My Socially Constructed Reality

A young couple moved into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging the wash outside. "That laundry is not very clean", she said. "She doesn't know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap" Her husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: "Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?" The husband said, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows." And so it is with life. What we see when watching others depends on the purity of the window through which we look.

Where is God when it hurts? This is actually a title of a book by Philip Yancey. I haven't read the book. I just saw it in one web site while I was surfing the net. The title made me reflect. I thought, yeah, where could God be when it hurts? It's easy to feel God's presence when things are fine . It's easy to say you're blessed and that God is just right there beside you. But when everything isn't fine, where can we find God? Is He still right beside us when we mourn and when we feel pain? If he's just right beside us on our "painful" moments, how would He feel as He looks at us crying and trying to endure pain? Sometimes I hear stories of bad things happening to good people. It's just so hard to understand sometimes why God allows bad things to happen. In my case, it still feels bad sometimes knowing that God made me "lose" my relationship with my mom and sister last year, then at the beginning of this year, I lost twins whom...

CHED is almost ready to implement what has been proposed years ago. The proposal of adding another year to BS Nursing and Education courses, as far as I know, has been proposed years ago. That's why I was no longer surprised with the news reports that these courses will be extended by another year in order "to make the students globally competitive." In the presentation of the CHED Chair of the proposed Phil. Education Highway, he said that only the Philippines has a ten-year basic education. Other countries have 12. He said that adding another year intends to "improve the quality of education." CHED is following the so-called 10+2+3 formula . Ten for basic educ., then two years of pre-university followed by a three-year university degree. Justifying this, the Chair said that the expenses for a five-year study after basic education has the same cost with the four-year curriculum. Well, I absolutely think it's not true. Sending a child to school is n...

After one missed abortion (miscarriage), huge hospital bills, 75-page paper, lots of quality time with my kids, and medicines worth thousands of pesos, I am finally back to work starting February 9. At times, I still think, "What have I done to deserve losing twin babies?" But inside, I feel that "it might be for the best." Maybe it should be a learning experience. If I don't learn from what happened, I wouldn't forgive myself. So what have I learned from losing them? Number one, there's no substitute for quality time with family, esp. with my kids who are growing up so fast. In school, I'm sure they would find an instructor who can do what I can, or perhaps better than what I can do. But at home, nobody can do what a mom does -- not even dads :-) Number two, the incident made me realize that the best investment one can have is not really money, but relationships. It's easy to spend money for hospital bills but relationships do last. My st...