Descent

"For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:" (Ecc. 3:1)

I usually mumble and grumble and complain about having to come back into the city from my new home in the mountains, but I knew from the outset that this was exactly the right time to descend to the lowlands.

These last several days, God has allowed me to experience His incomparable love and generosity in a continuously overwhelming manner. Every new day has been filled with tremendous blessings and exciting new directions - personal, professional, and spiritual - that the last week went by so very quickly (so quickly that I've hardly had much time to write about it).

CC and I did some major work (CC for the most part, anyway; I contributed to the major mess, hehe) on the BC house - constructing and creating and deconstructing. It was mostly manual work, with a lot of conversation and creative cookery (1,000 recipes for your rice cooker) and one huge dinner with a priest and some seminarians, all in all such a pleasant experience that I'm slightly surprised we didn't get sick of each other's company after four days and more than 400 kilometers on the road. Such a calm soul - he didn't even bat an eyelash when he split his finger with J's Swiss knife; the only time I saw him stressed was trying to rush back to Manila through the tricycle traffic in time for a meeting (yeah the city can do that to you). Thanks CC, you're such a blessing - I'm going to try to start work on the kitchen wall mosaic without getting grouted to the wall myself.


I needed to get back to Manila myself: second Saturdays are my He Cares toka and I had to prepare for Father Steve's Mass at the Center. That went off wonderfully, as usual, and we had quite an interesting afternoon as we were joined by our friend Delphine of France's Enfants du Mekong, Tim the US volunteer, and two walk-in volunteers who found He Cares on the Net: Elisa from Italy and Graham from the UK. Add to that motley crew our resident mestizos and mulattos and me (forever being mistaken to be Chinese, Japanese, and most recently, Korean), and you've got yourself a United Colors of Benetton ad.

Speaking of which! On the drive down, I get an unexpected call from one of the partners of the ad agency I regularly work with, and the rush campaign I wrote for them won the account! Wonderful news and a very, very welcome windfall, especially with all the BC renovations and a couple of impending trips abroad. Two of the "promoters" of such trips are coincidentally in the country right now - my darling Empress, who bestowed upon me the "legacy" of a dive regulator (probably a sign that I need to go back underwater soon) and my Chicago-based sister, who came bearing tons of my favorite pasalubong - books, books, and more books! Talk about God's generosity - stuff I can really put to good use and thoroughly enjoy without my having to spend a single centavo. :-)


Not that I need to spend much when I engage in one of my favorite activities: catching up with good friends. I finally got to spend quality one-on-one time with another dear friend and fellow Chicago-an/Oprah fan Carina in her gorgeous new house overlooking the Marikina valley; and my dearest Rhia and Neil held a special post-birthday dinner the day after I got back, just because I'd missed Rhia's actual celebration. A little while before that, I went on a little wine-tasting expedition with CC and my Anak, and later ended up bumping into my best friend Miles and David - you can imagine how that evening progressed... And after the He Cares Saturday feeding, I attended TG's birthday and thanksgiving party and got to catch up with her and some other new friends after a long hiatus - was supposed to get together with much older college friends at an alma mater activity later that evening but was waylaid by a slight "detour" and instead spent many hours just talking and talking and talking over "one beer lang" with one of my best bros, Pedro. Just yesterday, I was only supposed to pick up something at the He Cares boys' new Project 8 household, and of course ended up cooking for them and staying for dinner before I needed to leave for the airport. Whew; what a wild whirlwind of wonderful blessings indeed. All in less than two weeks, and all because I came back down from the mountains, in God's time.

And I'm going back up, God-willing, tomorrow, with a household/van-ful of blessings who are as excited as I am about BC. He is in our ascents as He is in our descents - what a beautiful truth to hold on to!

A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace. (1-8)