Felix Bravo’s Weblog

Arly has been on the warpath since Saturday night (she is not a Christian; but both her parents are). Listening to the accusations and counter-accusations the warring mother and daughter have been hurling against each other, I have even come to the conclusion that Arly has been on the warpath since she was twelve (she’s now twenty-four).

The occasion of the present war that I am watching today after church is the rebuke she receives Saturday night from the mother she has learned to hate. “Stop gambling! Take care of your child! Come to bed early so you will have strength for work tomorrow! Tell your husband to go find a job so he could support you and your child! Don’t pamper that good-for-nothing! You call him angel? He’s your devil!” Things like these that pain her and make her hate her more.

Oh how she hates her! She has learned to hate her since that afternoon twelve years ago when fresh from school she caught her in bed with someone else.

That story of one woman’s adulterous past has been going the rounds since the day I came and evangelized this village, and still keeps trying to destroy that soul who I think should have been given a respite from the troublings and the gossipings that like syphilis pester and destroy the souls of its victims. Oh those envious and those with criminal intents! When will they stop?

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My heart bleeds for this little prodigal, a lady 29 years old, with two kids.

Ten years ago, I dreamed of her becoming like us. I mean us, as a church. Would you believe that her grandmother had been a Christian before she died? Would you believe that her mother is now a minister’s wife? He uncle too is a preacher; her uncle’s wife is a Bible teacher; her uncle’s kids are all Christians. She has all the reasons to be like us.

I pity this victim of much injustice. Her father, she says, gave her only a name, nothing else. “I have a nice surname, an equally nice first name. But you can never eat it.”

Her story ought to be for Bannawag, or Hiligaynon or Liwayway. All defunct magazines. But that’s my wish list. A few months after she was born, her mother left her in the care of her older sister (the little girl’s aunt), who dreamed dreams for her too but could not deliver those dreams. The aunt was poor, so the little girl too lived in penury. That means she went to school without having breakfast and that her dresses and shoes were hand-me-downs.

Early in her teens, she heard that her mother married a preacher. (Her father she never heard of anymore). What was that supposed to mean? She thought she could now have a home. She thought she could now live with her mother’s new family and be treated as their own. She thought she could now go to college (because all her half-brothers and half-sisters were going to college).

That never happened. She felt the bitterness of neglect.

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Yesterday, today and tomorrow are just like other days the Lord has made.  As usual we, like other creatures of God, are into a game of advertising. That game is played by us and by them like any ordinary game, although its intent and purpose are beyond the ordinary. It is a game we and they don’t always play too well. We are the billboards, we are the ads and the ad carriers, God is the one advertised, but as in many cases the one advertised is being overshadowed by the billboards.

Why is that so, one may ask. Well, some participants in this advertising game are in a sense mediocrity a outrance. They are not creative, their special effects are lousy, and the impact they create on those who are watching, to say the least, leaves much to be desired. Simply stated, they just don’t measure up. The ones among them who have played it so bad are remembered only for the embarrassment they have created. Their failings are their biography.

It is a bit like the way our ordinary lives work through all the days of the year.

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Let’s say someone considers himself not a run-of-the-mill Christian.  He’s been trying to be good, and he’s been trying to do good. If Christianity means filling up the forms and leaving no boxes unticked, he’s done a superb job in this area.

Then, you ask, in spite of all these, why do good people like him still suffer?

Good people.  There is a sense in which we may misunderstand the term “good.”  The Bible says no one’s good but God (Matthew 19:17).  If a man is said to be “good,” he is such only according to the world’s standards.  But back to the question: Why do you, or I, suffer?

First, It is because the Lord wants me to exercise my freedom to bear or not to bear. That is not an off-the-cuff answer.

The Son of God, for instance, was free to choose, but He chose Calvary and its cross.  And in choosing, He bore it all—the pain, and the humiliation of having to undergo that pain at the hands of the people He had created, and the painful thought of dying at the hands of those whom He had given life. Pause here for a while and think… Think of this as you are being shamed and disrespected by the very child who owed you her life…Do you see the analogy?

So, to suffer is your choice. In having to suffer you must feel free. Not even God is going to take that freedom away from you.

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I am indoors this morning pounding at the slowness of my PC’s keyboard while the world around me is wrapped in the gust of coolness brought by the rains that began at two and whose end is nowhere in sight. I hate to open my door, for beyond that I know lies the inescapable responsibility to clean up the languishing mess of shopworn leaves, rotten and wet, thrown at my yard by the winds of last night. I am supposed to finish this piece whose deadline has been set by me.  At the craft I have chosen, I am my own boss. And even though it has been my wish and desire to fulfill my boss’ wish and desire, I still have failed to relate to my own time frame. Maybe a turtle could beat me at the speed at which I am writing.

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Stop a minute and tell me if your Christian shield has been quite strong, and that you have not experienced, not even for a second, any disappointment at all.

I want to be honest with you. There were times I had. Disappointment with self. With family. With others.

Disappointment puts on two faces: Unfulfilled desires and expectations unmet. As a result, you feel as if the world has caved in under you, and you find yourself floating and without support, and you’re unhappy. Disappointment is just that. It is “unhappiness caused by the failure of one’s hopes, desires, or expectations” (From Thesaurus, provided by Houghton, Mifflin & Company; see Answers.com).

And if that is not enough, disappointment too may result to discouragement. Some out-of-duty Christians who have been disappointed have also been discouraged. These two words— disappointment and discouragement— may differ in meaning, yet one of their similarities lies in the number of letters they have. They may be two peas in a pod.

One of the great men in history experienced discouragement that resulted from some disappointment. In 1841, he wrote: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall be better I cannot tell. I actually forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.” On April 15, 1865, he died, a victim of an assassin’s bullet. His name’s Abraham Lincoln.

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Why are American voters preoccupied with presidential birthdays? Questions have been asked: “How old is John McCain?” “Hillary Clinton?” “Obama?”

If age means anything, McCain is 72, Hillary is 60, and Obama is by far the youngest of them all: 46. If Hillary is elected, she would be the first woman president of the US. If Obama, the first African-American to occupy the White House; but definitely not the youngest (both Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy became president at age 43).

Why are they so concerned about presidential ages? Is it because of John McCain? If elected, McCain would be the oldest to occupy the Oval Office (Ronald Reagan became president at 69).

They never ask this question of Romney (if elected he could be the first Mormon president of America); or of Edwards (he could be the second member of the church to occupy the White House, next to James Garfield); of Giuliani (he could be the first American president with an Italian-sounding name). These three are not strong contenders.

Vladimir Putin, president of Russian Federation, does not like McCain, not because he is also a Republican like Bush but because he could follow in the steps of Bush. But to Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa, president of Mexico, such bloody fears of Vladimir are unfounded. The Mexican president cares for neither Obama nor Hillary. So what?

Well, so what? They say that wisdom comes with having many birthday candles. King Rehoboam’s damnation was because he had listened to his youthful advisers, they add. So you want someone older? As one American columnist has pointed out, in the case of Miss Britney Spears this doesn’t seem to ring true. The wisdom of age eludes her. Her Baptist background was no help either.

Methuselah holds the record of the being the oldest man in the Bible (age: 969). Wonder what he was doing while his grandson Noah was constructing the ark. For the information of everyone, Methuselah had perished in the year of the Flood.

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Today I bade goodbye to Penny. Three years ago, she became mine for a measly price of P2,800. Now as she grows older, and SLOWER, her upgrading price has gone up, while her usability has gone low. But she is one machine I’d learned to love. She watched me grow from one who knew nothing about Microsoft Word to one who knew something, like hacking–CPUs, memories, disks, legacy and I/O devices. Our three years journey was one most fruitful, because she had honed my skills to the utmost. I had adapted to her ways (”Checksum error”), her idiosyncrasies (”Try Safe mode”), her habits (”Your computer maybe at risk. Click here to update”) and her tantrums (”Could not find boot ini.”). Because she’s grown tired of Windows 98, she shacked up with Windows 2000, but finally settled with Windows XP. No one, definitely no one understood her more than I did; no one lovingly cared for her more than I did. You could say that today our parting was a tearful one. Penny it was who kept me company in my early blogging days. But I have to move on. Since she refused to be upgraded, rather, she could no longer be upgraded, I gave her away, and took on a new laptop.

My youngest daughter was too happy to have Penny the Pentium 2.

Things in this world get old or outdated. I thought about it last night too as I talked to a fellow preacher who’s on his last semester in a graduate school. He and his fellow students are on the cutting edge, the laptop-carrying generation, not just the ordinary laptops, mind you, but the Dual Core Centrino, 1 gig RAM, 180 gig hard disk, Windows Vista OS. Because they’re groomed to be counselors, teaching and lecturing became common affairs, and the DLP (”digital live projector”) became the common gadget they attach to their Neo Emprivas. The suns of modern technology definitely shine so brightly in the classrooms.

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I think you ought to remember me. You must remember me. I’ll give you a thousand and one reasons why you should remember me. Better listen.

Know this: Justice has not always been a part of my nature. Am not fair to everyone. Am just fair to myself. Ow, come on. Do not complain. I won’t listen anyway. (Posted by Ed Maquiling)…Read more……..

It is not often that I attended burials, and if I did, it would be for one reason: To pay my last respects to the dead.

But today was different: They would be burying the man who, while still living, had often considered me his enemy.

Indeed I was, for I was the essence of everything that he had fought against, both in morals and religion. He had despised my teetotalism, criticized my scripture-quoting sermons, belittled my warnings about hell, laughed at my preaching about heaven. He would mimic me, or make fun of my gestures. It was he who once accused me of being a subversive, but I was thankful that only he believed his story– the rest of them did not. As a result of his gossips, many attended my lectures. I was thankful too that he had become my best recruiter. (Posted by Ed Maquiling) Read more….