We find ourselves here.

My laptop kept losing internet connection tonight. Don’t know what’s happening — one moment it’s working fine, after a few minutes, all WiFi connection gets lost. Tried to troubleshoot it first but to no avail so I needed to restart. After the reboot, when I thought everything’s good to go, it just continues to repeat the cycle. And I needed to restart it over again.

Earlier I wrote God: I am stuck in a cycle. I am in desperate need of saving. Have you felt that Coldplay song?

When you try your best and you don’t succeed / When you get what you want and not what you need / When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep / Stuck in reverse

That’s what I’m feeling lately and I thought I resolved it already over the weekend. But here we are, three days after, losing to ourselves once more. When will we ever win this battle within? Can’t move pass our own demons. We go back and chain ourselves from the darkness inside every chance we get. We long for the light but we are so in love with darkness. And yet, we don’t wanna end a captive, we wanted freedom from these prison cells we built.

We find ourselves here. Here where we are doing it again. Pleading help to the high heavens, to our Savior, to save us from ourselves. Making an oath that this time, it’s different.

I had to restart my laptop everytime it loses it’s WiFi connection tonight. Even the Network and Sharing Center can’t provide answers as to why the easy troubleshooting steps don’t work. The solution should be swift: turn the WiFi option off and turn it on afterwards; if that doesn’t work, do the same in the Airplane mode. But when you expect the troubleshooting to work, it just don’t and we had to choose the Restart option. Coz you see, in the Computer World, if everything else fails, just Restart. Everything should be working fine after pushing that button.

Whenever we are in need of the WiFi connection, it doesn’t matter if we are in the middle of something, we’ll pause from it so we can restart. Because in the end, we’ll be needing to stay connected to finish what we’re doing. It reminded me of how we needed to stay connected to Jesus.

If we are stuck in a cycle, we need Him all the more. Because being inside the cage we created for ourselves, we lose the connection with the Lord. Inside that prison, we don’t function well because we don’t have Christ. What we have in the driver seat is ourselves. Haven’t we all learn from Carrie-Underwood’s-Jesus-Take-the-Wheel of who should be in charge of the driver seat in our hearts? We can’t do this life on our own.

We are messy creatures, alright. We tend to go in an unending cycle of bondage because maybe we didn’t fully surrender. We didn’t fully let go.

My encouragement is that if we lose our connection with the Lord, we can restart it right away. Even if we just rebooted Life yet we go astray a few days after, we can choose to restart again. Right where we are. That’s what we can do. That’s what we have: an option to restart. And the option to do it now.

This time will only be different if we truly give up our own wheel and solely follow His will in our lives. Get it? Not my wheel, but Yours be done.

Go fetch some small victories.

I wanted to write today because I haven’t been in a long while. I missed the labor poured into the white blank space. Problem is I don’t know what to write about. The one thing that popped on my mind instantly was that I wanted to share that I haven’t been able to finish books in years. I am reading every now and then but I haven’t been finishing what I’m reading. So I guess, that’s my topic: Commitment. HAHAHA yup, reading books is totally related to that.

We all know that beginnings are fine and good and that we could take it at any moment we choose to. Endings, however, are the crucial ones. I may have written this over the many years that I had been into writing. Beginnings-Endings are one of my favorite topics to write about because it’s something I can relate with the most. I am a sucker for beginnings but I’m terrible at endings. Needless to say, I am very poor in committing to something until the end.

Take my weight for an awful example of my performance in this beginning-ending hullabaloo. Two years ago, my normal weight ranges at about 128 to 132 lbs. People call me fat then but when I see my old photos, man, if I’m fat then, what am I now? If only I could still be in that weight, I would be content already. Towards the end of 2017, I gained 10 lbs from the normal weight that I had and decided to pursue preventive ways not to gain any more weight than I should; but that didn’t last long because I indulge into whatever my hunger desires. Fast forward to 2019, I gained another 10 lbs — when I should be losing some, I gained more.

January is the month every person on Earth “commits” into a whole new level of challenge to begin whether a healthier lifestyle, a deeper sense of personal development, a wider perspective of life, etc. We sincerely wanted to finish strong but somewhere in the middle of it, we lose our way. See, there’s a long stretch of doing between the beginning and the ending. Whenever we want something to be done, it don’t just magically appear — we work for it, grind hard for it, commit to it. It could be a long and painful process. We don’t always like what we need to do and may be that’s where we give it up sometimes. We wanted fun. We wanted something that would make us feel alive. We wanted pleasure. Commitment doesn’t always give us that. Commitment asks that we stay through the unpleasant and the quiet; when all the excitement is gone or when the thrill of reaching our destination no longer bothers us the way it did at the start. It could be uneventful. It could be a valley.

We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions in life — those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of life, and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength.

OSWALD CHAMBERS, MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST

Life is usually ordinary and yet we always wanted to make it extra. We get busy for the wrong things. We get sidetracked. We get distracted. Wanting to finish a book could be put on hold because we would choose the next Netflix series, instead. Wanting to lose weight could be jeopardized because we try to convince ourselves that we can start watching our weight tomorrow because the food today is delicious. Wanting to be productive could be countered because we have too many social media feeds we wanted to update. We lose sight of the things that are important because of all the little excitements we queued up for ourselves along the way. We don’t sustain the commitment until we are tired of going around in circles and would want a reboot.

As long as we are living, we don’t run out of chances to start again. In the Filipino phrase, it translates to: habambuhay, may pag-asa. There’s Hope, our God is. We can screw so bad. People can give up on us; we can give up on ourselves. But God is constant, God never changes, God commits to us — He stays with us in the mountaintops, the sunrises, the beautiful places we’ve been; but, most especially, He stays with us in our valleys. In our most uneventful season. In our most quiet. If we learn to anchor our commitments in the Lord, He will always renew our strength and stamina for the doing. If we abide in Him, we might actually get to the ending we don’t deserve and yet beyond what we crafted in our minds to be.

God chose us first so we can learn to choose Him, too. He knew we can’t do this on our own. He always intends to catch us each time we fall and pushes us back on our feet to keep trying. To keep doing.

In the meantime, let’s go fetch some small victories such as finally finishing a new book.