Category: In His Steps

Faith

My name is Forgiven

Tina 2 Comments

As soon as the Easter Vigil was done on midnight of Sunday morning, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy. It’s Easter, people! The tomb is empty! Jesus is risen! The Glory of God has defeated the night! Hallelujah!

And it was an amazing kind of joy, of delight, to know that it is Easter and Jesus is victorious, as He always is. Over the Holy Week, I pondered over how his disciples must have felt, right after Jesus expired on the cross. I couldn’t even fathom the idea of their pain, of their sense of loss and how life could possibly be after their friend was buried in the tomb. They didn’t know that Jesus was going to rise on Sunday. Jesus spoke of it, but I’m sure it was hard to understand then. What’s all this rising again mumbo-jumbo? Why is our friend speaking of death? Surely he didn’t mean it that way.

Then I realized that I actually knew that pain. I felt it, too. I felt it in a miniscule way when every time I was disappointed, I felt it in a bigger way in the times when my heart got broken. I knew a variation of that pain, that sense of loss in realizing that what I had known for the past few days, weeks, months, years is just…gone. And there is nothing I can do to get it back.

Of course I knew that pain.

Earlier in Holy Week, I was reflecting on Jesus’ pain as the week went by. Apparently, Holy Wednesday is also known as Spy Wednesday, because it was day when Judas went to the Pharisees to turn Jesus in. The Gospel that day felt like a knife to my heart:

Then one of the twelve, named Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priestsand said, “What are you willing to give me to betray Him to you?” And they weighed out thirtypieces of silver to him.From then on he began looking for a good opportunity to betray Jesus. (Matthew 24:14-16)

I could only imagine Jesus’ pain then, knowing that one of his closest friends betrayed him. For thirty pieces of silver. There was so much pain for him in the next few days, but I think the pain of this betrayal — and Peter’s later denial — was even worse than the pain of the crown and the scourging and the nails.

How terrible it is to be betrayed by a friend.

Even more terrible when I realized that there is very little difference between me and Judas.

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The Cornerstone Blessing

Tina 2 Comments

The thing about volunteering that I really liked so much is how it takes one’s focus away from themselves and puts it on others. I’ve always wanted to volunteer consistently for something, and when I was in college it was easier because it was a part of what we need to do for school to get our grades up. When I started working, it got a little bit harder, because I had to go out of my way to volunteer, and I always felt like I don’t have enough time to take that longer route for volunteering.

cornerstone00I became a Cornerstone tutor only this school year, and it all started with a heartache. I’ll spare you with all the drama about that. Let me just say that it’s true when people say that heartaches can make you do things you’ve never done before just so you can fill that hole that the ache is digging in your heart. I used to hate to admit to that, that it took a sad story for me to start moving and doing something, but I realized that we all get called through different circumstances.

So ever since August of 2013, I woke up early every Saturday, rode a tricycle, a jeep and a bus to our sector’s school, and tutored kids. I’m not really good with kids since I’m the youngest in the family and I don’t have little cousins or nieces or nephews to take care of and play with. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, exactly, but I prayed that whatever I lacked, God would fill. And that it wouldn’t be so bad. Like I said, I wasn’t good with kids.

Pretty soon, I started looking forward to my early Saturday mornings. It was so nice to start the weekend doing something for someone else, even if sometimes I have no idea what I was doing. Sometimes I danced. Sometimes I had to lead the prayer. Sometimes I had to struggle from not having enough sleep from the previous night because of work. Sometimes, I had to tell my friends that I had to skip a Friday night gimmick because I have to go to a Cornerstone session the next day. But I looked forward to those Saturday sessions, and I had fun. It was fun knowing new people, and playing with the kids and teaching them something that I really love to do: reading. And I’ve learned that sometimes it doesn’t matter if I don’t know what I’m really doing, as long as I am willing to do them. The small things really count in things like this.

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But they say sometimes, familiarity breeds contempt. Or at least, when you’ve gone and done something for so long (even if it wasn’t really so long yet), you start feeling lazy, or less motivated to go. You start of thinking of excuses like, “Well the others don’t go there anyway, so maybe I can skip this”, or “Maybe I can just sleep in today because it’s so cold and they can do things without me”. There are some days when we just don’t want to show up. On the first Cornerstone Saturday of 2014, I almost skipped going because of those reasons above, plus I was feeling a little under the weather. I ended up still going, though, because I had somewhere to be later that afternoon, too, and I thought it would be unfair if I skip the morning and then go to my appointment in the afternoon when I wasn’t really burning with fever or anything of that sort.

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The Story of Brave Things that Roar

Tina 3 Comments

Can I say it? I know we still have a day before 2013 is officially over, but can I please, please say it?

MAN, WHAT A YEAR 2013 HAS BEEN.

I mean, seriously.

I know that when I chose my 2013 word even before the year rolled around that it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, I almost decided to choose another word, but then I realized that’s cheating, especially after the word has owned me even before I decided to own it. I knew that I would go through a lot, and I knew that choosing to be courageous means facing fear head on. I wish I could say I was completely prepared, but I guess one is never really that prepared, no matter what.

So wow, 2013. You surely were something.

I could go on and on about courage and bravery, but to keep me from rambling, here are four important things I learned about courage in 2013. :)

1. “Happiness is a form of courage.”

This is a funny thing to think of, and the story behind this post about happiness is really me contemplating if I will buy myself the MacBook Air that my boss was selling me the day after I thought of replacing my 6-year-old MacBook. I know it’s such a shallow thing that I’d write about happiness in the context of buying a gadget, but that decision taught me a lot about how I thought of happiness in my life.

Because when you think about it, really, it takes courage to be happy. It takes courage to choose happiness because it’s easier to be sad, to feel down. It’s easier to dwell on the bad stuff than the good stuff, to see how things went wrong instead of choosing to see how right everything can be (even if you can’t really see it yet). I realized in 2013 that it really takes guts to choose to be happy, to be joyful, to delight. I have failed in this miserably, but I am holding onto this even more in the year to come. And like what my adopted little brother told me last Christmas: This sounds like a good plan.

Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. (Hilary Sherratt)

2. Courage and grace.

You know how sometimes, you think you’re such a nice person and all that…and then someone comes along, and it totally wrecks your perception of you being nice because they just grind your nerves to the very end? Or sometimes, someone seemed to do some things to spite you on purpose, so bad that you just want to lash out to them and make them feel your wrath because no one is supposed to say bad things about the people you love?

Yeah, I’ve had that several times this year. 2013 was the year that God decided I needed to learn more about grace. I ended 2012 with thoughts on graciousness, and that was just the beginning of it. 2013 saw me grappling for peace, getting really annoyed at people I don’t like, and being on a constant defense mode for the people I love because it felt like some people just won’t stop shooting at them. But the only way to learn to be gracious is when you’re given opportunities to be gracious. I wanted to be an unlimited dispenser of grace, and it was such a tall order that I kept on failing to do it. I learned that the more the important thing is to keep on trying. It takes courage to choose to do that, to give grace to people who don’t seem to deserve it, because in the end you’ll realize that you also need grace.

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