Missing the Moments

Since childhood, my Christmas schedule is fully booked with parties and family reunions.  I never missed a Noche Buena and Media Noche with my maternal side of the family in Pasay City, later in San Juan, then transferred to Multinational Village.  And on January 1, we need to go for lunch with our paternal side of the family in the house of my Uncle Vicente.

Truly, when family leaders passed away, things change, from the continuous practice of reunions to diminishing and none.  Since Uncle Vicente died years ago, the tradition of meeting our clan has stopped.  I think it is now exclusively for their own family.  Yes, while it is true that family expands to families, and we have to respect that and their privacy.  I just missed those coming together  being a family for it brings a very different essence of closeness and belongingness.  

While the passing of my grandmother in the maternal side has the same effect.  Though we have stopped attending Noche Buena some years earlier before she passed away because of duties in church, our church has an annual cantata every Christmas eve.  But, still during those days, dinner is required to be attended and rush back to church duties.

I remember there was even a time in the late 90s (we did this for several years), where I use to cook Noche Buena for church members after the Christmas cantata. Young people and friends who does not have Noche Buena in their own respective houses, flock to my house to welcome the birth of Christ.   Some of us would rush back to my house after the cantata to prepare the food, and some will stay late afterwards to clean the dishes.   These were now only moments in the past.

It has been more than 5 years now, our family or my family, meaning my parents together with me has not celebrated any Noche Buena nor Media Noche.  It has become just another day like any regular day, where you sleep according to the time required.

Can this be a result of being single or age has really come upon me and my parents?  I have no family of my own, but we never actually celebrated our own Noche Buena nor Media Noche with the family of my siblings.  Maybe, we were just stingy a little bit and not willing to spend or it has become impractical due to commitments and distance.  :D

Last night, as I spend the time looking at those fireworks again for the nth time alone in my room, I suddenly felt of missing having my own family to celebrate such wonderful and important moments, as families throughout the globe come together to celebrate.  There was a sudden emptiness within me that calls my attention of wanting to be warmth.

The Tedious Task of Taking Care of Parents

I was awakened by my mom early 4 am this morning to help my dad get up, he fell again for the second time this month.  I was dumbfounded seeing my dad flying flat on the ground.  As I hurried to help him up, he was practically helpless and unable to move even though I managed to sit him up and single handedly raised him up to bed.  He practically lost all his strength.  I even thought he died already because he was not responding for almost ten minutes, as if I was pulling a dead body from the floor.  

Gladly, he responded a little and I was able to transfer him to his chair, where he sleeps.  After seeing him ok, I left to go back to bed.  But with a big pain at my back, also a sign of aging crawling up on me. 

This morning, as I prepare my dad's breakfast and help him eat (his whole body is aching because of the fall), I was thinking of hiring a caretaker for him, and here we go again, my mom who always can't get alone with any house help objected the idea.  Many times, it is really tedious and difficult to care for old people.  Both of them have their own respective weirdness.  

My mom would almost daily complain that she has a bad life, but I would answer back that life to be good or bad is actually in the hands of the person.  She could have enjoyed life for years but opted to live a bad life trying to make herself slave for all, which I personally don't appreciate.  All my life I have been a good son providing material, emotional stability for this family.  She is making herself a slave for all, which she never realized that such is only putting her children in a bad light for being perceived as bad children because she enjoys being pitied by people.  

Well, I have always did my best and has even sacrificed my personal life for them.  Me, remaining single is a result of the need to provide for the needs of my family.  Though through the day's experienced challenged me to think, 'how about me when I grow old?  Who will take care of me?'  I have used up my finances to provide for this family.  So, what will happen to me in the future? 

Sometimes, parents really need be practical and work hard and save for their future in order not to be a burden to their children.  I am not complaining about my situation but I do believe, I am not alone going through such tedious task of providing and caring for old parents.  Good thing, God has blessed me in my journey, though I really missed the train of having my own family.  

Still, I am hopeful in the coming days, I would meet the right girl to journey with me in the last leg of my life.

Nothing Compares to the Thumb Print of God

Today, my academic team had our first official meeting.  We went through 6 hours of marathon meeting trying to define the school, which practically defines what we like Life Academy to be.

We started to get to know one another followed by a prayer meeting, then, vision casting by representatives of the board and put those ideas into writings using "educational language."  

Amazingly, with the active participation of the team members, we were able to write the mission and vision statements of the school, define our graduates attributes and verbalize our educational philosophy.  We also threshed out some academic work and assignments, went for a school facility tour, individual consultation, and even partial review of curriculum.  I also had interviews with two pairs of parents applying for their kids education with our institution.  

Summing up today's work in two words would be "amazingly productive."  What was supposed to be an at least three months of discussion and processing, ended up in 6 hours with everyone fully satisfied with all of our meeting outputs, which allowed us to have a clear direction for the coming days.  

Truly, today is another day of miracle as we see the thumb print of God in the result of our meeting.  To God be all the glory!

LIFE Academy 

Mission: We are a global innovative learning institution that partners with families in providing transformative education to help build holistically developed Christ-like influencers.

Vision: Through global innovative education, we envision our learners to be wise, holistically developed Christ-like servant leaders who love God and others with a commitment to make a positive difference in the world.

Blessing Upon Blessing!

The Lord truly blesses His people.  I have never thought I would be changing gadgets successively this month.  For the past years, it has been my practice that I would give myself a birthday gift and a Christmas gift.  So, it takes time to really save some money for my personal gift.

This practice of giving myself gifts started when I was still a teenager, when a counselor told me that money earned and placed in a bank is not yours, but the bank's.  Unless you enjoy part of your hard earned money, they are not yours.  This principle is simple, in order for you to say that the money you earned is yours, you need to spend some for yourself.

Looking at many people trying to save money and depriving themselves with the material blessings God has given them has made me think this philosophy or principle.  I was convinced that this is really true.  In order for me to proudly say that this is my hard earned money, I have to spend some of it for myself and not just put everything in savings for the rainy day.

I have witnessed people who died of starvation only to find out that the person has save hundreds of thousands of pesos under her bed.   I also remembered one time my mom was complaining that she is spending much of her SSS retirement money.  And I have to remind her that she has indeed retired, and such money was supposedly be spend for that purpose.

Some might look at this principle too much, but again, money saved in bank can also connote that money is controlling you.  While money spend wisely for some personal pleasure is you controlling money.

As my iPhone 4 starts to become very slow, I was forced to replace it with a new one, with Pavs convincing me to go for the Globe iPhone Forever Plan.  After being convince to take such, I tried the whole month going from Globe branch to branch but there were no stocks available.  Finally, December 24, I thought that there would be lesser people in Manila, and indeed, I was able to get one.

And comes today, my new MacBook Pro arrives to replace my old MacBook Pro who served with me for the past 4 ½ years of ministry.  

I praise God for new gadgets, I believe God would use these gadgets again for my ministry especially to establish communications with my flock as well as make my work more productive in many ways.

This is truly blessings upon blessings... Thank you Lord for your continues blessings!

Not God

Church leaders should actually be good spiritual leaders.  They are men who Christians look up to, seek guidance and respect their God given authority over the church.  But, we also need to understand and be reminded that it is not necessarily that whatever they want or say is already equivalent to God's will or what God wants.  Spiritual leaders are only human leaders and not God Himself. 

As believers of God, it is our personal responsibility to discern the will of God in our lives, and not just rely on counsel of godly men. Knowing the will of God is the result of our relationship with Him.  

Therefore, church leaders can affirm or confirm God's will through their counsel, but to solely seek God's will through counsel of spiritual leaders is definitely a NO!  We cannot put such important responsibility of seeking God's will in the hands of people, especially if it involves personal decisions, directions in life and our service for the Lord.  

When we looked at the Bible, there were times when God allowed lying spirits to be on the mouths of Israel's prophets to deceive and punish disobedient leaders.  In the same way in our generation, there would be times our discerning of God's will might not conform with the opinion of godly spiritual leaders.  

Therefore, it is better to put our relationship with God first, and discern the will of God rather just being lazy and just rely on the council of our spiritual leaders.  These leaders can be good spiritual leaders but still, they are not God. 

Productive and Better

As my class continue our journey in improving teaching, we focused on Kholberg's Experiential Learning Cycle.  We carefully discussed a more dynamic way of chopping the lesson to several learning experiences that hopes to maximize individual learning experiences.  One topic or content is divided into Activity, Analysis, Abstraction and Application.  

Activity - is a dynamic way for learners to interact and bring out their presuppositions on the particular topic.  In this way, we can already remove teaching things they already know.  This is to remove repeatitions as well as boredom from the learners.  

Analysis - is proving the accuracy of learning presented by the learners as a result of the activity.  This involves asking various probing questions.  The process is to prove and clarify if they were really clear or have actually understood what they have presented, and not just a wild coincident guess.  

Abstraction - is focusing on what the learners do not know.  After the two previous learning experiences, the teacher chops off all data the learners already know and just focus his or her presentation on the parts of the content that the learners do not know.  

Application - is the application of new learning with the learners presuppositions and create an actual action output.  The only way to know that learning has occured is through the application of the lesson.  

When we use this format in teaching our learners, we create a more dynamic way to present a lesson that would continually captivate the learners' attention on the lesson.  

The discussion today has fully captivated my students as well.  It has made our day's discussion move everyone to another level of thinking and preparing oneself to present dynamic lessons to their flock.  

So guys... is this what I am thinking?  (",)

Work Adjustment

It has been months, since I last worked like a cow.

Yes!  I just got back to full work, and though my new workplace is not fully operational, it seems my youthful energy has been missing.  I have been exhausted daily and off to bed around 10 pm, which I felt that it was a miracle, since I usually slept 12 am since May.  Maybe this just goes to say that when God puts you on an assignment, He also provides all the necessities for you to be up to the challenge. 

I do praise God that after four days of work, I was never late and miraculously got up at 5 am for work.  My travel time from Binondo to Ortigas is a price I need to pay.  Actually, the worse part was the travel from Ortigas back to Manila, where the traffic was really hell and exhausting.  

I do enjoy this new work though there are some pressures because of new challenges especially with people but so far, God has been very patient with me in this opening journey.  

In just 4 days time, we were able to accomplished a lot and we had already prepared for next week's list of task.  

Is this really work adjustment?  Maybe not.  

When it is God's work, He adjusts everything for you!  Praise Him! From whom all blessings flow!  

APPOLICIOUS!!!

It was an APPOLICIOUS experience!

For the past years, I have been busy advocating and conducting faculty development trainings on the Apple product integration to the basic education curriculum, particularly the iPad.   And this has finally paid off today!

I praise God for the learning journey in integrating technology to our education curriculum in order to make learning more fun, exciting and most important of all, deeper for our students.  As we use technology integration in the different subject areas, it has allowed students to be keen on researching facts and data by themselves.  It has allowed students to become reflective learners, which results to better critical thinking skills, better opportunities for processing learning, and innovate with wonderful and creative outputs.

These years of advocacy has now been recognized by Apple as I receive their appointment as one of the official consultant for Apple Philippines on Educational Integration from the representative of Apple Singapore.   This involves free further trainings to even better equip myself in the conduct of professional development seminars for educators in our country and hopefully in other parts of Asia.  Though this would be another addition to my new responsibility as School Principal, I do believe it would better enhance myself as an educational leader as technology has started to reshape education in our present generation.

 I think the most important perks would be my designation is official and I am authorized to use the Apple logo with my name card... Now, that's COOL!  :D

Hitting the Lesson Target!

Learning objectives as I have personally observed are the most neglected area of the lesson plan.   Surprisingly, some teachers do not know how to write learning objectives and worse, they  do not even know why they were there in the first place or interprets such objectives in a wrong way.

Some teachers are so comfortable with customized lesson plans, which has been handed down or prepared by publishers that they would just jump to the content and the teaching strategy of the lesson without bothering to read and comprehend the learning objectives included in the lesson plan.

Learning objectives are actually guide for the teacher to deliver the precise content demanded by the lesson.  But when these objectives are neglected, there is a big possibility that the teacher would be teaching something that is not actually what the lesson is all about.  Or the teacher could be concluding the lesson with another idea rather than the real intention of the lesson.

Like a lesson about the story of David and Goliath.  Possible learning objectives can include bravery, trust in God, not to look down on young people, conquering your giants, God uses anyone He wants... and so forth.  You cannot target all of these possible learning objectives in a 20 or 30 minutes lesson, but instead, you need to pick only one that you would want your students to learn most.

A particular topic can have hundreds of possible learning objectives, but because of the limited amount of time and the target of the lesson, you cannot accommodate all the possible learning outcomes.   And that is the job of learning objectives, to point to that very objective what you want your students to learn from the lesson.

As many educators would say, objectives must be written in SMART format: Simple, Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable and Time-bounded.  It sounds easy, but actually, deeper thoughts are needed in formulating such learning objectives to come out with a precise learning target.

It is highly suggested that each lesson must include 3 learning objectives at most, and such objectives must include a progression in the thinking level of the students.

Learning Objectives help teachers hit the target!  So, when we give importance to the learning objectives of our lessons, we give importance to the life of the students we mold out of our lessons.

Sudden Peace

It has been a struggling week as it was off schedule for me to go for work.  My original plan was to get back to work around April or May.  But because of so many circumstances and I myself feeling bored, I was forced to make a decision to work or not to work, where to work and what kind of work? 

It was a very difficult situation and decision that I have recently experienced, it was truly a crossroad, with many concerns actually piling up in my mnd, which include utmost care of relationships.  Accepting a ministry that can break relationships as other invitations need to be turned down.  

But eventually, I had to make a decision, factoring each area of finding God's will has put me on the spot, a decision that I have previously declined.  Well, after my last leg of struggle and surrender to what God wants.  I suddenly was filled with peace and ready for the challenge.   

This can be an example of a Jonah syndrome, where you know God wants you to do a particular ministry and you are lazy to do it because of different kind of fears that engulfs our presuppositions.  Anyway, as a fulltime minister of God, the boss is still God, there is no choice but to heed on His will since we always know that God knows what is best for us.  

I am ready for the challenge and let us get to work! 

The Fear of Growing Pains

Since last week, I felt my life has been a drag.  The cluttered mind needs unwinding for me to see clearly what God wants me to do next for Him.  

There are times, we just want to do things where we are comfortable already, but I was reminded the question, "am I relying on myself and my piled up skills more or am I relying more on God in faith?"  This struck me whether I am having a Jonah syndrome or not.  Even my interpretation of my devotion is siding with what I want rather than what God wants.  In the end, I know that I need to submit since my task is to follow my God. 

My dream to be rich and lazy or to be just a simple houseband someday seems to be so far away from my reality.  

With my previous ministry experiences, though I know my years in ministry were well blessed, there were also many growing pains.  Leaping in faith once again for a new journey makes me hesitant.  Am I really ready for the next challenge and set of growing pains?  

The preacher yesterday reminded me in Hebrews 11 about the list of faith stuffs, but what struck me most was that in verse 1, "by faith, we understand."  We are to have faith first and then understand... not the other way around.  By leaping in faith, and after leaping in faith where we will only understand and get answers to our questions.  Waiting for answers to our questions before acting in reliance on God is no longer faith.  

As I continue to journey this fulltime ministry... as I leap in faith for my next ministry... as I explore another level of faith...  All must continually be centered in God alone.