The Sunrise @ Baybay, Roxas City
I can’t move on with my life without purging the experience from my system. Maybe, by doing this, everything will settle down to routine.
You see, I attended the CFC-Singles for Christ Regional Conference (RECON) 2015 at Capiz National High School last August 28-30, 2015. The theme, God’s Masterpiece, came from the anchor verse 1 Corinthians 13:7.
“Love bears all things, believes in all things, hopes in all things and endures all things.”
Where else will this apply more but to our family? And where else are we being called to love more other than within our own families.
In the conference, I met God again in a place where His love is openly celebrated and where He is worshipped with no holding back. I encountered Him in a place where indeed, I felt at home (as I have always felt in SFC conferences, teachings and prayer meetings). The experience was powerful, beyond what mere words can describe. You have to experience it to really understand what I mean.
But, that powerfully beautifully and amazing experience was littered with painful realizations and recollections. Realizations that would help me in my journey and in choosing my vocation and recollections of the past hurts, anger, resentments I have been feeling that I buried deep within my heart so I will be able to survive and go on living. They all came out in the open, like newly opened can of worms.
Let’s focus on the sessions and what they have given me:
Session 1: God’s Masterpiece
Our speaker for this Talk was Bro. Martin Pil. He first introduced to us his family. Listening to a father speaking all those words about the family he has is weird. It made me wonder how my father speaks about us. I am sure he does it with pride but he also speaks about us with remembered pain, hurt, regret…as I often feel when I think about him…
The session emphasized that the family is God’s masterpiece because it is here that we:
a. First experience the love of God
b. Learn how to love
c. Form who we are and solidify our identities
d. relate with others
e. discover our purpose.
Because of the brokenness and woundedness of man, God’s design for the family is not being fulfilled. Instead, society has come to accept unconventional family set ups due to socio-economic and socio-cultural factors.
However, our model family should be the Holy Family. That we ought to follow them because of their:
a. Consistent obedience to His will
b. Steadfast faith
c. Daily devotion to prayer.
It is unfortunate that my family is not like that anymore. Only Nanay and my siblings are living together. Tatay is far away. Few people appreciate families like I do. But because my own family is incomplete, I have seen how wonderful it really is to have a complete and intact family with loving couples ensuring that God’s plan is protected and passed on to the next generation.
Every time I see couples and their children, I often feel envious but then, I would remember and say a prayer for the couple and their kids because the family is really under attack. Who would have thought that our family would break up, even after 20 years of marriage? But it happened because our foundation was weak… because we were too busy surviving that we forgot the Person to whom we owe our survival from….
Like the Sunrise on that first day, I remember how my family’s warmth caressed the beginning moments of my life and how, even as that warmth faded away, it was replaced by the burning love of being in God’s own family.
