My mother has trained me to become a very competitive person. I grew up constantly twirling on my toes in trying to fulfill her expectations- and she expected a lot from me.
When I was a kid, she wanted me to become a doctor. So I wanted to become one too. Then, I harbored dreams of becoming a singer. She helped me work out through the turmoil of such an ambition. Then, I discovered my love for writing. She also helped me through it and expected me to win first place in competitions (which I failed to satisfy). Then, came something we never agreed about: my reading obsession. I have always been a reader and my mother thinks that is a lazy man's pastime. She wanted me to go out and garden with her which I never really took a liking to.
But we're digressing here. Suffice it to say that my Nanay wanted me to become really successful in life. She wanted me to be the person she wanted to become before.
However, I entertained different dreams of my own. I wanted to become a romance novelist. I wanted to live in an isolated cottage on top of a mountain overlooking the sea. I wanted to live in total isolation with a dog, a fish in a bowl, an internet connection, a laptop computer and a lot of books (and can I have a fireplace please, plus snow on Christmas?).
Then, I started working as a teacher in a public school. I had dreams of becoming the strict, spinster English teacher who has a passion for her chosen profession. I wanted a car and a peaceful life with my students in a perfectly weird classroom in the morning and a quiet and peaceful home (alone of course) at night.
Now, I have the laptop, the teaching job, but not the peace and quiet (not with a bunch of sibling squabbling around the house).
However, a certain discontent came upon me. I did not know what it was. I had a meaningful job and I was getting paid doing it. I am an Alternative Learning System Mobile Teacher who teaches out-of-school youth, adults and nonliterates. I am making a difference in someone else's life. What could be wrong with me?
I saw and grabbed that very ambitious dream which I promptly let go when I joined the CFC-Singles for Christ last summer.
I thought Christ did not want me to be too ambitious....I mean, all those verses on humility and meekness. But, it was during those dream-filled days that I realized I had a purpose, a goal.
So what was wrong?
I mistook being a Christian to being a doormat.
And I was wrong.
Two weeks ago, I dusted out the dream I shelved and look at it at a Christians point-of-view. If I work on this dream with the sole selfish purpose of a twisted sense of self-aggrandizement, then it is nothing but a worldly dream.
But, if I reach for this dream with a Christian humble and meek spirit, it is a tool for something more: a selfless work for God's greater glory.
The dream is a difficult one and requires so much work and effort. It needs a lot of self-control. It requires a lot of study in repose. It requires me to work and deal with people. I can no longer have the selfish isolation of a novelists cozy cottage. I can no longer have the quiet life of a spinster's solitary home. What I have is the demands of public service to the extreme. It will require me to do something I am not really good at - working with people.
But I like the purpose of the dream. I have that dream now.
I dared to dream....and I stopped existing...I started living.
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