He first saw her in Sunday school when he was six years old and she was just five. “She had golden curls and beautiful blue eyes,” he recalled. They graduated from high school together in 1901, but went their separate ways — he moved to Kansas City and she to Colorado for a year — until becoming reacquainted nine years later. It was then that Truman, who once wrote of Bess, “I thought she was the most beautiful and the sweetest person on earth,” began his first and longest campaign — to win the heart of Bess Wallace.
On January 10, 1845, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett for the first time, after reading her volume of poetry, Poems. He was a little-known thirty-two-year-old poet and playwright, she was an internationally renowned poet, an invalid, and a thirty-nine-year-old spinster. “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett — I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart,” the letter said. Over the course of the next twenty months, they would write each other close to six hundred letters — one of the greatest literary correspondences of all time. The pair's last letter was exchanged on September 18, 1846, the night before the two left for a trip to Italy, and two weeks after their secret marriage. Their romance, which she would eventually credit with saving her life, lasted for fifteen years and spawned some of the world's most beautiful poetry.
The world has seen many great romances and as we look to another Valentine's Day this week we celebrate all the things that bring us together in loving relationships. I would contend, however, that it is even more important to celebrate those things that keep us together year after year, for 50, 60, 70 plus years. St. Paul spoke of loving another patiently, attentively, unconditionally—moment by moment, day by day. Love encourages, it builds up, it comes alongside and affirms the other. Love is much more than the chemistry of our feelings at any given moment–sometimes love is taking out the garbage and working that second job to pay the bills. Dostoevsky said, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in sight of all…But active love is labour and fortitude.” Let us celebrate the many couples on our campus who have lived out that active love of labour and fortitude together for many decades. Let us celebrate love in all of its marvelous manifestations! Roses and chocolates, candy hearts and valentine's cards are important but let us celebrate labour and fortitude, patience and forbearance, forgiveness and compassion, trust and hope, and all the things which make up the stout fabric of which a lasting love is made. *
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