Sigh

I remember Pastor Peter telling us to hold blessings lightly.  So that is why I can let you go.

 I remember the time I was telling J to let go of his girl because she isn’t a believer.  And I remember his friends’ advice, to not think about God when it comes to relationships.  “Mga ganyan dapat hindi na iniisip,” they said.  And now, I do want to take their advice, to forget about God, get back together and be happy.

But I can’t.  I guess years of forgetting God and putting you first has taught me that we won’t be really happy without God’s blessing.  I know God has a good plan for us, and we will have the best of love if we trust Him.

So if God tells you to come back for me, will you dance with me? A waltz perhaps?

Failure

I am suddenly faced with my 1^st failure as a business analyst.  It seems that I cannot take my eyes off the details and take a look at the bigger picture.  Self doubt and self pity flooded in during the call with the client that I cannot seem to understand what he wants me to do.  So I told him to give me a template of how he wants the information presented, and since he hasn’t sent it to me yet, I will just blog and surf away.

 

A big part of me wanted to quit MMG, but that wouldn’t make sense at all.  Part of me wanted to be reassigned to another project and let my other officemates take this one.  I felt as if I’m the most incompetent person in the whole world.  Really.  I know I look at the minute details too much, but I’m just built that way.

SO I turn to my God to make me feel better.  I have to repeat to myself that I am not a loser, that God doesn’t make losers, that I will have victory in God in the end (of this life), and that even if I’m defective, I can still do great things for God, with his grace.  I realized that I needed the humbling because I have become too proud of my achievements.  God is the One who gave me the brain to think, and He has given me the grace to excel beyond my abilities.

Anyway, I was looking for some article in the net to further comfort my poor heart.  And I found an article called “Developing a Theology of Failure”, which is basically about comforting those who fail in the ministry.  I thought I could gather some ideas from it, even if I’m not a church worker.

• The biggest problem with many of us is that we are soft from too much success.  This is so true, at least in my part. I think I failed only 3 exams in my whole academic life.  I have financial models that have received only praises, so I was enjoying a “false sense of mastery”.
• Failing plays a prominent or crucial role even, that success never could have played.  Failure teaches us things that success cannot.
• Through failure, we learn how to minister under grace. God may have to work with us for years to bring us to the place where we understand in our heart how it can be possible that my abilities matter, and yet take no sense of egotism from that fact. Usually, only profound failure will convince us that “apart from the vine we can do nothing,” and yet we need to strive all the harder. (I Cor 15:10) This is the paradoxical outlook of the mature worker–an outlook only accessible through a combination of success and failure. 

So I guess right now, I feel better, knowing that this is part of God’s plan to teach me to persevere despite the circumstances, to depend on him more yet at the same time work harder than ever before.  He is making Himself real to me.  I will be content with that for now.

Random Thought

Last Saturday, I had to go to a seminar.  While I was walking, it was slowly drizzling, and I decided not to use an umbrella and enjoy the rainfall.   That was the first time for a long time that I felt the rain on my face.  It felt good.

No Stocks Analogy Today

I am not trying to be deep in this entry, nor am I going to even attempt to solve this problem of mine.  I just want to air out the feelings and hopefully, somebody out there relates. 

I was thinking that I don’t really want to grow in my Christian Faith… It seems that the mature ones get all the BIG problems.  I’m sure mature Christians aren’t the only ones who undergo suffering, but I think the more mature you are, the harder the tests God sends your way.  Seriously, I fear for my life… It’s like I really do have to give up my standard of living if I want to grow in the faith.  Plus it doesn’t really help that Jesus promised that there will be sufferings in the world…  

When I give more thought to why I’m feeling this, I realize that I still don’t trust God enough to provide me with everything that I need (I’m thinking that His list is pretty concise, e.g. food, shelter, water, clothes, and that it doesn’t really contain ALL my needs.  I don’t think He would understand why I need my daily dose of Numb3rs every night),.  I seem to associate God’s love with military training.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you do good all your life, you will undergo the suffering (and the church always say it’s for my own sake/growth). 

Ack, and just when I was typing this, I received an email from my cousin.  I don’t usually read those but today, I just opened it and started reading (maybe God was like in control somehow; this is freaky!) and guess what it said: 

You need both blessings and difficulties, because one without the other is neither. 

Like God, is this your idea of a joke? 

The article goes on to say:You don’t realize how much you have until you don’t have it anymore. God knows the importance of balance; that is, the importance of having both blessings and difficulties. There are several scriptures that speak about this balance. For example in 1 Peter 4:13, we are told: Rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. Notice how we participate both in suffering and in joy. 

Similarly, in 2 Corinthians 1:7, Paul wrote this to the church in Corinth: And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. They experienced both suffering and comfort. 

So in the end, it says, we shouldn’t be too comfortable with what we have that we begin to assume that they are guaranteed possessions… because once we take things for granted, that is the time God will take them away to teach us that we need both blessings and difficulties. 

Okay, so after a long post, I have learned to thank God from the bottomest of my heart for all His blessings, knowing that these can be taken away if I take them for granted AND I learned that there should be a balance in life, so when I am suffering, there is hope that there will be comfort in the end.  But does that mean that if I’m comfortable now, there will be suffering waiting for me when I get home?