"We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard...that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is New Creation.” Paul Tillich, The New Being
In more than a week’s time, I am turning 36. This year I will be a Christian for 17 years, and will celebrate my 13th year as Pastor/Teacher. If I preached almost every Sunday in the last 10 years, I would have approximately preached 3,000 times (this excludes other venues for preaching and multiple services. This also does not mean I have crafted 3,000 sermons.). In the last 15 years I have finished and earned 4 degrees (and looking forward to adding more?). I have pastored 3 churches (5 years at Davao International Baptist Church, 1 year and 1 month at University Baptist Church in Baguio City, and 2 years and 10 months at Village Baptist Church, Paranaque City, Metro Manila). I have moved to 5 different cities, and have lived in and moved to different houses almost 10 times. I have taught at 3 seminaries in 2 cities. I have done some ministry-related travels to 4 different countries in Africa and Asia (and looking forward to more travels). I have read hundreds of books (novels, poetry, theological tomes, and miscellaneous reading materials too eclectic to identify), watched thousands of movies (ranging from the most banal to the most sublime), listened to thousands of songs. I have made friends, made enemies, had my heart broken a few times, and remain painfully optimistic, and sometimes excruciatingly naïve.
Of course the list is not exhaustive, but enough to make me ask the question, do these numbers make up a life? What are the stories behind these discomfited recollections? And what kind of life has it been so far? What themes and patterns and signals do we detect?
What we see are, of course, rough sketches at best. These are shadows, indeterminate and tentative details of a portrait, some strokes are too broad, and there are those that are too minute that particulars can sometimes confuse and mislead. What we have are awkward adumbrations of an incomplete, and most often bumpy journey of something towards someplace. It has been a life fraught with a series of events best described as “a lucky break, a step in the right direction,” rather than an achievement. Although this life is not without meaning and significance, and hopefully not without a singular contribution, what we hope to discover are traces, however faint, of Someone whose divine spark ignited and made this life shine for Him. For this is what we hope for, that in our lives, as we listen back over what has happened to it, we hear “the sound, above all else, of His voice.”
“Listen to your life. Hear it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and, life itself is grace.”
Frederick Buechner, Now and Then
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