Song of Songs 1-8

Daily Reading
Song of Songs 1-8

Daily Thought

How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride!
    How much better is your love than wine,
    and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!
Your lips drip nectar, my bride;
     honey and milk are under your tongue.
~Song of Songs 5:10-11

Solomon's Song of Songs reminds us of God's creative delight in fashioning the passions and pleasures of love and marriage. This is love, love to heaven's height, the love we long for, to be cherished and savored and guarded. The world sings of love and celebrates sex in free-for-all fashion, and you get what you pay for. Beware the ways of the world, for they cheapen us. "Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom" (Song of Songs 2:15).

We were created with a powerful passion that must be protected. The young woman warns her friends, "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases" (Song of Songs 2:7). You have a precious gift; do not open it. It belongs to someone special.  

And there he is, "My beloved is radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand" (Song of Songs 5:10). He notices her, too, "As a lily among brambles, so is my love among the young women" (Song of Songs 2:2). They each have found the other, their one-in-a-million, and there is a wedding, and they open the gift. 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. ~Genesis 2:24-25

Daily Prayer

Loving Father, Thank You for Your goodness. You looked at Your Creation and saw that it was good. Except one thing. Man was alone. You made woman, brought them together, and it was very good.

God, may my life be holy, my love be pure, and my marriage be an example of all You had in mind when you paired man with woman and said, "This is very good."

Amen