A Memorable Week… Got Some More, God?

This has been an extra memorable week for our family. It’s so good that I just can’t let it pass by without blogging about it. The events so far:

• A few days ago, my darling baby boy, who was walking with a glass of water, tripped while I was using this laptop. The water spilled all over my hubby’s keyboard. Gasp! We immediately turned it off and turned it over so the water can come out. Hubby then took it to the service center the next day for check up. After the diagnosis, the verdict: the laptop did not get wet inside, no need to do anything. Phew! Hubby took the laptop home. Yippeeee!!! He was not even charged for anything at the service center. Double Yippeee!!!!
• While hubby was on the way to the service center, he got the call that we have been waiting for. The call was for a job interview this Monday! Praise God! We’ve been looking forward to this because he’s been out of work since the start of the year.
• This morning, we brought Artsy Princess, Sunshine Girl and Flash Boy to our homeschool support group. All three had fun and the exercise that they needed. But the real good news to me is this: the directress of this group asked me to blog about our support group. She said that she’s been reading my blogs and she likes it. Here I thought that nobody reads my blogs.
• Upon coming home, I checked my email. Got an email from a fellow homeschooler thanking me for blogging about our homeschool experience. This is truly an encouragement for me and inspires me to keep on blogging.
• Hubby and I had a long discussion about our family and we saw how God’s hand is at work. We acknowledge that God is in control of our life and He knows what is best for us. Praise God!
• We attended our Worship Service at the Victory Christian Fellowship at Alabang. Preaching was by Pastor Jannsen Morados – he’s our hands-down favorite. He preached about Nehemiah, Rebuilding Our Nation and our role in it. Much of what he said is a confirmation of our prayer just before we attended the worship service. God is good!

The Lord is truly, truly good. He is the Giver of the good times and the bad. In both times and at all times, He is always there for us. All He asks is for us to trust Him and obey Him.

Musings on “How Can a Good God Let Bad Things Happen?”

Note: This is not yet my review of this book. However, I did receive this from NavPress for review. I have been reading it almost daily and I just can’t let the new insights I’m gaining to just pass by. Hence, I am blogging about the things I’ve learned from this book so far.

How Can A Good God Let Bad Things Happen? by Mark Tabb

God is good, isn’t it? I’ve lived most of my life believing this basic truth about our Lord God. I still believe it till now. That has not changed and this is not what the author, Mark Tabb, wanted to point out.

What he wanted his readers to see is that even though God is good, God can still let bad things happen to us.

From reading the first few chapters of the book, here is what I have learned:

• Sin is already in this world. Ever since Adam and Eve chose to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, sin came into this world. Along with sin are its curses, death, destruction, cruelty and the like. Therefore, sin being a part of our innate nature, bad things really just naturally happen.

 

• Satan is not responsible for all of the bad things happening to us. We, too, are responsible whenever we choose to make the wrong decisions. God, in His grace and wisdom, gave us the will to choose. He does not want to dictate to us as if we are just mere puppets. He loves us and respects that we can make our own decision. Therefore, bad things can also happen due to the wrong decisions that we make. Consequences will always be the result of our unwise decisions.

Mark Tabb uses the life of Job to point out these truths to us.  Job, who is righteous in God’s sight, was prospered greatly by the Lord. Satan then comes to God and challenges Him. He said that if Job were not blessed with so much, then he will probably start cursing God. So God tells Satan that he can do with him whatever he pleases, but Job’s life must be spared. And so Job loses everything, literally. He loses his children, his assets, and he loses his health. He was covered with sores from head to toe. Job’s wife challenges him to “Curse God and die!” And here is Job’s answer:

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.                 Job 2:10

Now here is where it gets interesting. The author points out that God does not just allow bad things to happen to us. By saying that God allows bad things, we are also saying that God is not the One responsible for the bad things, somebody else is. Usually, that somebody is Satan. Instead, God, in His Sovereignty, gives us the bad things along with the good. He does this because He is the only One who knows what will  happen next.

It’s scary to think that, right? That God can and will choose to give us trouble in life. But thinking about it some more, I realized that this is really God’s Sovereignty. You see, if I will only keep thinking that God is only all good and nothing bad can come from Him, then I am limiting God. The truth is God is God. He can really do anything He wants to do with our lives. It’s hard to understand and even harder to accept, but if I don’t accept that truth, then I am just deceiving myself.

However, even if we experience troubles in our lives, the kind that is not caused by sin, we must learn to place our trust in the Lord with the assurance that He knows best what He is doing.

My husband has been job hunting since the end of January. He’s been to several interviews, seemingly with good results. Until now, though, he is still out of work. He is the best at what he does. Anywhere he goes abroad, he succeeds. Strangely enough, he’s not experiencing that success, so far, here in Manila. We’ve not had any stable source of income since he came home from New Zealand. Come March, our children got sick one after the other. We had to confine them several times and pay the bill in full each time. Why so much trouble? I don’t believe that this trouble resulted in any sin that we committed. I do believe that the hand of God is behind all that is happening right now, good and bad. And I can believe that because I know that He always has the best plans laid out for our family. He has a purpose for our family, and if it will take those bad, troubled times to accomplish His purpose, He will do it. So be it, then.

So far, I am challenged by this book. My knowledge of God is being added to. I understand more about the Sovereignty of God. What, then, does God expect from us? One word: TRUST. Trust Him no matter what. Trust Him in everything.

Fighting to Stay and Work At Home

The title of this blog actually means two things for us. First, we really just want for Gary D. to stay at home with us. We no longer want to be separated from each other. We have endured the two years that he was gone and now we just want to be together. When he came home, the children has flourished even more. Our Flash Boy, the baby, grew by leaps and bounds since Dad came home. Sunshine Girl has become more confident. Artsy Princess’ constant illness have gone away. Guitar Babe has relaxed and become more like a child again. As for me, I, too, have relaxed in every way possible. No longer do I have to constantly worry about being alone in our home. I’m able to rest more in him. Many of the responsibilities that I carried on my shoulders are now back on his shoulders. We just want him to stay in the Philippines with us. Really, the money earned working abroad is fine, but it doesn’t compensate for all the emotional losses we’ve experienced while being separated.

The other reason for the title of this blog is because I am also fighting to stay and do work from home. We are a family that homeschools and I love being a SAHM (Stay at home Mom). I can’t imagine our life being any other way. Of course, realities set in and the reality of earning more money for our living stares us in the face all the time.

We have considered putting the children to regular school so that I can work outside the home full-time. But we just can’t see that as the solution for us considering that we would have more expenses if I’ve had to work away from home. Expenses by way of purchasing office wear, transportation allowance, daily food allowance, hiring another live-in helper, paying for school bus service and the biggest of all, the kids’ tuition fee. Even if we had combined salaries, we feel that the expenses just does not justify my working full time. Apart from that, there would also be the stresses of not being available to the children when they needed me.

So we want Gary D. to stay in the Philippines with us and I want to continue to be with my children at home.

We are working on ways that we can do that and I’ll be sharing with you in future blogs what we have done and are doing to accomplish this.

Gary D. is Home for Good!

Who is this Gary D?

Gary D is my pseudonym for my wonderful hubby. He loves Gary Valenciano and his first name's initial is D, hence the name.

I thought I'd start out with this post, in celebration and thankfulness to the Lord for bringing him home to us again. For everybody's info, Gary D. left to work for the US last November 2006. I was only three months pregnant with our fourth baby at that time. It was bittersweet, him having leave us. While we were looking forward to the dollars that he would earn, it hurt us to be so far apart. Gary D seriously loves to be with us, you see. If he's not doing anything, he'd rather be with us than be with anybody else. Our children enjoy a lot of playing time with him, and we love to have long conversations with each other. Despite this, because of our growing family, we decided to separate.

It was a difficult two years away from each other. Our children experienced several hospital confinements, and I developed anxiety attacks. One of our children was ill several times which our pedia attributed to missing her daddy so much. My anxiety attacks was brought about by the stresses of living by ourselves and caring for four children alone. For Gary D, his difficulty lay in not being around during those times. When we were at the hospital, he felt helpless and alone over there.

He did come back in May 2007 during the birth of our son. At the same time, his brother died a week after I gave birth. He was here for a total of six weeks. After six weeks, we had to take him back to the airport and say our sad goodbyes.

By the end of last year, he was allowed a three-week vacation by his boss. He came back home with the plan of leaving us again in three weeks. The children and I prayed that he will decide to stay with us instead. Upon coming home, we still continued to experience a lot of emotional stress due to adjusting to him being home. Despite missing him so much, we have already been used to living without him. We developed our own rhythm to life and suddenly he's here, and we have to consider him all the time. He, of course, noticed this and was saddened to see how much we have all changed while he was gone. One thing he did see clearly was the difficulty of raising up the children by myself. Guitar Babe, our eldest, once told me "Dad is not our dad anymore, he is just the giver of money". Sad to hear but I can't blame her, she's telling the truth.

After about a week and a half, he was already unsure about going back to work abroad, but can't decide yet because of the lack of a job here in Manila. However, going back abroad will mean that we will have to go into debt again for the purchase of his return ticket. We felt that we can no longer do that again. We considered for him to go back and return again when he has found a job here. However, we did not consider this a wise move because of the debt that we will incur to purchase his plane ticket and the amount of time that it will take for him to save up for another plane ticket home. We felt that this was already impractical.

The deciding factor, though, was really what God had put in his heart for his family. We are a family that deeply loves the Lord. This family needs a present husband and a father to four precious lives. We had to ask ourselves, “Was the money he was earning worth the time lost with us?” And the only answer was “No”.

After some time, he finally decided he’s not leaving us anymore. It’s a risk we took. He doesn’t have a job here. I, too, am not working. After considering the possible things that could happen to us while he’s still looking for a job, we decided we’ll go for that risk rather than risk losing each other.

This is the reason for this blog and this blog’s title. We are a Filipino family dedicated to staying together here in our home country. We have not given up our dreams to migrate to another country, but as of the moment, we are here to stay. This blog will be about our efforts in making it work here. We’ll be sharing about our income generating opportunities and how it is working for us.