Yesterday I stumbled into a small boutique in Newton, MA. I immediately fell in love with this bag. I feel like it was calling me…*buy me, own me, wear me. Truthfully, I am an emotional shopper. What that means is that I need to feel an emotional attachment to the product. Unlike real-life relationships, I believe there is such thing as love at first sight for bags, clothes, shoes and accessories And I haven’t had such strong feelings for a bag for… (geez, I don’t even know how long). Usually that good flowery feeling last for a while…until I asked for the price. HA!
I can’t believe my ears. $480 for that bag? Well, granted it was organic hemp cotton, vegetable dyed leather, personalized number for each bag, and outstanding quality. But I am not going to buy a bag that is more expensive than my Nikon D40!! Or will I? I was starting to entertain my thoughts to the point that it was dangerous. My shining, sharp and dangerous credit card was getting ready to be unsheathed. Ermm, not really..hehe. But I was really starting to entertain the idea. What if…I get a job…what if…I skipped lunch for a month, two months, a year?
Suddenly I saw a child, begging for food. Skipping lunch was not an option, maybe dinner too or maybe they haven’t had food in days. I saw the refugee camps in Sudan, the street kids in Jakarta, the earthquake victims in Padang, the single mothers who have to work two, three, even four jobs to put food on the table. Then, I can’t seem to find any justification for my love at first sight. I have to say goodbye. For now.
The truth is, I can’t deny my fleshly desires. There are just too many pretty things in this world… Sometimes I succumb to it, sometimes I don’t. I think, we want to own things to fill up the emptiness inside. It makes us happy, for a little while. Then, we got bored and look for a new excitement. I think that we fill our life with distractions, so that we can ignore the fact that we are going to die someday and what comes after it. What about you? Do you fear death? I do, sometimes I face it, sometimes I run away.
PS: “Diamonds and gold last forever” ~ that’s Tiffany’s solution
Today is the day.
i knelt before the presence of God,
asking Him,
“Really God? Is this what You want me to do?”
He said,
“Its time. Give me your Isaac.”
“My Isaac…”, i thought.
Oh, how much i loved him
i don’t want to let him go
i don’t know what i’m going to do without him
Then God asked me
As Aladdin asked Princess Jasmine,
“Do you trust Me?”
There was a moment of hesitation,
and i answered
“Yes LORD, i trust You.”
i trust You with my Isaac
i know You’ll be good to him
As i think these thoughts,
i remember a song my friend wrote,
“..as i go out on a limb,
it is okay is i fall,
because i already fallen for you.”
But the thing about God is,
He’ll never let me fall.
i’ll stumble, but He’ll catch me.
So, with that in mind,
i walked down to the altar
and sacrificed my Isaac.
You see, my Isaac is really
a 3×5 card, folded over,
with the word “my heart” written on it.
But it was my Isaac.
It was the thing I loved the most.
And I suddenly realized,
It was never mine, God just made me thought that it was
My first post in 2009, yay! I was just reading my journal that amazingly has spanned around 4 years. I came across my thought about the meaning of feeling alive, and I thought I wanted to share this with everyone. So, here goes.
I just realized that I don’t know how to feel alive. And that makes me so bitter and angry at everything and everyone. I don’t know how to appreciate this life. I think that is what “feeling alive” means. It means that you savor this moment, right now, every aspect of your life and see that it is good.
It means not feeling ashamed of who you are, but enjoying the good side and the bad side. Accepting who you are and yet still able to take critics humbly and work on your flaws without pressure. It means that being YOU is significant to somebody else. It means accepting your circumstances, no matter how ugly it is. It means that you are able to rejoice when others rejoice, and cry when the are sad. It means that you have somebody to share a meal with, or even just a funny story you thought of.
It means being able to look at your broken family and says, “They are beautiful.” It means being able to imagine, create and dream. It means wanting to change other people’s life for their sake, not because you feel good about it. It means being able be at peace with your identity, race, status, and accept differences as something to be treasured. It means to have something worth living for, worth dying for. Because as someone said, “someone who has something to live for, can live almost anyhow.”
Its Christmas yet again. It is my favorite time of the year, but yet this year felt different. Is it because I was working that day? I don’t know, but it just felt foreign. Something really nice happened, though. It was Christmas Eve, and I was talking to one of the kid at the shelter. He was telling me about a certain girl he liked and his history with girls. We were having a nice conversation, when suddenly he said, “You know, you should be a counselor and take over the shelter’s counselor job.” I was pretty surprised to hear his statement.
I always thought that I wanted to be a counselor, but I’m just unsure if I got what it takes to be one. So, it was really nice to hear him say that. It was almost like a confirmation, the voice if God maybe? The truth is that I’ve been slacking alot with my graduate school application, because I was not 100% sure if what I’m doing is right. Should I really go down that path? Should I be a clinical social worker? Again my inferiority complex made me question everything from A-Z. Well, in any case, I feel that it was a very nice Christmas present, to hear those words. Thanks, dude!
This is also a shoutout for my friends who bought me animeeples and the “Brassai: Paris” book. That was really thoughtful.
I wish y’all a Happy and Merry Christmas. May the spirit and joy of giving resonates with you throughout this season.
I haven’t write a post in a while. I guess I’m in a state in between laziness and refusing to succumb to the rotation of daily life schedules. Nowadays, I feel like a cog in a big wheel, doing the same things over and over again. Waking kids up, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, and then it starts all over again. Yet, somehow I need to make time to write my personal statement for grad school application and hang out with my friends. I usually do this out of the schedule things on my 5 days off. I realized that 5 days are never enough. I’m always sucked into the whirlwind of watching too much movies, playing too many board games and drinking with my buddies. Although all these things are necessary for my sanity, I find that I could never find the time nor the will to start on my personal statement.
I always thought that writing a personal statement would be waaayyy easy, and I could do it in one sitting. What is so hard about writing a story on yourself anyhow? Well, it is hard. I don’t know if its my lack of reflective thinking lately or…(I’m out of excuses). Well, I wanted to share this joy with all of you reading this, so I’m posting the questions these schools are asking me. From the way their question are phrased, I would think that they have a sign saying, “Only saints need to apply”. I mean, what a social problem of significance for me? What am I supposed to answer? Poverty? Sex Trafficking? I don’t know, there are so many social problems out there, they all have touched my heart at one time or another, but am I supposed to be married to a cause here? I don’t know, sorry if I’m bitchin’. Anyway, enjoy pondering on the questions.
Question 1. Discuss why you want to be a social worker. What personal, academic, volunteer and/or work experiences have influenced this choice? If you have worked in other fields, please discuss the reasons for this change.
Question 2. What attributes do you possess that contribute to your abilities to be helpful to others? Tell us about a specific example or a critical situation in which you have played a helping role. What attributes might you change to strengthen your ability to be helpful to others?
Qn. 3a. Describe a social problem of significance to you. Please discuss it with regard to: societal contributions to the origin of the problem; experiences that have contributed to your identification and understanding of the problem; and possible ways of addressing the problem.
My hat goes off to those parents or guardians dealing with teenagers today. They can really make your days miserable. I remembered that I gave my parents a pretty tough time, too, back then. I feel that the hardest thing about dealing with a teenager is that they look so much like an adult, and even from time to time think like an adult, that you can help but treat them like adult sometimes. Then, you’ll get dissapointed when they start acting like kids, but the fact of the matter is, they are still kids. Well, adult in progress as I would call it.
When dealing with a teenager, I would always try to talk to them and find out what’s going on. I hope and believe that they have enough reasoning skills for that. However, even talking to them can be really challenging, because sometimes they are so stubborn and would not change their opinion. I learned in my psychology class that this is normal, as they are forming their “independent self”. They wanted to have their own minds, and would not change it no matter what (even when they know that you are right). You can call it pride if you want. Most teenagers have this more than others. What I have learned from my experience is just to say what you wanted to say. Sometimes it will get through to them, and sometimes it might not. But just believe, if God is willing, we can really make a difference in their lives.
These three words seem so simple, yet not easy to say. I felt a tug at my heart when I heard these words on the radio. I was listening to K-Love this morning when I heard a story from a listener from Louisiana where the Hurricane Ike hit. After the devastation, the family of a father, mother and 4 year old son was cruising through the neigborhood to see how much damage was done. All of the sudden, while they were in the middle of ruined buildings the four-year-old said, “Life is good, Mom, because God is with us.” That was not the exact quote per se, but his words struck his parents. It seemed to them as inappropriate thing to say at that moment, but his words set his parents heart back to Jesus.
I myself is in a situation where I find it hard to say that life is good. It’s not that I’m starving, or I have no place to live, or have to pay up a huge amount of debt. It’s just that I don’t feel that I’m not where I want to be. I feel confused about my life and uncomfortable with my situation. I keep thinking to myself, what does God want me to learn from this? Should I just quit? Probably God was talking to me through the words of that 4-year-old. Life is good, because God is with us. Nothing else should matter. I just don’t want to hear that answer, I want God to say that I need to move, I need to quit my job, anything but staying put at where I’m at right now. But I guess that’s not His answer, because God will take us to the most uncomfortable place in our lives, to learn that no matter what, we can depend on Him, not ourselves.
Contentment in God is something learned, and its the most precious knowledgewe can acquire.
Along this note, I just want to share a song that I heard at church last Sunday. Think about it, what would you do or change about your life if you die today?
I am so bloody mad that I could punch someone in the face right now. Not really the best day at work. I hate whiney people. They frustrates the hell out of me. Especially when they cry like a baby, when it is not really a big deal. I was a hairline close to hitting a 14-year-old noy today. Not exactly something to be proud of, but I’m just really pissed. I’m really tired with this situation. I wanna get out of here. Now I feel like I’m being whiney. I’m just venting out everything I feel right now in this blog. Sorry for those who felt that their eyes are being abused by reading this entry. Don’t mean to take it out on you.
And I haven’t had such strong feelings for a bag for… (geez, I don’t even know how long). Usually that good flowery feeling last for a while…until I asked for the price. HA!
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