Star for All Seasons

“All the world is a stage, and we are merely actors.”
- William Shakespeare

[Although I do like the Bard’s work, I do not have a Shakespearean kick going. His quotes just seemed appropriate, for some reason, so I’m going to use these to help me make my point. Oh yeah, these are originally two entries that I merged into one, so I apologize for the length and for the parts that don’t seem to coincide with the other sections.]

Owing to my cynicism of many years [cue in Aerosmith’s “Jaded”], I have known and believed what William Shakespeare has said. I considered just about everyone to wear these masks fit for the company that they will be attending to, and would soon as shed one in favor of the other faster than you can say “façade.” In the present, I still believe in that to a certain degree. This is partly due to the fact that there is still a bit of a cynic in me. After all, who can deny that superficiality still exists, and is actually thriving? What with all the backstabbing and crab mentality going on around us, a person is hard-put to remain optimistic. Yet there is also truth in that certain people should be treated differently from others, not to conceal a part of one’s self, but because the circumstances call for it. You can’t go and treat your professor as your kabarkada in the classroom if you fear for your grade, for example. Yet that does not mean that you have to change your personality depending on who you are with. Don’t have multiple personalities – not only is that a psychological disorder, but the longer you keep on the mask, the more it becomes integrated in you that you end up being who you’re pretending to be. Always be true to yourself, but don’t be so bullheaded to force yourself upon others’ throats. Act according to the situation. In the same way, don’t try to hide who you are behind a mask when you are facing others. Otherwise, they’ll like you for who they are, and not for who you are. Young people, especially, seem to face this struggle more than the others, because in this age, there is always this need to belong to something, so much so that we end up risking who we are just so we can be liked. Otherwise, if we miss our cue, we end up being the laughingstock or the outcast of the play we are in where we barely know the script.

What am I getting at? Simply that we can’t go and pretend to be someone that we’re not. I recently had a talk with a friend who can’t bring himself to call himself a Christian because he felt that he didn’t deserve that name anymore. To connect it to a previous entry, we are Christians not because of who we are, but who He is. Yes, we definitely do not deserve to be His children, but by God’s grace and love, He made it so. It is also by His love that He made us different from each other. I’ve said this over and over again, but it’s really something that I want to emphasize – that we really were made not to be similar. We need not pretend to be someone else because we’re special the way we are. That’s how He made us so. All of us have different God-given gifts that we can tap into. It is up to us whether we choose to utilize these or not.

To further connect it to the other entry [yes, I know that that was long enough, but I really feel that there’s so much to be said about the topic], we cannot put on the label “Christian” as a sort of a shirt that we can pull on and off of us when we feel like it. Sure, other people might be properly impressed by that mask, but in the end, who are we fooling? Ourselves? God? I can’t help but think of this couple who tried deceiving God, and ended up literally falling dead on their feet. Don’t believe me? Read Acts 5:1-11 and see what happened to Ananias and Saphira. It wasn’t so much because they withheld a part of the sum of money that should have been their tithe, but because they tried to fool God. I don’t know if there are any cases of people dropping dead when they decided to lie to God, but the point is, God does not want their material sacrifice in place of their souls. Psalm 51:18 says it: “For You do not desire sacrifice; a burnt offering You will not accept.” How can we go and lie to Him, when He knows even the number of hair strands on our head (Mt 10:30)? To be a Christian means to live as a Christian in every facet of life, not one, two, or three, but everything.

~

Almost a couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference of this Christian community that I recently joined. It was really cool because initially, I didn’t think I’d be able to attend, considering that I always go home to the province during the semestral breaks (even with the few days left when I served in RegCom for two years). Anyhow, thank God that He allowed me to go, because I was really blessed with the experience of attending the conference. It wasn’t just the talks that really brought enlightenment to me; the presence of the people themselves was a huge blessing. I’m not just talking about the friends (both old and new) I had there. Seeing and knowing that there are hundreds of people who are just ready to worship Jesus and giving everything that they’ve got – even more – to the Lord is just amazing. I can’t express it in words. Even if I danced and sang the way they did before, it wouldn’t be enough to convey just how much I felt blessed by all that has happened. What was also powerful was the delegation of participants from just about all over the world. It was really great to see that in spite of the language barrier, the cultural differences between the races, the people were really united to worship the Lord. Age also did not matter. It was really amazing to see people, however old they were, bouncing up and down, shouting praises to Him, dancing and singing with all their heart to worship Him. To see these people, and to know that they were called there by God to know Him more and to be part of the harvest, and even the thought that they would bring others to God, that there will be others who would come to know God is just amazing.

There was this message given that was really striking for me, and it’s about worship. Yes, we could worship Him in the ways I described above, but it’s not really limited to that. True worship means complete obedience to what He wills for us. It’s not about segregating a chunk of our life and saying, “Lord, this one’s for You!” It’s the totality of who we are that God wants. It’s not about basing our worship on our condition. It’s about praising Him for everything that’s going with us, even if the situation that we’re in isn’t all that great. I particularly loved this quote that the speaker gave during his talk, that the size of our enemy is the size of God’s confidence in us. That is just completely amazing. It adds a whole new dimension to the promises He gave in the Bible. He says 2 Corinthians 12:9 that His grace is sufficient for us, for His power is made perfect in our witness, and it supports Matthew 11:28-30, that He is the source of our relief and strength in our burdens. It’s really amazing that even if He allowed us to experience trial that He knows we’re capable of handling, He is still there to support us. That’s not something that we should lose sight of, because it’s all about Him in the end. Feelings may come and go, but God is constant. I love this song of Relient K, because its message is that the trials that we are going through will never overpower the promise of being in God’s presence forever. That is a very beautiful thing to look forward to, to finally be with Him for all eternity, and to just bask in His love and to praise and worship Him anytime and every time. To believe that we can be overcome by our trials is to disbelieve in God’s power. He is God, and nothing is impossible in Him. He has defeated sin and death; how much more our puny struggles? In these situations, it would be better if we focused on Him and what He is trying to teach us and not on the suffering itself. Otherwise, we would end up just huddled in a corner, bawling our eyes out. He always has a reason for everything that He does, and all of these are a result of His great love for us. He makes us go through tough situations not as a form of punishment, but to cleanse us of our impurities.

When I was younger, I couldn’t really understand what it meant when they said that God allows trials to test us? I’d be like, “Test us for what?” It was only until a few years ago that I truly understood what that meant, that He tries us to test our devotion for Him. What kind of ground are we that the seeds which the sower threw fell on? It’s not to taunt us that we are worthless whenever we fall – quite the opposite. He wants us to grow as Christians who are living for Him. How can we know we truly do love and serve Him when everything is always so cotton candy-perfect for us? He wants us to learn how to be humble. How can we boast of something that is not really from us? He wants us to share in His sufferings, and also to be able to aid to those who are suffering. How can we help them when we don’t know what they’re going through? That’s a major thing I learned in the Excellence Conference: that to be excellent is not to put ourselves above others, but to humble ourselves and be willing to serve, not (just) in the way that we think, but also outside of that. John 7:18 says that “whoever speaks on his own seeks his own glory, but whoever seeks the glory of the One who sent him is truthful, and there is no wrong in him.” It’s not about furthering our own agenda. If we did that, God will know about it. What will happen then is that we seek to glorify ourselves and not Him – a version of the so-called “Sunday Christians.” It’s about serving Him through others, and lifting it up for His greater glory, and we do it not for its own sake, but because of our love for Him. There was this part in the homily of the Archbishop, when he said something to the effect that it’s not about the grandiose actions that we do just for the sake of doing them that counts. Even if we do the littlest things, if these are out of love, they’re definitely more meaningful than acts so obvious as to positively be shouting, “K.S.P.!” It’s not about acting. It’s about a genuine move to show that it’s really out of love that you’re doing it. As He loved us, so should we love Him.

John 15:19 – “If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you.”