my mind…my heart

I just finished chatting with a friend who decided to return here in MSU after years of working in Manila and she gave me a lot to think of…having plans of going out myself, I eagerly listened to the things that she has learned while she was out there, a totally alien world from what she was so used to. What I heard from her both scared me and prepared me (somehow) because I know that the day that I would have to go out from here will inevitably come and judging on how things are turning out lately, it will come soon. When that time comes, my only prayer is that God will enable me to stand on what to HIM is right, relying on HIS strength and not my own, and most especially not of what I think I have learned and achieved during my really long stay here but of what GOD has taught me and what HE will continue to teach me.

What she said was all true, outside MSU, a person is armed with nothing else but his character; his achievements and the name he has made for himself will all be, though not forgotten, unimportant…Out there, however great you think you are she said, you’ll be just another face, just another “someone” and if you will not struggle to stand up for what is right, then you’ll easily be lost and you would not even know what happened. All the while, you’ll think that all that you are doing is simply for you to be able adjust, to cope up with all the pressures around you and the emptiness, only to wake up one day eventually realizing that you have already drowned and you have not become any different from the multitudes who have gone there only to lose themselves. You unknowingly let go of your identity in favor of a world that you thought you can stand up against, forgetting that you would not have come that far if not for GOD and had you not chosen to stand up for what you formerly stood up for. It’s a race out there she warned, and if you choose to run the same race as the others did, you will realize that you did not really gain anything, quite the opposite; you will lose because that race is just a rat race and it doesn’t matter in the end if you win because you will not be any different, you will still be the same rat that you allowed yourself to become, the moment you turned your back on what makes you distinctly you…

I guess I cannot be as brave as she is but when that day comes that I would have no other choice but to cross the bridge, I would always look back to this time and remember everything that she has told me and thank GOD for her, a treasure that I would not want to lose. To Jewel: Thanks! You are indeed a gem…