My Thoughts and Ideas

My hubby knows how it is to be a stranger. When he was 16, he stayed in the United States for a year as an exchange student. While his foster family treated him like a son, and classmates tried their best to make him feel welcome, there were moments he felt lost.

For one, he didn’t know his way around. He’d lost in their suburb. While he spoke English, in the beginning, he had a hard time understanding the accent. And then, everything was different—the food, the weather, the activities, the traditions.

While I am writing for my blog, a super tsunami has just hit Southern Asia . More than a hundred thousand people were killed.

Fortunately, the Philippines was spared. But what if the massive tsunami had struck us? Are we prepared to face what comes before us?

We need to be. Every moment of our lives is part of one great plan. This every moment we need to cherish. “Carpe Diem” “Seize the day.” Being prepared isn’t merely gathering food and staying inside our houses.

Being prepared entails a certain love.

A certain forgiveness.

I was the teacher’s pet way back in grade school. I enjoyed all the attention and took full advantage of the additional privileges.

For example, my teacher would use my notes in giving out quiz questions so my notebook served as the perfect reviewer. She would ask me to help her grade our test papers so I got “exclusive” preview of the results. She would entrust me to fetch her child from kindergarten so I managed to be excused from the classroom for about 15 minutes each day while I walked the short distance to the pre-school.

It is only in hindsight that I realized that I became her favorite not because of any special closeness that she felt fro me. It was mostly because I served her well. My notes were always complete and written in legible handwriting. I would stay for an additional half hour after each class to help her check the papers. She knew she could trust me to go straight to her child’s school and not make any trip on the side.

I was playing billiards with my cousins and uncle a sometime ago. Solids and Stripes. The objective was for a team to pocket either all the solid colored balls, or all the striped ones. In one shot my uncle accidentally pocketed a striped ball when he was aiming for a solid one. Laughing hard, my cousin who was on the opposing team commented: “Uncle, you’re strongest team mate.”

Thing is, if you don’t pocket a ball on one shot, you’re also giving the opposing team another chance to get ahead of you. So in not making a shot, you’re actually helping the other team win.