whether we are in a relationship or not.
For sure, though, someone is going to ask you to do those pink lights.
