Like the Sunrise: Reflections on the SFC RECON 2015 (Part 1)

 

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.

My Love Kita! Experience

Or Why I Attend SFC Conferences…

Attending the CFC-SFC Iloilo Provincial Conference for 2015 was God’s personal surprise for me.

I never expected that I would be able to attend the said conference. For the last two months, I have cajoled,convinced and threatened my mother to allow me to attend the said conference… but deep inside, I have already given up on the possibilities. I am far too cowardly to get what I wanted anyway.

I once threatened Nanay with a text message demanding that she should allow me to attend our ProvCon  since I am very close to my “snapping point”. When she asked me what I meant, I chickened out and told her to ignore what I said.

Nanay does not want me to go because she considers Carles too far (but its okay for me to attend work-related conferences to Baguio, Tagaytay and Cebu City… huh, figure that out). She also thinks that I can always worship God in my room or at Church which is the most important part of my relationship with God. (She just does not understand or maybe, she understands too well since she was once an active member of a religious org in her heydays!)

What changed the weather? I did. Or maybe, God enabled me to. He gave me the courage, the resources, and the opportunity to attend the conference at the last minute…

Few people will understand why Singles for Christ attend conferences like this one. In fact, until I experienced those conferences, I was never that eager to go. I mean, why spend the weekend in discomfort? (Our Love Kita! experience was definitely a story worth retelling).

Well, here are my reasons for attending SFC Conferences. Maybe someday, Nanay would be able to read this and understand why I feel the need, the longing to encounter my Beloved through SFC conferences.

1. I am given the chance to step out of the fast-lane called life and reflect on my part in God’s grand scheme.

Travel time from Passi City to Carles (the venue for the 2015 ProvCon) took 3-4 hours. We took the bus from Passi to Roxas and waited for the bus to Balasan from Crossing Lanot. After the two-hour ride to Balasan, we rode a jeepney to Carles (about 30 minutes).

 

The travel time alone is enough to let you think about life and where it is taking you. For me, the destination is not just the goal. Most of my significant musings and discussions with the Lord happens over the long-distance travel from our residence to wherever it is He is taking me.

One of my most memorable TRAVELOGUE with the Lord occurred on the four-hour trip to Concepcion, the venue of last year’s Intimacy Weekend Retreat. Because I had a prior engagement, I had to travel alone. And yes, it was the best travel experience of my life so far… because I felt His presence-His enfolding, protecting, loving presence on that bus ride to Concepcion.I felt so blessed and so overwhelmed that day.

2. I get to worship Christ on a deeper level, in the company of likeminded people who share in His love.

One of the experiences that I look forward to during Conferences is the Praise Fest. Praise fests are lengthy worship moments. During praise fests, we get to praise, glorify and worship the Lord through corporate worship,and by singing,praise and worship songs…

 

I am not a very expressive person but in the privacy, intimacy and solemnity of a praise fest in the SFC community, I feel as if I am able to freely let go and worship the Lord. I am allowed to openly immerse myself in His presence, in His pleasure, in His love.

During moments like this, I keep imagining the Lord, looking down upon all of us, with a pleased and happy smile on His face, and loving tears in His eyes.

I feel as if through this, I am able to express my love for Him and show that I know how good He is, how awesome, and amazing and how I believe that His love is so great and perfect. Through the praise fest, I get to express what words can never truly convey.

3. Through conferences like this, I get to encounter Christ.

 

Our Love Kita! experience has given me a unique perspective about life and about God’s love. The parish priest’s homily reminded us not to keep ourselves “exclusive” as a community. The charismatic revival, he said, was meant to empower the Church, to keep it burning hot and on fire. Instead of keeping God’s love within our community, we should reach out to the rest of the world.

And I realized what he meant by that the very next day when, in search of water (since the water supply in our lodging area was cut off), a poor couple offered us their home for our morning ablutions. They were not part of the community, and their home, after being devastated by Yolanda, was still in an impoverished state. But, they were very generous, and accommodating to us.

I think this is what the Parish Priest meant. Our activities within the community should not be limited therein. We must bring love especially outside the community for a lot of people need that love.

My encounter with the Lord taught me this…. We live in a broken world. Broken adults are raising broken children. And broken people, like broken glass, hurt others that comes into contact with it.

Christ is the healer of our brokenness and the world needs Him. It needs us to bring them to Him and Him to them through our actions, our words and our very lives.

I am His Beloved

 

 

Love is something I would have never touched with a two foot pole. Love is something I used to reserve to describe an emotion I would rather read about than experience. Love is something I always thought would eventually just lead to tears and disappointments.

I am familiar with hard work and dedication. I am very intimately connected with words like “obligation” and “responsibility” and “sacrifice”.

But I can’t seem to connect love and myself in one sentence….

I am currently reading “The Story of a Soul” by St. Therese of Lisieux and I feel a little resentful because God did not give me parents like He gave Therese Martin. The “Little Queen” (as her father called her) had a childhood filled with so much love – from her parents and her sisters and from her God. At such a young age, she was already drawn to the divine.

She has so much love to draw from.

I grew up in a household where love is not demonstrated. So, I grew up cold and callous and uncaring, not because I chose to be cold and uncaring but because I did not know how to be anything else. There was just nothing inside my heart. I used to feel nothing at all. I was seldom moved by compassion, seldom moved to tears, seldom touched by scenes that would have made others cry. I felt neither pain nor comfort, neither joy nor sorrow. Everything was gray. I only feel the things that hurt my pride. I was simply existing, moving on from one chapter of my life and stoically smiling over tragedies and triumphs, while inside, there was just this empty hole.

I was incapable of love because I never felt love.

St. Therese said “… I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues.” Why can’t I have had parents like St. Therese’s mother and father so that I would have grown up into a loving woman like St. Therese… so that I could have had known and loved God with all of me ever since I was a child?

But then, who am I to question His plan for my life? He gave me my Nanay and Tatay because He had His reasons. My parents are good parents.They are responsible parents and they loved me in ways I had not seen because I was expecting them to love me in a certain way. And now, I can honestly say that I love them… just as I love my brothers and sisters. No, not out of familial obligation and responsibility but out of something inside me that has been growing and breaking free since I felt how much He loves me.

Love is now a wonderful feeling. Love is now this strange and beautiful thing I hold out in the open when I am alone. It is something that I ponder and wonder at in the silence of my solitude. Love is so amazing. Love is everything and if not for my experiences, if not for the lack of love in my life before, if not for that void in my heart, I would not have this kind of appreciation, and sense of wonder before It.

Love is God. God is Love. God is amazing. Love is amazing. God is wonderful. Love is wonderful. Love is all I need. God is all I need… because I am His beloved and He is mine… And I love Him with all that I am….

See how He works? Glory and praise to the King alone.