Valentine’s Day, the manmade holiday when we celebrate love (or someone’s perception of love). It brings to mind commercial images of chocolates, beautiful jewelry, romantic date nights, and perfect relationships. Our “Valentine’s-Day-love” usually doesn’t look like the commercial image, and I would say that many of you can probably relate.

When we were younger, love looked like stealing a few moments to be together and catch up at the end of the day, exhausted after chasing small children around and my husband working long hours a distance from home. It was taking turns staying up all night with a sick child. It was walking prayerfully and tearfully through struggles too personal to mention. Love looked like finding a few moments to be together in the middle of church activities and basketball and ballet schedules when they were teens, eventually watching each of them leave the nest and walk out the door into their adult lives.

Then love transitioned into my husband and I standing beside each other while we attended many doctors’ visits with aging parents whose health was failing (which was an utmost privilege). Love was missing church services and many other events to sit with or meet the needs of my mom in a memory care facility while still holding on to our faith and each other. Love has been both of us getting up, dressed, and heading to the hospital in the middle of the night, many times over, after a startling phone call for an emergency with a parent. Love has been giving each other the time to sit by their hospital beds. Love has looked like my husband and I holding on to each other while we stood in front of their caskets.

Love has been the joy of our grandchildren lighting up the room simply by entering it with their sweet little smiles and watching them change and grow. Love has been about having an intricate part in their little lives and teaching them about Jesus’s love.

More recently, love has been more quiet evenings at home, sometimes simply being together to rest—with easy meals for two, long walks together, and caring for each other when one of us is ill. It has meant reflecting on our real blessings as a couple: our adult children whom we love dearly and enjoy their company and conversation (waiting excitedly and impatiently when we know they’re coming for a visit) as well as our most precious blessings of grandchildren and seeing the world through young eyes again.

Love now looks like peace where we both love and accept each other in this stage of life. It looks like simplifying and eliminating anything unnecessary—where we both agree that we want to leave good memories and live lives of significance for whatever time is left. And love looks like following God-given dreams and purposes—no matter what ages we are.

Does it all look like a romantic commercial? No. But it looks like love resulting from two imperfect people united in one perfect God.