I have at one time in my life thrown everything and willing to do anything for a passion, for an obsession. I left a high-paying job. I left my family. I left my home. I left the Deaf community and organization I have built up in Iloilo. I left my past. I left my comfort zone. I left my hometown to move to Cebu to chase a dream— to improve the quality of life of the Deaf through quality education. I thought it was noble. It was promising. It was full of hope. I almost had the dream at arm’s reach in three different occasions. But all of them vanished in an instant. I was left jobless, distant from home, desolate without a family, broke without a means of income, and drowned in debt and financial obligation. I was devastated. But it was during those instances when God’s glory and mighty hand is at work. God came and rescued me, picked up the broken pieces and brought me to Elim Community.
It is in Elim Community, that is where I realized I missed one whole point. That all my dreams, my passions, my plans, my hopes are not entirely for God and His kingdom. That I am just so obsessed with the things of this earth, fighting for the rights of the Deaf, regaining back their human dignity, improving the quality of the lives of the Deaf “on this earth.” I haven’t set my sight to the “infinity and beyond.” I have toiled and worked hard and given up my own future and just seeing them all washed down the drain.
That’s why it got me in circles, suspended me in points of high elation and deep frustration. It was a rollercoaster ride chasing that dream. I sobbed, cried, wailed, anguished, hopeless and feeling defeated. I asked God in sincere prayers to transform and rearrange my life. I have at one point given up on this “Deaf passion.” I said “Lord, I give up my work for the Deaf. It is only what you want me to do that I aspire now. Help me know what it is. Reveal to me what it is.”
God is in His superb and infinite wisdom, knows what He is doing and is still at work in me and in my life and in this mission and spiritual burden given to me. I still don’t know where it would lead me. But I wait on the Lord. And if it is His desire to have the Deaf included or not in my own faith-journey, then so be it, as the Lord wills it.
In an article, I wrote in my high school paper entitled “The Deaf, the Mute and I,” it was highlighted “I have ears but I don’t listen, I have mouth but I don’t proclaim the Lord’s glory.” True enough, I am just that- a mediocre and coward Christian. With God’s transforming work for me here at Elim, through the example of the Elders, through the prayers and guidance of my KG facilitator, through the spiritual friendship and encouragement of my KG sisters, through Team Revival Night, through the teachings, through anything and everything that God will use, someday soon, that would be a reverberating “YES, LORD, anything and everything for you!”
“Only those who throw away their lives for my sake and for the sake of the good news will know what it means to really live.”
(Elim Discipleship Studies 1: Servanthood)
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