True North Missionaries Journal

“Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time, and seeing His hand in every happening”
– Mother Teresa

Lord, amid this storm I’m under, remind me to still love and stay firm. Help me to understand and see the purpose behind Your plan.  I desire the strength and energy to never get tired of serving You and may you help me see that. My worries mean nothing as long as You are with me. I trust in You! 

Thank you for being so willing to serve in the very many events that we have because as you have probably noticed by now, there are a lot. Despite the events coming one after the other, you serve with a joyful heart and you do what the role entails with much excellence. For your zeal to give it your all so that the members can have an amazing experience, I personally  am grateful.

I pray that you stay humble and remember that everything – your talents and the propensity you have towards certain skills  comes from the Lord. Accept your personal limitations and weaknesses but more importantly those of the people you’ll be working with. Sometimes no matter how much we envision something happening, things don’t go as planned. Even though we have weekly coordination meetings, unanticipated things occur. Don’t let those discourage you but rather lift them up to the Lord so that one day we may have the grace to understand as He does.

Get to know your service counterpart and your committee members because who knows when you’ll be able to work with them next. I truly believe the people He blesses us with at certain points in our lives are the people whom He knows will bring out our potential. They are the ones to make us discover things about ourselves and bring us closer to Him; even if it’s just for the five week period that we’re working with them.

May you always have the thirst to acquire new skills, improve your craft, and receive guidance. When you’re pro and you feel like you know the service role like the back of your hand, remember to pass the knowledge you have acquired to the younger ones. Be gentle with them as they learn just as how someone patiently taught you the hows, the whats, and the whys behind a particular role. Lastly, may you always remember to use the skills you have to glorify God whether it’s through events we have in the community or in your future workplaces.

As with everything, these things are easier said / written than done. But that’s why we’re all serving with one another – so that we may remind each other when we feel lost amidst the crazy timelines. 🙂

♥,

Sab

God does not choose the prepared. He prepares the chosen. God is so much greater than our feeling of unworthiness.

Often times I don’t consider myself as others may perceive. They say that I love outside of myself, that I’m passionate about service, and that I’m brave and unafraid. But I don’t see that at all. What I often see is someone who fails to love. Someone who does what they can, when they can. Someone whose life verse is “Fear not for I am with you always” because I’m often afraid. I am someone who constantly thinks that I’m not giving enough, doing enough, and loving enough in all aspects of my life because I don’t possess particular characteristics that people say that I have 100% of the time. Because the truth is, amongst a lot more sins, I can be lazy, selfish, not confident, and very impatient at times.

This is why I found it difficult these past couple of weeks to say yes to taking on extra service for RYC because I thought that I wasn’t fit for what was asked of me. I sincerely didn’t think I was capable of leading a workshop because one of the activities was something I had no skills or experience in, and I thought that people in Mountain would be tired of hearing me share about my life again since I shared at Liveloud and at the previous RYC. There were a lot of worries cluttering my mind, causing me to doubt that I was anointed and called by God. My Area CCs, my counterpart, and my ate were all witnesses to this when I told them how I felt.

I never thought that I was someone who would ever doubt the Lord, especially after all the good things He has done in my life. I even told my household at one of our households that doubt wasn’t my issue; it’s forgetting that God is present. But I realize more deeply now that I am doubting God when I fail to see the presence of God in me, especially when I question if I’m really called to do a particular service.

As RYC draws near in the Mountain Region, it makes sense to me that I have discovered my doubting story. Although it does not precisely mirror that of St. Thomas the Apostle, I’m glad that I’ve found some little way to relate to this saint as his own doubting story led him to do great things for God in various parts of the world. I can only hope to do what God wants of me in my own life, beginning with this RYC.

During this RYC and further on in my life, I pray that I may see God in me and understand fully that yes, I am imperfect and other people definitely could do the service I was asked to do. Regardless of what other people could have done and what other things would have happened, the most important thing to address is that God is present and alive in me, and He calls upon the least expected people to do His work and He empowers them with the Holy Spirit. I have never doubted the service I was asked to do until these past couple of weeks and so this quote, “God doesn’t call the equipped, but equips the called” has a fuller meaning to me now. I pray that I may believe that God is not only alive, but He is alive in me at all times, even when I doubt myself. May I believe that whenever I am asked to serve, that I may not hesitate to believe that is God who calling me by name. Amen.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

St. Thomas the Apostle, pray for us.

The major learnings I took from my recent mission trip are:

1. The importance of household
2. The importance of planning
3. The community is global

A household is the bread and butter of our community. It is the building block of any type of community structure but more importantly is one of the most intimate ways to experience and share Christ in our community. It also provides a way as leaders to pastor and nurture their members. Without consistent households, service can easily be something that is forced upon us rather than a response to a love that we have experienced. The great blessing about Malta is that their culture promotes the importance of family. This inspired me to carry it into my future vocation as well. There is a saying, “we cannot give what we do not have”. Households are meant to exchange love intimately within the community.

Planning ahead can really help in direction and goal setting. It allows us to be strategic in our pastoral efforts as well. It helps people to make commitments to specific events, trainings, and to the community as a whole. We are also able to look back on the year and see what practices to continue as well as tangible ways to improve.

It is very comforting knowing that our community is global. This is especially true for smaller areas or areas that are isolated from other members. Without proper pastoral support, ministry directions or manuals can be challenging to follow. It is easy to get caught up in following the community, to the point that we begin following people. When we follow people, we might get discouraged or upset when they do not meet our expectations. This is where, I believe, a Full-time Pastoral Worker can be a blessing. He/she can explain the Spirit behind the manuals, events, culture and overall community. He/she can be the link between the local community and global community.

Spending 4 weeks in Malta has reminded me that Christ has no boundaries. Cultural, language and ethnic differences cannot stop the sharing and exchange of God’s love, especially through the community. I was blessed with the opportunity to meet new people and learn from them. I am now inspired to go back and to share the same passion and love for God wherever I go. May God be forever praised in Malta!

This past weekend, I was asked to share for Session 4 with an old, old, old friend of mine. She journeyed with me since the very beginning. Having to go up on stage and share about our struggles brought on so much anxiety. After all for almost 5 years we never spoke because of a small misunderstanding that we let get out of control. Sometimes what starts off as a crack in the pavement, when left unattended over time, may grow to be a huge canyon. This was what we intended to share, but with 5 minutes to do everything we had to summarize.

I know that I am definitely at peace with where we are now. God has never stopped being good to us, whether together or individually. I know that being asked to do this sharing for the both of us was the last nail to that coffin. We are able to acknowledge our faults, failures and humanity and move on to something brighter.

No matter how hard you try to separate two hearts that are together, with Christ in the centre, there is NO separating them.

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Ekah: Thea and I first met when we attended our youth camp together, back in August 2001. At the time, I was new the Mississauga and new the community, of course. I thought my family was going camping, and I didn’t know that I was going to a retreat. I remember going to Thea’s house before the camp, and I thought we were going camping with her family too. My parents obviously tricked me and left me there with…Thea. She was the weirdest girl I had ever met and I didn’t wanna be her friend.

Thea: Thirteen and a half years ago, I joined my first youth camp, “A New Beginning”. I was finally twelve and finally allowed to go from being a Kids for Christ to a Youth for Christ member. This was a big deal. This was a huge milestone, the first of any to signify that I was now a teenager- old enough to be a “grown up” of sorts. When my parents told me that we had to wait for another family and their daughter before going to camp, my excitement grew even more- this was it…she was going to be my first YFC friend. I couldn’t wait to meet her and tell her everything I knew about YFC. After all, my parents had been coordinators for many years and I practically studied the community growing up in it. 

Ekah: Low and behold, we became best friends after that. I think our friendship grew close, when I started to pull her dead hairs out of her head (weird, I know lol), but I guess it was just the “big sister” in me. Thea and I were very close. We actually talked for hours on the phone and on MSN. Whenever we cried about something or had our hearts broken by boys, we would call each other.

Thea: I was right. She did become my friend, but not just a friend. She became the best one of them all, a role model, an ate- the older sister I should have had. My parents were way too strict, and hers let her do whatever she wanted. She accepted me for all my quirks and weirdness. I felt the most real when we were together, because she never judged me for the way I dressed, acted or spoke. I grew up in the Philippines and for the most part moving to Canada meant having to hide parts of myself from everyone else. But not Ekah, with her I could be 100% me and 100% real. I loved hearing her stories and I loved that my parents would let me go out if she was with me.  She showed me a world larger than the one I was currently allowed to explore. 

 

The Drift
Thea: Highschool changed everything. It was the hardest time of my life. Ekah and I went to the same one, but she was a year older which meant I couldn’t really hang out with her until the weekends. It was a struggle finding balance between who I knew I was- the moral and values my parents raised me with- and the person I was expected to be. My parents expected nothing less than academic perfection, but there was no room for that in highschool if you wanted to be in with the “cool kids”. It was all about the right clothes, the right hair, the right body, the right crowd. None of which I had. Highschool was a jungle and as far as I knew, I was at the bottom of the food chain. I wasn’t even anything significant. Like a leaf, I was just there. Existing without any meaning. Or at least it felt like it. Then I discovered dance and I realized that my body moved naturally to music. Dance allowed me to bloom and blossom. People noticed me. People recognized me. I was asked to be part of an exclusive dance team that performed outside the community. It felt nice to be wanted. It felt like I had a purpose. I found a group that thought I was good enough to belong.

Ekah: As Thea moved on to high school I noticed her struggle to want to belong. She was in a state of finding herself and wanting to be a part of something. I knew that she was “exploring”. She became part of RMX and started dancing more, she built close relationships with other YFCs that were her age between Mississauga and Brampton, and hung out a lot more with another friend of ours. Me, Thea and this friend became a trio. At first, Thea and our friend started hanging out a lot more, since they both danced together. Then, our friend moved on to university and we started working at the same place and hung out a lot more too. I can tell that Thea started to feel left out whenever the three of us were together. I sensed the jealousy and the anger. But my thought was, “Well she has no reason to feel that way, because we’re all friends. if she does feel that way, then that’s her problem. She should be talking to us about it.” She suddenly stopped talking to both of us. She stopped responding to texts and stopped coming out. I knew that a lot of her desire for belonging was the pressure that she was under. She struggled with having to meet her parents’ academic expectations.

Thea: I became so good at hiding parts of myself that eventually I got lost- lost in my own emotional and mental chaos. I hated that I couldn’t just fit in. I drowned myself in the expectations of other people. Ekah tried to help, I mean she was still around. But not even our friendship felt like enough. She eventually moved on to university and we were just in different times of our life. Because it never seemed like she struggled at fitting in or finding her own group of friends, her sympathies seemed lacking to me. She began working with one of my dance friends and they started doing everything together. I became resentful because it seemed like they never wanted to invite me. So many people came in and out of my life before, so many friends who said they’d stay and be there forever but left as soon as they found something or someone better. To me, Ekah was already halfway out of my life. So I figured I’d do her a favour and walk out the door first. I took what I could and left. It’s easier to hurt someone first by leaving without an explanation than having to wait around for the inevitable. 

Ekah: I was hurt that she didn’t just talk to me about it. I was hurt that she was always choosing other people to spend time with than me. I was hurt that she was only coming to be for emotional comfort, and then after that, she would go off to some more exciting people.

Because she pushed me away, I pushed her away even more. Before Thea three-month long trip to the Philippines, she came to see me. She insisted to talk to me in person. So, she came over and admitted that she was jealous of how I got closer to our friend. Looking back now, I was really harsh. I told her that things were never going to be the same again. I had nothing left to say to her, leaving her with nothing to say to me.

Thea: I tried replacing Ekah with other people, but it was never the same. How could it? The time we spent together growing into our older selves was something no one could just borrow or take from us. I fell into half-hearted, half-lived, non-committal “friendlationships” with guys. I lived off their promises of staying even though I knew they wouldn’t. Because having someone there for the time being is better than being along even if that meant lying to myself. Happiness was hard to come by. I left the community after high school because I felt like it just dragged me down. God had no room in my life. He had abandoned me a long time ago. 

Ekah: During the time we had drifted, I found out that Thea had been diagnosed with depression. I remember feeling angry about it and I didn’t even know why. But looking back, I guess is because I was still mad about what happened and that if she didn’t push me away, I could have been there to help her so she wouldn’t fall into depression.

Thea: My happiness now came in a bottle. I had hit rock bottom. 

 

Leading up to now
Ekah: I remember feeling so awkward and feeling like I had not yet healed. Because seeing her and being in the same room with her still made me angry. So I continued to avoid her. I continued to gossip about her to other people. It was my reaction to being hurt.

Then, when I was going through some spiritual dryness in my life, is when I noticed Thea had come back to the community. One of the reasons I didn’t wanna come back to the community was because of her. That was the time that Joni wanted to begin transitioning to SFC. Thea joined SFC the following CLP after I graduated, which I served at. She was in my facilitating group, and it was either myself or another sister that had to do one-on-ones with her. I refused to do it, not because I still resented her, but because I was scared to rekindle that relationship with her. Was I gna choke on the words I said to her, when I said that “it’s never going to be the same again?” So there was pride.

Thea: Then in April 2011 something happened. I was forced to visit a Regional Youth Conference by my parents and it was there that I rediscovered God. I decided to take a leap of faith and book a 6 month trip to the Philippines for January of the following year for some soul searching. But before that, I knew I had to join SFC. I hadn’t participated in the community for a long time so there were a lot of reasons for me not to continue. One of them was Ekah- I didn’t know she would be there. I couldn’t stand being around her and so much anger welled up in my chest everytime I saw her. But I knew I had to finish my CLP before my trip. A lot of people told me she talked behind my back. I was partly shocked, cos I mean how long as it been since we’d talked? What new stories or lies about me did she have to give to other people? I stuck it out, because as far as I was concerned at this point, I just had to finish my CLP.

Ekah: When I started the MV program for SFC, I knew she was probably going to see her more often. When Gelo asked is both to go on mission with him to Bermuda, I was actually feeling so anxious because obv we would be hosted together. I kept wondering what it was gna be like. Was it gna be awkward? Was it gna go back to the way it was?

Thea: My trip gave me a new life- a prodigal son, rather daughter, who went back to her Father. Faith reshaped me and molded me. With the help of the community in the Philippines I rediscovered myself. But more importantly I learned to love how the Lord specifically made me. I came back to Canada and was asked to join the Area Core for the CFC-Youth GTA. I applied to the Mission Volunteer Program for the youth and everything made sense. I understood why the Lord put me through all my struggles. My story became my greatest weapon. 

Ekah: And praise God it did. She opened up to me about her potential love life, which is just like old times. And in those 6 days that we were there there, we spent a lot of time together and it was okay. I didn’t feel as anxious as I thought I would. We prayed together, we met new friends together, just talked like we did before. From then to this day, I just praise God because he allowed us to heal and rekindle the sisterhood we once had.

Thea: God is as funny as he is good, because Ekah and I ended up serving in Bermuda together. I had a feeling Kuya Gelo had something up his sleeve. I was anxious because we never really talked about our past but being stuck in an island for a week allowed us to open old wounds. It was clear to me that God’s hand was in all of this when our talk assignments were handed to us. I had to give a session on “Our Emotions and our character” and she had to give one on “Righteous and Unrighteous Anger”. It was God’s way of humbling us. As we sat through each other’s sessions we both were able to realize how much the Lord had transformed us through our weaknesses. Now we both stand here as Mission Volunteers for SFC Toronto not just as workers in the same vineyard, but as sisters who found eachother again. 

 

“Love is at it’s finest in forgiveness.”
-Gelo Saludo, Session 4, SFC RECON GTA