i write to believe.

I walk in a rhythm of highs and lows. Interaction after interaction. Seeing the hearts in need of help. In a deep deep hunger for soothing peace. Every person I encounter resembles my aching and I dig deep with them. To see the hurt and the pain. And wait with them till the light of God’s comfort embraces them whole. The past few weeks have been tuning in to this rhythm. And I get tuned in so deep and this morning I uncoil from the work and breathe. I spend some time listening to the voice of encouragement. Going back to that one thing that has helped me keep my grace-filled rhythm constant. Ann Voskamp does that for me. And tuning in to her eucharisteo rhythm which she discovered at the height of her anxiety-filled life brings me into a solace that I would never have known had I not learned the habit of counting gifts. 860. Noodles for yesterday’s lunch 861. The peaceful moments listening to encouraging words 862. Blue masking tape for the brown notebooks gi...

A morning of light musings. Flipping the pages of the Holy Book and seeing Hebrews as a letter to me from Paul who wrote this centuries ago. I saw markings of where I stopped reading. Verses I highlighted seven years before starting only to come true for me seven years later. I'm hungry to dig into his words. Words fueled by the passionate witness of a Savior who set him free. Free from the life that accused him and stereotyped him. Free from a life of control. Free from the unnecessary anxieties the clamor for his attention. This is the life I want. And I am happy to have been able to reach this place despite the long journey that took to get me here. I'm walking feebly. Obviously exhausted from the past days of struggling to get to this freedom. And now I'm just tasting restoration moment by moment. Faith rising with the words, "We are not among those who draw back and perish, but among those who have faith and will possess life." I walk ...

I thought I'd go back to one of my old routine of waking up with a camera today.  Well, before the camera was my journal.  I woke up to Holley Gerth's post talking about what to do when you don't know what to do next.    It hit me that the one thing I can do is what is right infront of me.  It's timely because mulling over this the past few days since I've officially ended the first week of the new year.  I could easily go back and say I'd like to structure my life outlined perfectly in a resume of sorts and submit it to corporations.  My left brain would click on it.  But my right would struggle and nag.   If there is one thing I am beginning to accept about myself it is this: I like structured experiences but I don't want to be limited by them.   These days, I find myself going about the days in a more peaceful rhythm.  The weight has been lifted and I can talk about things without the need to rush and be conscio...

I never got into the habit of deliberately making resolutions for the New Year because I always thought I'd fail at it anyway.  But I sit here this morning with my bed head and night gown staring out the window to what is now the first day of the year 2013.  The streets are quiet from the night of fireworks and frenzy.  Counting down moments till midnight kept many awake and awaiting that pop of champagne or that sip of wine.  We simply stayed at home and watched the countdown on television but lit all the lights and opened windows to welcome the 1st of January.  Our meal was simple.  A slice of butter bread, cheese and ham.  A bottle of wine.   So I may have started this year less festive than usual, I seem to not mind it.  I actually like that it has been void of the usual fuss and kept it to a minimum so I can pay more attention to the meaningful.  To the ordinary.  To learn how to open my eyes to the "grace of the small....

The nap was 2 hours.  The sun is slowly setting.  I'm letting my mind drown in songs of worship because I'd like to worship my way into the New Year.  And there's this word from a song that my heart's beating to this moment. Restoration.   For this moment it feels like a declaration rising from the very depths of all that has been messed up, lost and broken.  So I let it rise.  This pulse climbing out of the noisy clutter and I let it embrace me.  It's on repeat and the cry is loud, desperate, aching and victorious. Restoration.   Before the fireworks sound its trumpets blaring onwards to midnight, I make my own ascent and blow my own horn. You bring Restoration. The year was long and tiring.  The ride was an unending rollercoaster.  There were pockets of graces were potholes of despair made me stumble. And I haven't really done much to overcome anything because I am spent and weary. ...

It plays on the background. The interview for Ann Voskamp's book over at {In} Courage. I love the chatter of their thoughts going over what she has written about life and sorrow and the grace in the middle of it all.  Listening to these moments shared by women give me the courage to listen to myself this morning. I'm back in the city and today is the last day of 2012.  It's a cloudy morning and I just spent the past 2 hours talking to my bestfriend Adi.  I've missed our conversations (and our letters which we wrote in heaps of email strings back in the day).  But it's always great to catch up and I'm glad I have time to do that today.  I'm thinking that one of the first resolutions I'd make is to really make time.  I've been troubled by so many things this year and felt that I've lost so many things because I didn't have the time.  I didn't have a lot of time to read and discover.  I didn't have a lot of time to converse and con...

The smell of old books and old furniture wakes me up this morning.  It's a day before Christmas and things are slowly starting to sink in.  This season of gifts. And the best gift will always be the remembrance of home.  It is when I remember where I came from that everything uncertain becomes an appreciated mystery of faith. Breakfast was filled with musings of family history.  My grandmother's scrambled eggs recipe.  The dining chairs where they used to sit.  The living room filled with photographs of aunts and uncles.  The wall of college diplomas.  Thoughtful chatter of the night before. Christmas is always that moment of honoring and remembering the gift woven by ties of family.  The wrinkled and crooked. The smooth and entwined. There is nothing like coming back to the old home town where the most early memories of joyful play never fails to warm the heart.   The first childhood friends.  The first set of stories...

I went to mass this morning to celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin.  After all the things that I've went through this week, going to church on an early Saturday morning was a much needed breathing room.  Today's gospel broke through the walls I've had to put up just to survive the rigor of the work place.  It was loud and clear that I felt awakened from a catatonic state.  Nothing is impossible for God. The monsignor spoke a very beautiful homily that drove the point home and I remember his every word because it brought hope back into me.  Nothing is impossible for God.  Even your happiness.  I struggle with the word happiness.  It's relative for everyone.  Some say that happiness is a choice.  Some say that happiness comes and goes.  Some say happiness no longer exists and we just have to be content with what we have.   There are so many definitions and per...

The smell of printed paper and freshly poured ink permeate the warehouse.  The machines buzzing noisily echoes around the walls.  We were on an intense race to reach our delivery commitment the past few days and everyone is on their toes. The environment was tense.  It had started yesterday.  Phone call after phone call.  It never seemed to end.  All I could keep thinking was, I just wanted it to be over.  There's one more day to go this week and if I had not written that post last Sunday, I don't know where I'd be as of this moment. But all is grace.  He is faithful in His silent whisperings.  Reminders nudge deep inside the heart where the clamor of problems that need for solutions reverberate.  I don't know how long I can last an environment like this.  But grace helped me rise above what I felt was an impossible situation and deal with it.  It burns, oh how it does.  When questions are not answered an...

There is nothing safe about this world. Things change almost every minute.  People can say things that harm your soul  and break it to pieces in many different angles.  A job can make you lose your values and question your ideals.  A friend can make you feel like you're the most undesirable company.  A circumstance can be so overwhelming that it can make you feel your strength slip away and that fear of losing your grip on life, an insurmountable wall to climb over. Fear rules with each chance it can take to rob you off the certainty that there is a hope that does not ever disappoint when your life can be hanging by a thread.  When your story seems to keep repeating like an endless transition played on loop. Fear is loud and overbearing.  It makes you cower.  It makes you aggressive.  It makes you steal the control you do not own and end up distorting the graceful rhythm that is inherent in your life.  It makes you dou...

While the past two days of this work week has passed by so swiftly than I expected, I am pausing tonight to go back into the silence before sleep.  The moment where I commit to rekindling the moments where I discover the places of joy tucked between the busy hours or the day's work. #160.  The call to pray before our meeting acknowledging the presence of God   #161. Protected by God's peace the whole day despite work issues.   #162. The momentum rolling with newly discovered opportunities.   #163. My parents' appreciation and interested in what I've been writing of late. #164. The delight of my parents as they learn how to use iMessage.   #165. Rekindling the dream of building art foundations. Last Sunday I was anxious to experience the possibility of encountering so many unresolved issues that have piled up while I was away.  And though they continue to exist, I am wrapped in a place of peace. Steadily keeping my eyes on Him, th...

This evening I find myself silently huddling close to the Word.  I'm stuffing myself with everything I could ever chew on that I feel would "protect" me from the "snares" that will attempt to steal my newfound peace as soon as I step back into the work-place tomorrow.  I've been working on this page for the past  hours or so.  Thinking that I cannot get enough of this "creative breathing space" once I find myself locked within the demands of my job.  So I work on it and change the banners and the fonts like I'm changing living room furniture and upholstery.  Silently I think to myself, I might not be able to do this ever again.   So I binge.   I'm trying not to be frantic but inside, I know I am.   I take a deep sigh and let my anxiety exhale.  There is nothing much that I can do.  I'm going back to a place that I know I will never quite fit.  And while I know God's grace will sustain me, the fragile human...

This banner hangs on the wall across my bed.  The tape almost peeling from the wall it has been attached to for the past 5 years or so.  It calls out to me when I wake up or before I sleep.  It wasn't until this morning that I've realized how little I've paid attention to its silent command.    Remember!  To walk on water. My friend Adi  hung this on the wall when I gave my room a make-over.  She decided to stencil this on a simple stretch of cartolina.  She said she wanted it to remind me of how to walk on water especially on days when I forget about it.   Walking on water is a phrase I always tell myself when I'm experiencing almost impossible-to-deal-with circumstances.  It triggers my hope that when these circumstances come, I can arise above them for God calls me to "Come!" and walk over the impossible situations in my life. One of the most impossible situations I've felt in my life was/is my job. ...

I spent time with a friend this afternoon.  It has been a while since we spent time and just talked with quiet hearts.  I was listening to her story.  It was so similar to mine.  The way she felt tired with serving and working.  The way her strivings have caused her soul to be callused.  The way she gave so much endlessly only to find herself spent at the end of the day without anything in-filling.   Her story was all too familiar.  In fact it continues to be my story till today.  But I shared with her the one thing that has kept me from spiraling into a downward cycle that would have been my plight had I not allowed myself to be touched by women who were looking to be awakened to the present grace and who continued to fight for joy in the middle of the difficult & messy moments of life. That one thing was learning     gratitude.   Oh, I still continue to see the things that "could've been better...

Oh am I awake.  Wide awake.  And I'm not speaking of jet lag.  But I have realized that since I came back, I've gone into this rhythm of listening to myself and allowing a meager creative experience to arise from the ordinary act of scrapbooking.   For many years, I've told myself that I try this out.  I probably did when I was a lot younger but when you're life has been overtaken by the need to pound your fists at the boardroom tables and hit a 12 hour workday with no pat in the back, scrapbooking has no choice but to take a backseat.  It's a big mistake, I would say, when you let your life be robbed off the balance it rightfully needs between work and the perimeter you keep for your own self.  I think for the first time in my life since I graduated business school  I have felt more fulfilled tearing blue masking tape with my fingers than finishing a budget justification that was approved but that was barely read, hurriedly...

Last night I was with some of the young people from our Youth Apostolate and I asked one of them a few questions about why they like being in Youth Ministry.   She paused and gazed at a spot beneath the tree.   "I like the care circles.  I learn a lot from other young people when they share what they've been through.  Then I realize stuff that I haven't understood because I had a different perspective."   I'm musing about young people today because I've been a youth minister for the past 6 years or so and while I think to myself that young people seem to be different now than before I stop and pause.  Young people now take time to articulate what they want to say in person because they fear the judgment of adults.  They seem apprehensive to open up their thoughts because they fear it will be insignificant or irrelevant.  They would rather express themselves to a certain few because the comfort of acceptance is less risky and the word...

It's been 3 days since I got back and I have one more week to gather and complete what this pilgrimage has begun. The journey to fully entrusting my life and everything in it to the love of an ever relentless Soul Lover-God.   I've been sitting on my desk almost day in and out until the wee hours of jet-lagged mornings sifting through photograph after photograph.  Trembling at the beauty of memories and how faith spilt stories through time to make sure there remains testimonies from the remnants of the lives of those who witnessed God. And He is Real.  They say.   They speak of His beauty and the calm of His peace on the walls of Assisi glowing in soft pink.  Walls that traced the lives of Saints Francis & Claire as they walked in surrender of their wealth and belongings in return for a life complete in Him. They spoke of His everlasting embrace in the wide expanse of breath-taking view from the Basilica of Francis that sits at the top of ...