This Rugged JoyFull Home

I think that I will never be the same once this pandemic is over. B usinesses where closed, millions of jobs were lost. Then, suddenly, we find every student homeschooling and most workers are home — working. Words like social-distancing, quarantine, hoarding, panic-buying, flattening the bell curve, and lockdown have become just a few of the operative words that the media would use to describe the daily news updates.  This crisis is unprecedented in history. It has put everything to a halt.  All of us are confined to our own homes now and I'm assuming that most days, people are watching from outside of their windows. 'When will this all end?'   My sister who works as a nurse in the Middle East earlier shared a poem to my siblings' social media group chat. I was amazed at how simple yet timelessly written it was. Originally written in  1869 by an unknown writer, it was  reprinted during the 1919 Pandemic that recorded 50,000,000 deaths all over the world a...

"Every marriage is made up of two ingredients, togetherness and separateness. In good marriages, the partners carry equal loads of those. Let's say there are 100 points of togetherness and 100 points of separateness. In a good relationship, one partner expresses 50 points togetherness and 50 points separateness, and the other does the same. They both do things on their own, and that creates some mutual longing for the other, and the togetherness creates some need for separateness."   BOUNDARIES By Dr. Henry Cloud  Part 1 The Season of Togetherness Part 2 The Season of Separateness As quoted above, Dr. Henry Cloud described a  healthy  togetherness and separateness in marriage. But it's interesting to note that this also holds true for  a healthy parent-children relationship especially for  home-educating  families, presuming that they have a close relationship with each other. This is the kind of perspective that helped you process and...

Part 1 The Season of Togetherness Part 2 The Season of Separateness How to wrap around your mama-heart, the thought of your daughter leaving home for college in Manila, Philippines? It's nursery, kinder 1, kinder 2, and then grades 1 to 12, we're talking about 15 wonderful years of preparing her for this season of going to college. 'She's finally on her own now and away from your leashes' was a joke that somehow felt like a reality. But would those 15 years be enough to train her to overcome the challenges of university life and eventually the real life for which she was called for a purpose? Yes. You thought so.  You will worry and you will be scared naturally, thinking about how she will survive mostly living on her own in the big city. But that is not how you're going to take this season in your life. It's not about the worrying or the doubting, although you can't deny that this struggle is real. Now what is this all about, then? This is all about yo...

"Consider it all JOY, brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." James 1:2-4 Consider it all JOY, my brethren, when you encounter various trials ...  such as the tragedy that struck my family last October 3 when two gun-wielding criminals riding a motorbike fired multiple shots at my eldest brother and his 15 year-old son. It happened so fast in split seconds that both of them died on the spot in broad daylight, right at the driveway of their own home. It was difficult watching the news on national TV and on the internet the following days.  It was a double-murder tragedy. I've seen hundreds of news like this before. But this day was different. This  was my brother. This was my nephew.  You and I both know that a tragedy is a tragedy; it is unthinkable, it cut so deep, the shards of glass ...

A fishbowl photo from 2009. Bethany and Noah, seven and one year-old respectively, year 2007.   Year 2007, when I was "21" and Noah was one year-old. Ha! Happy birthday, Noah Bear😍 Last year, on the same month of July, our family went to a dinosaur museum  in Moscow to celebrate our Noah's 10th birthday.  It was a dream come true for him, a decade-long wait had been over. How time flies around here and now he turns 21 11!  He is our boy from the wild and below is a poem to prove it just in case you can't tell.  He's into poems lately. And I guess too much rain in the Philippines lately has been making him write poems to curtail the boredom that's starting to seep in. The Ocean By Noah Isaiah The deep, deep ocean Dark and blue Is teeming with life You never knew Underneath this world You will hear  The call of a Whale That is near Its scars, visible From the fight with a Squid And it is gone In its stomach, it is hi...