When faith is tested

The exams are near but I put myself on this emotional roller-coaster which took me for a wild ride every now and then, giving me no respite.

God has made me see that I should cherish someone that denounces Him. This is rather queer: but in my dreams His message is very clear that I should cherish people around me, whether they are believers or not, and I must have this leap of faith that all will be reconciled and whatever hardship I have been through will not burden me unnecessarily.

But my faith is shaken. I get both impatient an dejected and put on a pair of grey and gloomy glasses when I look at things-- and they look gloomier than before--all things started off so well in one day with every thought organized and every muscle mustered and the atmosphere could turn wrong at the midway point! All kinds of readable tension and pent-up angst is so apparent that I am drowning in it. I feel I am returning to the status quo, I am not making improvement, I am living like an open wound.

For the first time in these two months, I shivered and almost developed shingles. The feeling was terrible-- the rain is heavy and everything felt so wrong when they should be so blissful. I could not muster up courage to alleviate any tension though things could not get wronger. I could not get away from fe sorrow that I was thrown in without being numbed by my pain.

I feel something died inside. That moment, that is not relief, that is not fallen expectation, that is not self-consolation, that is not anything.

Many times I said that there is gonna be one person that makes you feel that even if you look stupid and crap, it is worth a try. Now that part of my faith is shaken too. About all the worth. All the pent-up passion. All the pent-up disillusion. Like many years ago when I ran in the winter for hours to quieten down my feelings, to shout out aloud. I never changed. The feeling never went away.

I am being tested. It is challenging indeed. But I will hold on!

Living sacrifice

The Precept lessons on Romans 12 are amazing. For the first time I feel God's words are clear and powerful--not the first time I feel so, but the first time I feel SO MUCH. A powerful message sent to me last week was to live as a living sacrifice, to offer and present our bodies to Him, and to fulfill His glory.

About this sacrifice a friend of mine was undergoing a struggle about reading the signs of God and not heeding the words of man. God's signs are elusive but once found they are transforming. I felt glad that she found her signs and was able to finding peace and a sense of settledness. What a blessed state! She told me sacrificing does not necessarily start from your whole body, but can be in part, an ongoing sacrifice in a piecemeal manner. Her sharing did not register much on my head until Easter--when I wrote the things I was willing to sacrifice on the paper and pinned it on the cross. It is hard to sacrifice something that I cherish so much, SO much that I do not want to approach it. But it is in Christ that I live so to Christ is what belongs to Him.

Earnestly, I seek the signs and whispers of the God. Sometimes He does speak, He does know me well. He is reassuring in His manners and all anxiety is removed from me. I feel that I am getting closer and closer to His plan for me and in it He planned me a future.

A future that He put in my head when I was most down. The future that might make me the living testimony of God.