That special day is coming up soon again. That special day to tell your sweetheart you love them and they are very special. That day, of course, is Valentine’s Day. In our fast-paced world today, it is easy for married couples to start to take each other for granted.
The person we should love, honor and respect the most, we oftentimes forget to treat special at all. We should never take for granted the spouse we married and pledged ourselves to.
When a married couple starts to take each other too much for granted, that’s when their marriage starts to go downhill. I have a sad but true story to recount here.
Many years ago, when we were first starting to farm here, I had a good friend who would come sometimes and help me fix machinery. We would naturally visit as we worked on the machinery together. Sometimes we would talk about “Treasure Island” and some of the really good things we got from there.
You ask, “What is Treasure Island?” It’s the name we’d given the spot where the city had their place for people to drop off their garbage. Back then, if you could find something of value there, you could freely take it. So we scavengers got all kinds of treasures from there. The phrase, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure” was true here.
One time my friend, Mike, found a very expensive window in excellent condition there. It appears that it came from a doctor’s or lawyer’s office when they did a bunch of remodeling. I had a glass block window in my milkhouse that was literally falling to pieces. When he asked me if I could use his new-found treasure, my answer was, “Absolutely yes!”
It took all of my carpentry skills, but I got it fit in there beautifully. This, now, is 20-some years later, and the window looks as nice now as the day I put it in. It was and still is a super-quality window that was sure worth retrieving.
Another time Mike told me of something he’d found at Treasure Island that nearly brought us to tears. He found a large wedding album filled with pictures. The couple in the album had apparently had a large wedding party with many guests. They had a fabulous wedding day with everything done to perfection.
But what had started out so beautifully and wonderfully had now ended in disaster. The lovely bride and handsome bridegroom in time ended up getting divorced. Their marriage didn’t last very long.
When they split up, they took a lot of their things, including their wedding album, to the garbage place. How tragic. Mike, when he got done looking at it, gently laid it back in the trash.
Wedding albums should never be put in the garbage. Marriages should never end in divorce, either. Broken marriages and broken people and innocent children caught in the fray. It should not be this way. There are way too many broken homes and marriages in our nation today.
We need to keep our wedding vows and love our spouses with all our hearts. We need to love them and treat them special every day, not just on our wedding day. But there are days when we can really treat them special and show them how much we really do love them.
One of those days is Valentine’s Day. If we do this, there will be a lot less wedding albums ending up in the garbage. If we do this, we will be amazed as we look back in time at how blessed we’ve been.
The Bible says in Luke 6:38, “Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down and shaken together and running over.” I know that as I have learned to express my love and appreciation to my wife on a daily basis, it has certainly improved our marriage and family life.
And in the end, I’m the one blessed most of all. So men, on this Valentine’s Day do something special for your wife that says you really love her and would count it a privilege to marry her all over again. 
Tom Heck, his wife, Joanne, and their two children own and operate a 35-cow dairy farm in Wisconsin. Email Tom Heck. Order his book at Life on the family farm under an open heaven.
