1^st Reading:  Act 17:15, 22 – 18:1*

…Yet, he is not far from any one of us.  For, in him, we live and move and have our being; as some of your poets have said:  for we, too, are his offspring.  If we are indeed God’s offspring, we ought not to think of divinity as something like a statue of gold or silver, a product of human art and imagination…

It makes me think that the people of today is no different from the people of Athens during St. Paul’s time.  They have their statues of different gods, and they even have an inscription for the unknown God.  While they may be excused not to know because it was St. Paul who first evangelized them about Christianity, I wonder what our excuse might be?  From the time we were baptized as Christians from infancy to adulthood, we were taught to value our faith and love the only one true God.

How is it that in our daily lives, we seem to prioritize other god’s like the people of Athens?

Gospel: Jn 16:12 – 15

Jesus said to his disciples, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now.  When he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into the whole truth.

For weeks, I practiced restraint from being judgmental to my kids.  I felt at peace because I dealt with their bickering and quarrels in a calm manner.  No guilt and I felt in-charge.  Until yesterday!  I failed yesterday and what a failure it was.  It made me helpless to be back to square one again.  I don’t even remember what triggered my yelling spree, I just knew that I failed to the highest degree.

Before, in moments of weakness, I would be really hard on myself.  The guilt will burrow in my thoughts for years.

That was before.  I’m glad I’m more forgiving now, even to myself.  I apologize to my kids for yelling at them like they had a hearing impediment and prayed to the Holy Spirit to rescue me in my moments of weakness.

When I was growing up, I was made to believe that I belong to an impatient kindred.  I accepted the fact that it’s not my nature to be calm and understanding because I was not raised like that.  I succumbed to the belief that I could not change the kind of parenting I was raised with.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I have great parents who made a lot of sacrifices for me and my siblings, even to the point of being physically separated just to make ends meet.

My good friend Jing De Guzman, in one of our parent coaching session asked me this.

“What if…who you think you are, is not who you really are? What if  what you believe as your personality is not the person God intended you to be?  You just made yourself believe that for years because that is how you’ve been acting for a very long time.”

Those exact questions made me rethink my perspective.  We can’t think straight all the time, most especially if there is an intense emotion involve.  But we can have Christian-precision respond by asking the Holy Spirit’s guidance all the time.

When I yelled to my kids yesterday, I forgot to do one thing before I react.  I forgot to pray to the Holy Spirit – the spirit of truth.  Jing was the one who taught me to pray and call the Holy Spirit whenever I feel emotionally weak and distress.  I gave in to the temptation of doing the quick fix which was no fix at all.