Onward and Upward!

Decide to improve. You are in charge of your life. Your life will only change inasmuch as you let it.

So much beauty in the world! So much things to be thankful for. So much things to enjoy.

Yet, not everybody sees them. Not all seize the good life. Let’s not cheat ourselves of the happiness we deserve!

Unlock the source of joy and blessings by being grateful.

Life is a series of choices. Some personally choose to be free and happy; others opt that other people and events dictate the kind of life they live.

Decide to improve. You are in charge of your life. Your life will only change inasmuch as you let it.

Choose to be happy; it takes a lot of energy to hold anger. Accept your situation at the moment and do something about it.

Living a passive life is a fate worse than dying the hard way. Don’t just sit down, keep silent, and refuse to risk. Own up the responsibility of making your life better and happier. Live, don’t just exist. Be grateful for the new day to live by!

When negativity peeps through, don’t mind it. Be indifferent. It will go away sooner than you think when you don’t give it attention. Plant seeds of positivity! Smile.

If people seem cruel… let them be. What matters is how you treat others and yourself. Getting even will only hurt you. Making others suffer will not make your pain go away. Fight evil with good! Understand and be compassionate.

Yes, good things are easier said than done. Nobody said worthwhile things are easy. But always remember, where there is hardship, there your growth is. So when your character is tested, keep on keeping on!

Building a good character is like building a house on a solid rock. When trials, pains, or calamities come, one will not be overwhelmed and falter; instead, one may maturely soar over these storm of difficulties and remain grateful for yet another blessing in disguise.

Take occasional breaks. Pause and breathe. Appreciate your journey… Your trials and triumphs, downs and ups are what give life texture and color. Take some time to re-introduce yourself to yourself.

Regularly check your parameters and boundaries so you know your pace and limit. Both freedom and improvement require setting limits.

It is also important that you ask life for the great desires of your heart… Ask for your dreams. Feel them. Believe you will receive them. Go get them!

Dreams don’t die. Sometimes we've just grown out of them. Then, we just need to make new ones, better ones. If we are faced with roadblocks along the way, just remember that trials are just like fire in the fiery furnace that polishes our ability and intentions so we may know clearly the good desires of our hearts.

Appreciate each day—the new days itself is a wonderful opportunity to become better.

Thank each trial—trivial things stretch you and teach you valuable lessons; they make you wiser.

Acknowledge each pain—uncomfortable feelings and situations allow you to explore your other emotions; they make you know yourself better.

Value each difficulty—hard people, things, or circumstances to deal with polish you and enable you to establish self-concept and appreciate self-worth.

Unlock your gifts, joy, and fountain of blessings by being grateful, hopeful, and by constantly utilizing the things you’ve just unlocked.

Life is a series of choices and decisions and a combination of moments—little ones that add up to big ones, and create who you are. You're not letting others make those choices for you and to dictate who you are, right?

Live. Enjoy. Improve. Keep moving onward, upward!

Keep on smiling and the world will smile with you. :-)

When Smiling Does a Lot and Silence Says More

"...we shouldn't be angry at the people who use, curse, ridicule, or betray us. Instead, we must pray for them because they might be undergoing something we don't know. They might be deeply wounded or confused or lost."


Many of us are familiar with the itching provocative feeling when a friend or a relative uses us for his/her advantage. I myself have my own fair share of such stories.

I am naturally an expressive and frank person. But there are just those moments when I simply choose to just smile and be silent no matter how hurtful or provoking the circumstance is.

I believe it is God working inside me. It isn't my normal response then--either I talk with the person in private or I would be indifferent because of pride.

I have been betrayed by a close friend when we were in high school. She used my name for her to get what she wanted and even tried to stain my reputation by giving statements that she said was from me. I was totally clueless. Good thing, another friend who knows me so well thought that she was so sure I couldn't be involved in that situation and told me about it. Another instance was when another close friend used my name to cover up her situation. She looks naive and sweet, nobody would ever think that it was really her who did such thing--and with my outgoing, outspoken, extrovert personality, everybody would think it was me who's the suspect.

The particular things they did to me were so provoking that I wanted to confront them flat to their faces. But I opted not to. I didn't know what was going on inside me that I preferred not to defend myself; rather, I chose to just smile, just be silent, and pray for prudence and peace that I urgently need.

Time passed. Now I realized situations of same the nature—provoking, tormenting, hurting, and saddening—happen in our lives so we may appreciate even more the support of our families, who as sure as the sun will rise will emerge and console us; know our true friends; receive the grace of self-discipline; and obtain emotional maturity and strength in character in the midst of torrents of feelings running through our veins.

I learned tonight from a Bible reflection that we shouldn't be angry at the people who use, curse, ridicule, or betray us. Instead, we must pray for them because they might be undergoing something we don't know. They might be deeply wounded or confused or lost.

If we truly want to see ourselves as people who are living upright lives (that we even assess our projected integrity), then we must start from within and take the upward steps of forgiveness and understanding to make it real and meaningful.

Whenever people put you down or pick holes in you, just smile. Forgive even if you don't understand why. In your quiet moment, understanding from heaven will descend upon you. Then, your silence will radiate the peace that you hold and will speak to the heart of the one who hurt you in ways you cannot imagine, because God will work it out for you if you just surrender the situation to Him.

PS:

As King David said in 1 Sammuel 16: 11-12 , "Leave him alone; let him curse for the Lord has told him to. It may be that the Lord will see my distress and repay me with good for the cursing I am receiving today."

In Psalm 3:3-5 David says, "You are a shield around me, O Lord; You bestow glory on me and lift up my head. To the Lord I cry aloud, and he answers me from His holy hill. I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me."

In Psalm 4:4 David says, "In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds search your hearts and be silent."

The sweetest place to find it is right inside you, deep down…

The love that makes us smile and touch our hearts doesn’t always have to necessarily come from another person, just what many always think. The love that will ultimately make us smile comes from the innermost core of our humanity.

We cannot appreciate the love from another person if we don’t personally know, in the first place, what love really is.

Sometimes we cannot truly love person or a thing when we don’t have any love for ourselves. At times, we cannot be content with what we love or have right now if we don’t love ourselves enough, hence, we keep on loving and hopping from one person or thing to another, hoping to find the greatest love of our lives—when in fact it is just so near to us, just inside us. Sometimes we cannot love what we do because we don’t find enough reason why we have to do things for other people thinking we, ourselves, need help.

Some people tend to pity themselves, thinking they don’t have enough love. That no one values them. Others become promiscuous or polygamous thinking they haven’t found yet the real love that they need.

As it’s been said by the oracle in ‘My Life in Ruins’, “It wasn’t you he cheated. Some people cheat themselves out of living a life with a woman they love.” And my version is, “they don’t cheat to their wives, but to themselves, because they leave the real love of their lives.”

Well, at times we become blinded by our emotions, especially if they’re too heavy because our own love for ourselves has been shut by negativity and hopelessness. Love wakes up all our senses and moves our nerves to work at their best… when we love, we have infinite creative ideas on how to express our feelings.

Me, after putting all my love to a certain things and everything has just been broken, I resolved to love myself humbly first and make it overflow so it can touch many people and clothe many works.

When we gain love from loving…. Happiness, kindness, gratitude follow through from the fountain of love inside us. So do patience, understanding, forgiveness, and discipline. Of course they’re not perfect, but time is polishing them.

Now I learn to embrace and love more people and things and works without a blemish of expectation from their ends. In return, they reflect back to me the things that I give and so I receive more love and warm actions and words of care.

Truly, the two best feelings in the world are to love purely and to be loved sincerely.

(I wrote this after finding different joy, and realizing the love therein, as we cook up a compassionate activity for the “these abled” persons with down syndrome, autism, and cerebral palsy. After all, love isn’t just for and from a certain person (I mean the romantic one); it could also be from an ‘act’ and for more people than one; and between more than two people with a noble purpose to carry out.)