Like most fairytales, my life story started picture-perfect.
My Dad was a ship captain and my Mom was a HS teacher in the best private school in the municipality as I was growing up. They made a point of never letting us see them fight. They would take these after-dinner walks to discuss all that they had to sort through. When we try to follow them for a peek, we would always see them holding hands and walking side by side.
I remember thinking sometime in high school (prompted by a book I was reading) that I have a perfect life. I was the firstborn and, being a role model to my younger siblings, I was killing it! I was surely going to graduate the valedictorian of my class, I was part of the school’s lawn tennis team and our watched-out-for gymnastics team, and I was a student leader in campus and in church. Adding icing to the cake is the fact that I didn’t have to deal with all the drama of high school romance because my heart was just not in it yet. I was focused on getting into the premiere state university so I can get the best training for helping patients in our rural community.
Now let me qualify the rural community I am referring to. It’s not the kind where I have to walk through rice paddies or long distances to get to school. In our gated community, the private school is right in the center and just across the street from our house – like literally about 10 steps from our gate. We have electricity and water from the faucet in our own homes (not a shared community water source). We had access to television and a local hospital that could very well attend to most common ills. And the city is an 8-10hr drive via a dirt road, if anyone needed more advanced medical care. In fact, if it was too bad that it would require a specialist, company employees (which includes my Mom) have access to a Cessna plane that makes bi-monthly trips to and from Manila, the nation’s capital. Flight time is only about an hour.
So, as you can see, I lived a rather sheltered, privileged life. Back then, I didn’t really think much of it. I was just totally enjoying the peace and quiet of our tranquil environs, the ease and general safety by which we get to do things, and the many opportunities we get to enjoy as students of the lone La Salle-supervised school in the whole province. I was loved by the people in my community and I loved the community I’m in.
Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. (I Tim. 4:12)
Living out the instructions in this verse came easy for me.
I’m gonna end with that for today. If you want to know what happened next, subscribe to the blog so you’ll get notifications when the next one gets published.
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Until next time…