For the Love of a Cat

It’s been a tough week. Our 10-year-old cat needed an operation because of pyometra. Then after  being home for a day, we brought her to the vet again because she was having difficulties breathing. It turned out she had a lot of water in her lungs. She’s still being treated, and we’re still waiting a couple of days to repeat the xray and find out what the underlying cause of her pneumonia is. It’s tough, and it breaks my heart to see her suffering. I am terrified of the prospect of losing her, she is much beloved.

When our pet dog (a beautiful Japanese spitz named Alanis) died, many years ago, I was so traumatized and surprised by the pain I felt that I thought I would never love a dog again. It took a few years for me to allow myself to love another dog, but the death of Alanis really changed the way I viewed pet ownership. I came to terms with the fact that they live so much shorter than we do. When my husband and I decided to get a cat, our first pet together, I mentally fast-forwarded to the moment of the cat’s death, and reminded myself that if we will open our home to a pet, then we should open our hearts too. If we open our hearts, then we need to face the reality that pain is the price we pay for the privilege of loving. If I cannot reconcile myself with the reality of the possibility that our pets will die before we do, then I shouldn’t open my heart to love anything or anyone at all. We are all just passing through this world, after all. Our lives are richer for having opened our hearts to this delicate creature, and now we are in so much pain because she is also in pain.

Our well-meaning Christian friends comfort us by cheering us on, claiming healing for our cat, praying with us, declaring that since their own pet experienced miraculous healing, they know God will do it for us too. I truly appreciate that and I cannot imagine going through this time without those words. But I don’t have the heart to tell them that I believe our lives and the lives of everything around us isn’t ours. God isn’t a cosmic butler who is obligated to do things for me just because I want Him to. People die, pets too. It’s a fact of life, and as much as I want to “claim” the miracle, I know that God doesn’t always intervene. He does always provide His grace, and that’s all I can hang on to right now. I plead with Him humbly for the life of our beloved cat, with silent intensity, in the privacy of my heart.

I sometimes think about how Christians can be trapped into thinking that if they pray hard enough, God moves on their behalf in exactly the way that they want Him to move. Where is the humility in all this? There are Christians who will have you think that these things happen to you because you lack faith, or you didn’t pray hard enough, or you didn’t give enough tithes or offerings. I remember this well-meaning Christian church leader who had the audacity to tell me that I remained childless because I had the wrong desires in my heart, I prayed the wrong prayer, I had the wrong attitude about it, and that he will teach me how to properly pray so that I can get the results that I want. It reduced God to a formula, not a Person. The truth is, this is life. Life is filled with fluid circumstances that changes whether you’re ready or not. Faith must rise above circumstances.

I know that things can end up differently than we hoped, and I know that it could also end up in a miraculous answered prayer. No matter how it ends, I will trust in God.

The Mother I Had

I’ve avoided Mothers’ Day celebrations since my mom died in 2011. I hid out at home, mostly, just spending the day in prayer and in quiet, away from social media. I privately greet my family and friends who are mothers. Mostly I celebrated my mother’s memory in solitude, while others were celebrating, taking photos and posting them online. Not that I resent these things, I am truly happy for people who have something to celebrate on Mothers’ Day. However,  I remembered women like me who were both orphaned and childless, who had babies who died, who nursed these private pains while the world celebrated their mothers who were still physically with them.

To say that my mom had a tough childhood is quite the understatement. She had a horrific childhood. She married young (to a sweet, wonderful man) in part to escape that awful part of her life. She was eager to have children of her own that she can love and cherish and not break. She had no good role model when it came to parenting, but the older I get, the more I am amazed at how deliberate and thoughtful she was in the way that she raised us. Especially me, her only daughter. While she didn’t have good role models when it came to parenting, she opened herself completely to God, and let His Word shape her into the kind of mother she hoped to be.

As her only daughter, and one who had such a different personality from her, our relationship wasn’t always easy. In fact we butted horns quite frequently, and it strained our relationship for many years. She raised me to be my own person, though. Now that I have begun to get to know God through His Word, as she did when she was still alive, I realize that I recognize the principles behind many of her decisions and the words that she used to teach us, shape us. Instead of allowing the pain of her childhood to define her, she begun to understand her identity in Christ, and that defined her instead. That was the kind of parent she became–God-fearing, God-loving.

She is one of the very few people I know who was truly status-blind. She didn’t treat people differently just because they were richer or poorer. Even after we got out of the bad neighborhood where we grew up, even when God has prospered our family, my mom was never mata-pobre. She had a wider sense of the world, a better grasp of its temporary nature. Especially towards the end of her life, she had a quietness inside her that I struggled to comprehend.

She also taught me at an early age to think differently. She said I always asked questions about things that puzzled her. Questions about stereotypes on women and men (why women were expected to dress and act a certain way, for example). She let me read books at an early age that opened my mind to questions about the struggles of women. She showed by example that women can do anything they set their minds on, and that I didn’t need a man to complete me. When I became a young woman, she reminded me that I did not need “romance” to feel complete, and helped me re-evaluate my idea of a healthy relationship. She taught me to date a man whose world doesn’t revolve around me, who wasn’t intimidated of my intellect and personality, who was kind towards me. Despite all the guidance, I still made a few mistakes, but in the end I did marry a man who is the best fit for me, and she was such a loving mother-in-law to him.

When I got married, she never pressured me to give her a grandchild. She reminded me to take care of my health, but she never even suggested that my husband and I are incomplete without children. She just wanted us to be happy, and she saw that we were happy, and she never tried to cast a shadow on that. She never catered to that idea of a “complete”, traditional family, and I never had to defend myself to her when it came to that. She never hurt me with those kinds of questions or comments.

Many times in my life, when I am trying to figure out what to do and how to decide on things, I wish my mom’s still here to guide me. I rack my brain to try and remember her lessons, her words, and true enough I find her words to always be reliable because she’s guided by the Word. Despite the challenges and struggles of her life, I know that this is the kind of woman I want to be. She might not be successful in the world’s definition of success, but she ran the race and finished strong. That’s how I want to finish.

I still miss her so much. Perhaps I’ll always miss her, even when the grieving is done. My mother was a remarkable Christian woman. I am very much blessed to be her daughter.

A Soliloquy at the Crossroads

Shall I doubt you now
When You’ve taken me by the hand
Through the belly of the valley.
When at nights, amidst the shadows
You lulled me to peaceful sleep.

Shall I doubt you now
When You’ve fed me from your own hands
The best yield of the land
As abundant and generous
As the waters of your well.
Never running dry,
Always flowing, always full.

Shall I retrace my steps now,
When you’ve taken me through the fog
Carried me through violent storms
Borne by the strength of your love
Safe, secure, in the cup of your palm?

Shall I turn away now
When morning is breaking
As surely as it broke yesterday
And the days before that?

Shall I doubt your love now
When I’ve glimpsed your very heart
Laid bare at the cross?
A love, pure and simple.
A love, impossibly profound.

Shall I doubt you now
When at great cost you crowned me with life
And pieced together the garments
I’ve so carelessly cast aside
In the past.
All in the forgotten past.

Shall I waver? Shall I despair?
When I know, I know now more than ever
I am no lost stranger, alone in the world.
I am a beloved daughter, precious and unique
As I could only be to my Father.

Pao Alfonso

A Prelude to Daybreak

An expanse of night
As far as the eyes can see.
An uncut fabric
Punctuated by little stars;
Billions of pinpricks of grace.

(Pao Alfonso)

Times of Upheaval

We all go through times of upheaval. We all go through those weeks (months…years…) where several things in our life just simultaneously break down in a major way and it threatens the peace of our hearts.

I disconnected from the internet as much as I could these past few days so that I can find the peace and quiet I so badly needed during a trying time. I realize how one gets so comfortable in the constant  buzz of social media that you hardly realize how you’re rarely alone with your thoughts anymore, and I really needed to  be alone, to recharge through prayer and devotions.

I had some time to read through this journal I found in the library. It was the journal I kept from 2010-2011; the time when I had a miscarriage and my mom was in and out of the hospital, leading to the time when she passed away. That journal was so hard to read. I can’t imagine how we survived day to day, and I was in constant emotional anguish from seeing my mother suffer in her sickness. The entries I wrote were crying out in private pain.

During that time, I found no comfort in anything else except in holding on to the promises of God. It was like holding on to the last life vest while adrift at sea. It was a dark time for me, but it was also a time of great grace. I saw my relationship with my mom healed, I saw God’s supernatural provisions for our needs, I saw the inner strength renewed in me day by day. I saw my family survive the ordeal and continue to grow in love and maturity after my mother passed away. It was a dark time with a myriad of moments lit up by God’s love and grace. Like a dark sky lit up by countless stars. It carried us through, and I was never the same person afterwards.

This week, in one of my devotions, I meditated once more on Psalm 91. Back in high school we had speech classes. Our teacher was an elderly lady who made a great impression on me. She made us memorize Psalm 91, and though I thought it was a beautiful Psalm, I appreciated it more when she told us why it was her favorite.

She said that when she was a very young girl, she and her family lived through the Japanese-American war. Being a family of some means, they lived on a private island. Despite that, she was so afraid whenever war planes flew overhead. They would try to find shelter as bombs were dropped all around them. Her mother taught her Psalm 91 so that she would say that to herself and cling to the promises, despite the terrifying reality of what was going on around her.

I’m so fortunate to not have to live through any wars. The trauma must have been great. It must have been a while before she stopped hearing the sounds of the planes and the bombs in her mind. I could imagine a frightened young girl who had no other recourse than to hold on to God’s promises.

There will always be dark times in life. Such is the human condition. There will always be times of upheaval, but somehow we always come out of it in one piece. There’s always something left in order to build something new with. Something left so that we’re not completely swept away. These are my favorite verses in the chapter:

If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent. Psalm 91:9-10

I love this passage because it’s a wonderful promise that whatever damage happens in my life, I won’t be completely razed to the ground. There’s always hope to rebuild because I will not be completely and utterly overtaken or defeated by the circumstances of life. If you look at the word “disaster”, it’s such a common word that the intensity of it is all but lost over time. The word is actually from the Latin dis which means “without” and astrum which means “star”.

Because of the hope afforded by our faith in a God who cares for us and loves us, we don’t live in a starless void. We’re not lost at sea, hopeless and directionless. Look in God’s word, reconnect with Him and see how He will help you find your true north again.

Daylight is coming, hang in there.

The Long Wait

We used to live in a flood-prone area, and when I was in fifth grade, we went to school in an even more flood-prone area along Pasong Tamo Extension. Oftentimes the roads are not passable during heavy rainfall, and my youngest brother and I would get stuck in school for hours. The first time this happened, my eldest brother got so worried that maybe my father won’t be able to pick us up because of the floods and rain, he dutifully braved the storm and began to walk all the way through the flooded streets from our place to our school. It’s a good thing my parents found him on the road while they were stuck in traffic.

Meanwhile, my youngest brother and I waited in school. The wait seemed like forever, and the dark sky and heavy rains made the wait feel even longer. It felt like nobody was coming for us. Of course, my father always came to pick us up no matter how long it took. This happened several times during rainy season, and each time my father would always come to fetch us. Eventually we learned to just wait for him because despite the long wait and no matter how late it is, my father never failed to show up.

Today I was reading through Psalm 13 in my devotions. It’s a Psalm by David, something that I used to have a hard time understanding. A lot of the Psalms attributed to King David sounded a lot like complaining. This short Psalm is one of them. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? Oh my goodness, did he really write that? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? I used to wonder how words like these found their way in the Bible. I think now I understand them better.

David, a man after God’s own heart, did not enjoy a life that is always at the peak of everything. There are moments when he spent a long time in valleys, dark and seemingly endless. During those times, he was honest with God about his feelings. Apparently, David understood that God knows how we feel anyway, so we don’t need to act like we’re perpetually popping mood-altering drugs when we talk to Him in prayer. We can’t hide anything from Him, so there’s no point pretending. There’s no use for the fake rah-rah-rah attitude when we really feel shaken inside.

That being said, we can be honest with him about that sense of desperation in our hearts when the wait seems so interminably long. We can tell him that we feel ashamed of our failures. We can tell him that we feel alone and abandoned, and we can utter the most plaintive cries for help. Look on me and answer, O Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. We can tell him that we feel like there’s only deafening silence when we really need to feel that we’re not going through the valley alone.

Even Jesus showed appropriate emotions when confronted with the pain of the human condition. He wept when Lazarus died, He felt compassion for the sick and weary, He stopped to give comfort and offer forgiveness to the outcasts and the social rejects because He felt compassion for them…He even felt like the Father turned His back on Him at the cross. God created us with a range of human emotions, and it’s unnatural to deny that we feel these emotions during trying times.

However, David still recognized the fact that despite everything that is happening to his life, God is still his salvation and there will come a time for rejoicing. It’s not a question of if but when. Sometimes my head knows that all things work together for good, but I still act like I want everything to be good right here and now. It’s unreasonable to go through this life and expect to not participate in it, good and bad experiences alike.

In times when our faith is challenged by circumstances, remember all of the many, many times that God came through for you. No matter how long the wait, He has never abandoned us and He never will.

Quick Thought: On Being Still

These past few days, my readings in the Word were about prayer. Today I meditated specifically on this verse, which many people know and call to their minds when they are in dire need. “Be still and know that I am God…” It’s an imperative statement that often makes it in our pleadings during times of distress. I’ve uttered this verse myself so many times in my life.

Tonight I learned that the Latin imperative form for the phrase “be still” is vacate, as in the root word for vacation. Cease striving, take a rest, have a vacation from all this worrying and fruitless labor and know that God is God. After all, as Jesus said, who among us by worrying can add a single moment in our life?

More interesting is the Hebrew word for the phrase “be still”, which is raphah (raw-faw’). This means to sink, to relax, to cease, to let go, to become helpless. The Bible reminds us of our need to be completely dependent on God who is able. It reminds us that we must remember how helpless we are, and that we must vacate the position of God in our lives, so that He can take over and show us who He really is, because who He is…it’s incredibly awesome.

I read in C.S. Lewis’ book “The Problem of Pain” that some people regard God as a pilot would regard a parachute–it’s good to have it around, but we always hope that we don’t need to use it. Often, prayer is the last recourse and only something we remember to do when all our efforts have failed and we’ve made a bigger mess than we can claw our way out of.

Let this be an encouragement to you today that God invites us to let go, and let Him work in your life. Trust that if you let Him do His work, He will not mess it up. Perhaps you don’t have the same end in mind, perhaps things won’t work out exactly the way that we plan it to work out, but if there’s anything I learned from all the things He took me through, it’s that He can be trusted. I can let go because of that, and so can you.

Lessons in Restoration

It’s amazing how life lessons can be learned even in unexpected ways if you look closely enough. I appreciate how my mom would always take every opportunity to pick up golden nuggets of wisdom and teach us as we were growing up. The past few days, I’ve been pondering on this particular little nugget that I found.

A couple of weeks ago, during our weekly Bible Study at a friend’s house, she said that she found three old pens as she was cleaning out her home office. The pens looked dirty and broken, she was almost ready to throw them away but since she knew I was interested in pens, she decided to show them to me and let me have a look.

My friend seemed almost embarrassed to give them to me because they looked so dirty, but honestly, when I saw these pens, I couldn’t even see the grime. All I saw were the possibilities. It’s like my eyes looked through all the dirt and straight to what the pens actually were…Parker 75s.

So I set about the restoration job as soon as I went home. I took apart the pen, determined which parts to throw away and which ones to keep. I soaked the nibs for hours while persistently rubbing off the grime and oxidation from the pens. A few hours after, I could see what wasn’t obvious at first–the beautiful sterling silver, cisele finish.

It took a bit more rubbing over the next few days to get it to gleam, but after a few hours that first night, the pens started to look more like their old selves. I put them together again, replaced a few broken parts, and inked them. I set them on paper one at a time and oh, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt happier to see the ink streaming out of the nib in fine, wet lines. I tuned it a bit so it writes exactly the way I want it (wet and smooth), and by the end of the night, they were writing perfectly.

The more time I spent polishing these up, the better they look. There are dings in some spots, some signs of wear and stubborn stains, but overall, they’re beautiful and look almost new. Best of all, they are working again.

These past few days, I’ve been reading the book of Isaiah and the gospels, and this experience with restoring the pens reminded me of Jesus’ way of restoring us.

I’ve made such a mess of my life before. There was a point when I feel marred beyond recognition, broken, unfit to share a relationship with God or to ever be held in His hands again. Shame followed me around and piled on until I can barely remember what life was like before all the awful mistakes.

When I truly surrendered myself to Jesus’ hands, a radical thing happened. I wasn’t thrown in the garbage. Jesus looked at me and loved me, as awful as I thought I was. With complete surrender, the restoration process began. There were a few things that He took away, broken pieces that don’t help me at all. Perhaps at first they hurt but I trusted that it was necessary. There were a few things that took time to take away (like the dried up ink that needed to soak before the feed gave up the gunk), but again, the softening process was necessary.

The cleaning and polishing was done lovingly by hand. No shortcuts. Just a lot of hands-on effort to remove all that dirt piled on me, and a lot of time alone with Him. In the end, I had some faint scars from my rebellious years, but they don’t define me anymore. Bad decisions have consequences, but they’re not a disfigurement on me. Merely a part of the past.

In the end, I am the same person (much like the pens were still Parker 75s once they were cleaned up), except that the Lord has Himself made me clean, forgave me, removed what was not working anymore and gave me new life. I am once more an extension of His hand, able to do His good work while I am here on Earth. Much like how the pen is once again a functional writing tool. The shame of sin has been removed and I can now live without the past hanging about me reproachfully. Since I have experienced the liberating power of His forgiveness, I can tell everybody about it and point them back to Jesus who didn’t see me as fit to throw away, but restored me lovingly and cherished me as His own.

“Though you have allowed me to see troubles,
many and bitter,
you will restore my life again;
from the depths of the earth
you will again bring me up.”
Psalm 71:20

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In EVERYTHING?! Seriously?!

Don’t you have that verse that sticks with you for days, sometimes weeks? A verse that just won’t let you go? I was chewing on this verse since the past week:

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

As somebody who has been through so much at such an early age, I know how difficult it is to give thanks in “everything” because what is inside that “everything” could be a lot–the pain of child abuse, the indignity of poverty, the loneliness of being an orphan…a lot. Yet the Bible tells us to give thanks in EVERYTHING. Was Paul just being super-spiritual? Maybe he didn’t actually mean everything?

Then this week I sat down with an old lady I had known since my high school days. I never noticed this about her, but since I’ve been pondering the verses above, something just made sense. The way some inscrutable puzzle just suddenly makes sense once you look at it at the right angle and fresh from an afternoon nap. Being thankful in life determines how happy you become.

This old lady was comfortable in life, she had a substantial and steady monthly income, she did not need to rely on her children for anything  but her children provided for everything anyway. She had a lot of beautiful grandchildren, her own house, a lot of time to enjoy the fruits of her years of labor. The strange thing is that she’s unhappy about absolutely everything. When her children got her a car, she complained it was too small. When they got her a van, she complained it was too noisy. She complains about the time she spends with her grandchildren, and complains when they don’t visit her. She complains about the food, the weather, Philippine politics, world politics, the neighbor, the neighbor’s dog. She’s a good person deep in her heart, but I realized that as she sits in a dark corner of her life, wallowing in her unhappiness, she’s blind to all the good things in her life. Wherever she goes, she manages to find that dark corner and sit and watch the world from there.

In a sense, a lot of people who have so many reasons to  be happy are no different from the destitute. The holes in their hearts are so deep, nothing fills them up. On the other hand, I’ve met people who are thankful for everything, from the smallest things to the largest ones. Nothing escapes their sight.

They don’t blame God for the misfortunes of their life, but they thank God for the grace they receive to survive the catastrophic blows that they endured. They thank God for turning their mourning into dancing. They thank God for that parking space that frees up at just the right time. They thank God for the great weather on their wedding day or their birthday. They thank God for the food that they eat, the air that they breathe, the family that holds them near and dear to their hearts, the friends that are like second family to them. They thank God for a wonderful dessert, for that helpful stranger who came to the rescue when they had a flat tire, for the gift of small acts of kindness that they receive from different people each day.

For these people who may or may not be financially well-off in this life, their hearts are so full of gratitude that every little thing added to their cup makes it run over and overflow.

So yes, it’s not how much you have in this life that matters. You may have the whole world at your feet and still be a destitute and hungry beggar at heart. You may have the humblest situation in life, and still find see the grace and goodness of God as clear as a signature written across the sky. Your thankful attitude matters, for your own sake.