LOVING IS A BATTLE THAT WE CAN WIN

I don’t really understand why trying to love truly makes one a laughing stock and open to mockery? How much longer should one hold on in times like this? Doubts fill your heart when resentment piles up and you no longer like yourself for allowing the beloved to keep hurting you. The love bank can become bankrupt because of careless words and thoughtless actions. Love supposed to make you carefree but why it becomes like a measurement that one fall short off. Or the worse, overdoes?

Love is a mystery that becomes a misery unless its habits are healthy. Love is a skill one needs to learn hard most often. The pathways can oftentimes be filled with stumbling blocks, thorny grasses, and broken glasses. When you choose to walk that path you may hurt yourself and stumble along the way. Love is something you wrestle with especially when you have second thoughts. You need to reflect on your decision and be wise. I am learning to love in a tough way and its stretching my normal capacity.

Is this good or bad? The answer depends on how I will respond to the situation. Should I be coward and run away or be brave and hold on to what I believe is right?

I hate seeing myself cowering in the face of adversity because I was not made up that way. Although I am hit in my tender points it hurts so much and I feel sore deep inside because of the blows.  I cannot remain wearing a poker face.Instead I should ask God to give me a “face as hard as flint” to go on and stand strong with my convictions. Although I am human I believe I was designed with a sterner stuff than this. Although I need to protect my heart, I should know what I am protecting it against and not “walling” people out. I have to admit that I need grace beyond my limitations and mercy that embraces the ugly and the beautiful in me. I need to come face to face with my darkness so that I can shine my light appropriately.  I have to choose the battles I can fight and let go of those that God can do for me.

On Loving and Commitment

Loving is such a funny thing! It’s a decision that changes you in so many ways. It is like facing a mirror and seeing a face that you have not seen before. Sometimes the reflection gives you a smile, a frown, a confused look or a surprise. Whatever emotion you experienced in the process, the point is loving makes a fool or a wise lover out of you. “Love brings out both the best and the worst in you.” Before I learned the art of loving, I could not believe this statement but now that I knew better, I am learning that there’s certainly a grain of truth in this.

Loving takes you to places you’ve never been before. It takes you to exhilarating valleys and mountains. It can also take you to deep crevices that scare you to death. It exposes your motives and hidden desires. You feel insecure of the depths that you find yourself into. It overwhelms you. All you can do is surrender to its force and learn that in being weak, you are strong. Only the courageous learns the art of loving. A coward will run away from its intricacies and a fraud will repent of his devious ways. Loving is for the genuine, the human, the artist.

What is the best way to describe loving? Is it “falling” in love or “growing” in love? Which is the best approach tested by those who surrendered to its sheer beauty? If you say, “falling in love”, does it mean you may also “fall out of love?” If that’s the case, loving then becomes conditional or temporal. However, if we accept that it is “growing in love” we agree that it can grow less or grow more. Maybe loving is best described as a commitment that one makes to someone special. It is something independent of feelings but the existence of love fuel such. Yet it can also be loaded of deep affection. If we believe this, we are saying that loving is learning to commit.

Now that I am learning to love, I am also learning to be committed. It means, sticking to it even when the going gets tough. It means to fight for what’s good for the others. Loving means a decision that I will make in all my powers. It makes me a better person and   therefore, I like what I am becoming when I am loving.

Seven Months Committed

Guess what? I’ve been married for seven months now and one interesting thing I realized is the truth behind the quote that says “Home is where the heart is.” So far, we have moved to our second house and it was really challenging for me at first because my husband and I have different approaches to life’s emergency. I usually plan ahead before doing a “major” project while he is very adept in what you call a “spur of the moment” plan.This was one of the things that caused our conflicts in the very early days of our marriage, however, as days went by we learned to adjust to each others differences. Praise God!

The next interesting thing I have learned so far and that is, home is what you make it. No matter how small your space is, as long you have the creativity and the determination to make a home and make it work, you will enjoy it!

our mini library in the living room

chairs from my hubby’s salon before we got married

a separate toilet cum reading room!

wall hanging decorative shells  I made myself

memento from a young friend, he painted this himself

Home is something you create out from the abundance of you  heart and it’s priceless.

To Be Beautiful

I am blessed with a hubby who has a gift for making something ordinary to beautiful. He has a skill of using his scissors to cut your hair and bring out your best looks and the uncanny sense of painting your face to highlight your true beauty within. He always reminds his clients; “Beauty is not only skin-deep. It has something to do with your attitude in life that shows in your lifestyle in how you take care of your body and your looks. It has something to do with what you eat and what you put on your face. It has something to do with how you look at yourself and the people around you.”

In his ministrations, I understand more the work of God in us through our experiences. Some are happy, some are painful.  Yet God the greatest artist will not stop until He can bring out the best in us. He will remove some parts in our lives that hide the beauty within. He will add some colors like relationship that he allows us to have; some may be dark, some may be light, yet the purpose of these is to bring out the beautiful colors in our lives. At times He teaches us simplicity as the key to healing. As my husband would say, “just use pure water on your face as not to kill the naturally friendly bacteria that will eat all the germs you accumulate from the polluted surroundings.” At times he says; “you have to exfoliate to remove the dead skin cells and so that your facial moisturizers can do its job effectively. We need this spiritual hygiene too. Most often, we are so filled with the filth of  this world that it’s deadness rub on us. We need God’s thorough cleansing through His Word to remove our accumulated callous to soften us. So that He can penetrate hearts and rejuvenate us deep within.

As the face and body glow after its taken care of, our soul can also glow when we take a regular regimen to sustain it’s beauty. Most often, people may not have the best skin there is like those who have the leisure of following a beauty regimen infallibly. Yet for the few who knows what’s more important, their souls are so beautiful that they shine from inside out. Only GOD can do that. We can pray for a glowing face and body but we should work, pray be passionate about making our souls healthy, beautiful and strong. In this pursuit, we can never go wrong.

On Waiting

When I was a Literature student in College, one of our  requirements in the Humanity class is to paint. I was a frustrated artist at that time cause if I have one great dream in my life, it is to be a trained fine artist. However, the course I pursued was nevertheless satisfying to my artistic bent.Writing is one of the most creative thing one can engage in. For my part, I do it not as a profession or a career but as a hobby.

In this era of technology, I almost become a blog addict and the frustrating thing is that, I’ve started so many blogs enough to make me forget my log in names and passwords.  I could have written a book for the countless poems, essays and reflections, which i have posted on the net. That was not really commendable. I felt like I was an illegitimate mother if those articles I’ve written were human children. The way I gave birth to them and lost them may be a crime of some sort like literary genocide if there’s a term like that. However, I’m trying to correct my wrong deeds. I am trying to refuel the passion of writing after some lost years. My husband of two months believes that I can write and is so critical of my attitude of not really believing that I could develop this “gift”  further “for the sake of humanity.”

Since I love him and believes in him, I am trying again and hopefully not commit another crime of literary genocide.   So one fine day in my Humanity class I painted a pregnant girl and her little boy with an anguish expression of waiting all over their faces. Then after I’ve completed the painting I wrote it’s theme at the bottom of my work “the wait.” Looking back, I am trying to recollect what were my thoughts at that time when I painted it. Why have I chosen “waiting” as a theme at that time. Was I waiting for something to come, to happen? Waiting seems to be a very passive experience when you are young and restless.

However, the tides of time, the various challenges you face as a young adult help you understand that waiting is a handmaid of transformation or call it self-evolution. This exercise helps a growing person to develop the necessary skills needed for reinventing oneself in the course of time. To avoid becoming jaded, one has to learn to dance with the seasons of life. There will be times along life’s journey where we feel like summer. Were so passionate about a lot of things. We are on fire about new things in life . However, when that season fades we have to learn how to face the autumn of life where we have to shed off some of the novelty that enamored us. We have to die some sort of death to give way to young buds to sprout. The death never intends to keep us on that dark pit but to renew us–to be born again. Then after the autumn, winter comes and some parts of our dreams are frozen. When will the thawing comes? You’ll never know but the waiting prepares you yet for another season. Then spring comes in it’s beauty that amazes you and you forgets the gloom of winter time. This is when your frozen dreams are re-birthed.

Life and it’s seasons are magnificently illustrated by the mystical beauty of one cherry blossom (Sakura). I painted Sakura in it’s many faces and colors. Sakura is said to symbolizes the mystery of life and death. The sense of eternity that we glimpse even in our humanness. We are but a tiny breath on this vast universe but we have this uncanny sense of the eternal in us. It breathes in us, gives us hope. The waiting for new things, better things and the way it supposed to be is truly our guide towards the truth about us. In spite of the meanness of our existence at times, the humdrum of our daily routine, we are created for something greater than what we feel right now.  Something awaits us in at the end of our journey and we must keep on walking forward to where it is….

Friends that follow you for life

Life is a constant change…

Jose Mari Chan wrote a song that tells us about what is constant in this life–CHANGE. During the 90′s this song was popularized as a graduation themesong.  Chan’s haunting melody and beautiful poetry, with its vivid imagery  makes you think about your life and how are you spending it from day to day. Indeed when you look at the moving clouds above you, you realized that the world is moving on. Yet at times, people seem stuck where they were yesterday. I once heard a friend who bemoans about her failures in the past. Listening to her, I realized that our painful past has the power to control our present and even our future. When we allow past negative experiences to stop us from moving on, then we will miss the joy of what a new day brings. Life is a constant change and we have a choice, to change for the better or for the worse. To change for the better, we have to choose to think of positive thoughts. Positive thoughts like what an ancient letter written by a man named Paul to his friends in the ancient city of Philippi says; ” And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. (Philippians 4:8). On the other hand, to change for the worse is to harbor all that is opposite to the virtues that Paul mentioned in our hearts. Life is a constant change yet we have a choice. We can choose life and freedom towards a new hope  or death and bondage to the painful past and misery.