Provision, Pro-vision

Whenever I pray for provision, an image of the material things form in my mind. Material things that God will miraculously give me for me to use to achieve my dreams. I usually pray for provision when God starts to stir a vision inside me and eventually, my prayers die down as the ball rolls on.

But, today, God made me realize that provision is something that God gives for the fulfillment of your vision. It is not something that comes to jumpstart my dreams. It is something He sends every step of the way. The material things are part of it but it also includes people, ideas, circumstances that will bring you to another level of His glory.

Do you have a vision? Is your vision according to God's will? Then, be excited and have faith for God is faithful to fulfill it. :) 

On Wedding Preps

Archbishop Tagle's comment about weddings comes timely for this season of my life. Nowadays, my social calendar includes fittings for a friend's wedding, bridal fairs, supplier meet ups and the like. I have experienced seeing my friends off to their new adventure and am now planning mine.

I have once described this experience as a "girly-girly" thing. Half of me feels I'm not cut out to conduct such activities while the other spends most of her time looking at pictures and thinking about the details (dreaming the day away... though I don't want to admit it :P). Somehow, I understand why a lot of girls (I should be using "couple"... i know ) puts so much pakulo in their weddings. They've grown up dreaming about their happy-ever-after's that they feel their wedding is their chance to make it come true.

To be honest, I share these tendencies. However, whenever I catch myself fussing too much about the details I really tell myself to stop. There are a lot of nice things to have for my own wedding but I don't want to fret over them. There are a lot of facts to consider while in the planning stage but I don't want to worry too much. It's not that I want to maintain my composure over these things, it's just really more on, I want what's essential.

And for me, what is really essential is my Master to be with my mate and I as we start our mission together that will glorify His holy name. The 3M's, that is what it's really all about ;)

The Misadventures of O and J : Dumbfounded

So it's my dad's birthday today (haberday daddy! :D) . I volunteered to buy the ice cream. Going home, O and I stopped by the grocery store. We lined up by the green cart lane as we only had 2 items in tow. The line was frustratingly long (at least in my own point of view...) for a transaction that involved only 2 items but as I already promised this at home, I had to fall in line. I looked at the big cart lanes for a possible option but as I was already hungry and tired, I was unable to gauge which would be faster for us. In short, we stayed where we are. I happened to remember glancing at my watch that time, it said 8:00.

So we tried to patiently wait for our turn, chatting our time away to produce the illusion of shortening it. True enough, by about 8:15 (mind you, that's already long for 2 hungry people), we found ourselves third from the cashier. We were still chatting and still waiting for our turn feeling relieved we were almost there when out of a sudden someone tapped me by the shoulder. O and I turned around to see who it was. "It" was a quite old lady (about 50 or so I guess... ) showing her shampoo sachets in hand who apologetically asked "Pwede ba akong makisingit?". O and I were actually dumbfounded. After the initial shock, I said, "Sorry po, nagmamadali din po kasi kami. Birthday ng dad ko." The lady went away (and I actually saw she went to someone else in the line but was again denied, so she went to look for a lane with a shorter queue... )

After we were done and as we went to the transport terminal, we talked about the old lady. We were trying to think of other ways we could have handled it. I ended up wanting to say this "Pwede ko naman po kayo pasingitin kaso po paano naman sila?" while pointing to the others in the line. O wanted to handle it in a different way. He wanted to say "Gusto nyo po magbotohan na lang po kaming lahat kung pasisingitin namin kayo o hindi?" then turns to the other people in the line for their vote. We ended up both laughing.

Haayyyy... People! They never cease to amaze me and how they feel they're always exempted from the social order of things...

Patience

During my first grade, I was assigned to I – Patience. I remember, upon hearing my mom inform me of my section, I immediately disliked it. Aside from the fact that it was the afternoon crème section (morning crème section was I – Diligence), I thought the word patience sounded plain and boring. There was no oomph to the word. Please forgive my ignorance but I did not care much for the meaning of words back then and I only judged them just by how they sound. Much to my dismay, they were unable to re-assign me to I – Diligence. This experience symbolically started my love-hate relationship with the word patience.

Googling the definition of patience, this is what I got:

patience [ˈpeɪʃəns]

n

1. tolerant and even-tempered perseverance

2. the capacity for calmly enduring pain, trying situations, etc.

3. (Group Games / Card Games) Chiefly Brit any of various card games for one player only, in which the cards may be laid out in various combinations as the player tries to use up the whole pack US equivalent solitaire

4. Obsolete permission; sufferance

The definition of patience highlights why I would want to love it. Being patient is having that perpetual calm EVERYTIME things don’t go your way. But, ironically, the odds are there are a lot of things that won’t go the way you want them to go: an MRT train bogs down when you need to be at the office as early as possible for an important meeting; your boss is pressuring you for an information you can get from the web but the internet connection suddenly slows down; you encounter a traffic jam while you are suffering from LBM; you haven’t had lunch and everything in the menu takes 30 minutes to prepare; the queue you pick towards the tollbooth seems to be the slowest of all the lines of cars. This is one of my many battles and, chances are, yours as well.

There are days that I win and days that I lose and it’s that losing that depresses me. Whenever I see how much of my patience I can stretch only to lose it at the very next second seems very frustrating. Like a rubber band, it feels like my patience is back to how it was the moment I lost it. Sometimes, I even hear myself saying “Back to square one”. And these times re-affirm my belief that it is never the rigidity of my battle plans that would win it for me.

Simply put, I want to be a patient person. But, I realize, it can never be achieved overnight. Patience is a process. This is one of the many things God changes within us that is “from glory to glory”. We have to be patient in becoming patient. ;)