A FUNNY VALENTINE MEMORY

“Love, love, love. Yada, yada, yada.” That’s how a guy at Tim Hortons’ with a cup of coffee in his hand summarized his view this morning of what the day does NOT have to offer. He asked,”What’s your most memorable Valentine’s day?” One Valentine’s Day stands out so well.

It may be hard to believe, but for the most part of my university life I was a student leader with a major degree of popularity (;-). Editing the university paper, two Christian campus ministries, glee club, student government, an international exchange program, sports and all other things cool. In short, I was one geek of a jock! LOL

To raise funds for a particular cause, one of my organizations ventured into selling beautiful flowers and candy for Valentine’s Day. Some rich dude supplied the flowers and chocolates and all we needed to do was to set up a table, play some CDs aloud and wait for lovestruck customers. It was a recipe for success. A true money maker! The catch though is, delivery boys should be able to sing. We needed to deliver stuff and sing customer-requested songs. It was a lot of work that took a lot of guts! And man, did I ever enjoy that job! In addition to all of 1999′s top 20, I had to sing, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” 8 times, N’Sync’s “Crazy” 15 times, Savage Garden’s “I knew I loved You Before I met You” 21 times. I even had to sing “Mmmbop” which totally ruined my reputation as a respectable member of the Glee Club for singing a whimsical song with an unintelligible refrain, “Mmmbop badoobadap pappa doo ap badoobadap pappa doo ap badoobadap adoo, yeah, yeah!” (To this day I think that was all planned out by one of the glee club members who knew I hated that song)

Love was in the air and there was a school-wide sugar HIGH with all the candy! It was fun seeing university students getting hyper and giddy like crazy 13 year-olds. At the end of the day, after having sold 1800 roses (I made the highest sale, by the way), as we were closing shop and packing up I looked through the glass window of the library and saw the librarian working. We were out of chocolates but there were two roses left in the pail. I grabbed one and went to the library thinking maybe I can share some love. She was a short ornery lady in her mid-50s who never married having “devoted her life to cataloging books” (to quote her). She never liked me because my friends and I were always boisterous in the library and I used study carrels for my mid-afternoon naps! I knocked on her door and said, “Hi ma’am. A flower and a song for you.” She smiled and sat. I sang Nat King Cole’s “When I Fall in Love.” When I had finished I saw a little teardrop roll down her left cheek. She stood up and walked away for a bit and said, “Thank you. But you’re way too young for me!” “Shut the door on your way out” she ordered. I had a pretty good laugh.

OF CLERGY LIFE

(Somehow writing feels therapeutic when you’re in a trip like this one. I’m out on this retreat for pastors and their wives).

There was a time when I thought my kindergarten teachers were smart because of the chalk dust on their pants/skirts and shirts/blouses (sort of like pixie dust of smartness). There was a time when I used to believe cab and jeepney (mini-buses in the Philippines) drivers are the most well paid workers on earth.  I used to think the President of the Philippines lived inside our television set! But one thing I always knew, pastors (regardless of how congregations view them) are imperfect people. Whether we accept it or not, people have an almost deified view of ministers, especially in the culture from which I came. The sense of priestly “mediatorship” still is the people’s prevailing view of the clergy. There is a sense of a great divide between clergy and laity. Scriptures do speak of a special call on certain individuals to oversee the church, to serve, feed and lead the the flock. These people are spoken of in the Bible as worthy of being given “double honor.”  To become one therefore, some qualifications need to be met. Hence, it is a tough pill to swallow when ministers make mistakes, misbehave and show other signs of human imperfection. Scandalous (from Greek scandalon, a stumbling block) is the word of choice to express the feeling.

But apart from a special calling from God, a pastor is by nature a man/woman, father/mother, husband/wife, a learner, a friend, a sojourner, a seeker, even a sinner, who nevertheless yearns to grow up, who also discovered God’s love and responded, twice born as God would have it. An addition is the responsibility of caring for and about other people’s spiritual lives, discipleship, physical well-being, and social justice in this world, not to mention the taxing and mundane task of office work! So tonight in the first session of this weekend retreat, we were told to take our “clergy hats and collars” off and come figuratively bare naked before God and bask in the fresh waters where the Good Shepherd leads us. Frankly, that’s how we all appear before God. We all have nothing in our hands to bring other than what God graciously clothes us with: the righteousness (perfect standing) of Jesus Christ.

And so we line ourselves “clergy” and “laity” along with other imperfect people like Peter, James, John, Matthew, Paul, among others, who stand behind the perfection of Jesus.