[thoughts] February 2, 2003

This is my first endeavor in writing a regular something.  It's like a journal kind of thing. 

Man, I just tried to be formal but I just can't.  This is a personal thing, and thus, me being a not-so-formal-all-the-time person, opted to use my language.

Anyhow, I feel like I'm writing an e-mail to a friend.  So consider yourself lucky.  I don't know if my friends feel lucky, however; my e-mails are novels in themselves!

So why did I start to write this darned thing?  Well actually, I just bought a new notebook (no, not a laptop. the traditional, made-from-a-poor-tree kind of thing!), something I'll bring to my prayer meetings with my Christian community.  I've been attending our prayer meetings since mid-October but it's only now that I've bought a notebook for this purpose.  Then I wanted to write down things I remember from our past two prayer meetings, but... Man, writing is just not my thing man!  I mean not writing as in what I'm doing now; as in, writing as in using pen and paper!  Don't get me wrong however, I love paper.  I have this thing for pen and paper---paper mostly...  I love the smell of paper!  (I didn't mean that literally; I didn't also say that I did not mean that!  Okay, I'm weird!  Sue me!  More of my weirdness later on!)

Okay!  I'm starting to get lost again trying to explain one thing.  Let's get back to the topic...  So I started "writing" this thing, because I really wanted to "write" on paper, but, as I was trying to explain, my arms just get exhausted rather fast when writing down on paper.  No thanks to computer keyboards, I'm a typer not a writer (or scribbler---now that's a better word!).  So I thought, why not type it down and not write it down.  I just hope this computer does not crash!  Anyhoo, I hope I've explained that well now.  Let's now go to what I was really gonna write about....

So okay, it's a Sunday today.  Last Thursday was our last prayer meeting (we actually call it a "household meeting"; a household is our smallest unit next to the individual in our community), and the Thursday before that, was our, well, second to the last prayer meeting.  I remember one of our sisters (she's not my biological sister, she's my sister in Christ; in that respect, she's your sister, too!) commenting something about money and recalling some elders saying that "money is evil."  I, of course, disagreed.  My mother would have disagreed also.  My dad would have agreed.  That's altogether a different issue!  Anyhow, I just read a little part of Bo Sanchez' "Simplify," and indeed, as he had confirmed, it is not actually money that is evil.  It's the "love of money."  Come to think of it, Jesus Christ only wanted us to love just two things: God, and our neighbors.  Not money!

Thinking about "Simplify..."  I thought about this one definition of simplicity that I've shared with some of my close friends---the more sleep you get, the simpler your life is!  Who are the simplest beings?  Babies!  Man, I'd love to be a baby again!  :-)  Although, I'm not sure, but if you have observed, for some reason, older people sleep less...  I cannot explain why.  Is it because of getting used to sleeping less during their prime, when they had to work (and work really hard for their children)?  Or is it really just a biological thing, as opposed to being a socially influenced kind of thing?  Anyhow, I do know that older people sleep in the afternoons......  Paging Mr. Sanchez, please quote me!  ;-)

In the same prayer meeting we're still talking about (that's the prayer meeting on the Thursday before last Thursday; whew, we almost got lost again!), we had Bible sharing; that is, we read a passage from the Bible (the day's Gospel, actually).  We were asked by our prayer meeting leader (or household head) to cite a word, phrase, or sentence that struck us, and I quoted the following verse: "And whenever unclean spirits saw him, they would fall down before him and shout, 'You are the Son of God.'" (Mark 3:11)  Man, I didn't realize this would take long.  So I'm postponing my reaction to this verse in the next issue!

We were also asked to answer the question, "What if you meet Jesus face to face? What will your reaction be?  What would you tell the Lord?"  Next issue!!!  :-)