The moment seems like a long time ago… in a galaxy far far away. I was a senior high school student as far as I could remember. And my story was not a burning-bush or a road-to-Damascus kind of thing. It simply happened in a campus crusade conducted by a Christian group in Manila doing some sort of a mini-concert. My whole class attended and the next thing that happened was we’re already attending bible studies. And what was life before that?
I was an ordinary girl, living in an ordinary world, having ordinary dreams. But my siblings always treated me like a mutant: a weird hybrid. Cousins saw me as an irking geek. Neighbors thought I was atypical. Friends believed I was out of this world.
Being the eldest granddaughter, I practically grew up with my grandparents. There was even a time I thought my mother was only my aunt or a cousin. As a kid I was always on my grandfather’s lap listening to his war stories (he was a US war veteran) or playing chess with him while kids my age played hide and seek. I was usually by my grandmother’s side when she prepared food in the kitchen while my siblings and cousins enjoyed throwing jack stones. And I was memorizing the multiplication table while other kids in our neighbourhood were watching soap operas.Memories about my father were all wonderful. He taught me about finding humor in just anything – even dismal times when things were uncertain. He always told us that money is not the most important thing. Being together as a family is. It cannot be exchanged with any form of wealth. And that the greatest possession we could ever have is education; it cannot be stolen.
I had some tough times with my mother but much of my strength came from those poignant moments and from seeing her immovable disposition. She was always cool and there simply seemed nothing that could push her off the wall.
So, I was atypical, a mutant, a geek. What difference did my first rendezvous with Christ make then? I have to go back to that question. Otherwise, I could not complete the requirement of my assignment. As my grandfather once told me that the palest ink is better than the sharpest memory, I had to consult my journals that contain long forgotten memoirs showing how my life was transformed line upon line and precept upon precept, after knowing Christ. And it was not how I met the Lord for the first time that was spectacular. What’s amazing was the journey he made me go through after we met. It’s a story about transformation and restoration, of moving me from one step to the next, of allowing me to learn one lesson after another, and of breaking me into pieces in order to make me into a new whole in preparation for yet another level of brokenness.Meeting Christ for the first time was only part of the love story he is writing for me. An enchanting saga that shows his faithfulness as he carried me through the whole journey... my destiny.
