How Can A Train Be Lost When It's On Tracks?

I usually stop writing/blogging, when things in my life happen that are too overwhelming, too urgent and too immediate, that any attempts to put it down in writing will result in rambling.

Not that this would necessarily make more sense now. I just felt the need to begin with a disclaimer, in case this does come off as rambling.

Last weekend, I went on a retreat. Not just any retreat -- the retreat to end all retreats, haha. Days With The Lord, which I have forever been hearing about from friends like Mela and Alvin, and, back in college, Kyla.

I now kind of understand why I wasn't able to go to Days when I was in high school or college. Mostly, I wasn't ready. And I probably would taken a flippant attitude about the weekend -- would probably have shed a couple of tears, spent the next three to four days in a haze of holiness and then moved on with worldly ways.



But because it happened now, at this particular point in my life, with the upheavals (as I'd like to call them) of the past couple of years, I am in a particularly conducive state to experience God's love, in a profound manner, and also, I think I'm in a particularly better state, to respond to it.

I've always been intrigued about people like Erika (who chose to give up her posh life in Manila to teach indigenous people in Mindanao) or Bono (who, we all know has a messianic complex about saving the world's poor).

They're not like the rest of us (me), who flail around like rag dolls, bouyed by every change in our lives. They have spark and relentlessness.

I now have an inkling of what drives their passion, and conviction, what makes them purposeful, unapologetic and fearless.



It's the sureness of God's love.

I know why they are engaged and concerned. It's the sureness of the God's love, the profound feeling of God's love -- which compels them to respond to it in a huge way.

Not that I plan to become a missionary or volunteer for the Peace Corps or anything radical like that.

In my life, it's the simple things that need work on -- family, especially my troubled brother, and my role as
daughter and big sister. I've been exhausting all my energies trying to be a better writer, or teacher or friend, a better pop culture consumer (haha), that

I've been neglecting my family for what seems like forever.





Maybe I'd feel compelled to save the world in time. Right now, I feel like a character in a Wes Anderson film. Like Royal Tenenbaum or Francis Whitman -- the family member that comes back and tries, in a bumbling, stumbling fashion, to set things right.