Inspirations From a Tree

When working in a mission, there are some necessary tools you need to be truly helpful and successful in your work...and I'm not talking about flashlights and comfortable shoes, here!!  Of course, to be successful at anything you need THINGS to help you get the job done, but in mission, I've come to really see how many few THINGS you need for yourself...God already gave them to you: generous hands and an open mind!!  But what I'm talking about is inner tools; the necessary requirements to be successful in human relations and loving interaction.  As with so many other topics, what is necessary to be a successful missionary is also basically what's necessary to be a successful human...anyways, here are my thoughts:

Last October 2020, we celebrated our fourth annual Adlaw Han Mga Kablas... A Day For The Poor. It is a day of celebration in honor of the poor people here in Eastern Samar, a day just for them to celebrate who they are, celebrate their lives, celebrate the fact that they too are children of God.  

In past years, we bussed in the poor from various barrios: the elderly, persons with disabilities, children, families...more than one thousand people!!  We danced with them, sang songs together, we had a fiesta of untold culinary delights- mostly donated from our local sponsors and restaurants, we gave them gifts and even the Bishop came to say mass...it has become the highlight of our year!  However in 2020, because of CoVid19, we could not celebrate the day as we had in the past.  But, you know, the Oikos Community is not one that can be on lockdown for long!!  We brainstormed and planned and tried our best to "think outside of the box" to come up with a way we could celebrate this day in quarantine!  And we did!!  Adlaw Han Mga Kablas 2020 was different from all the rest, but at least we found a way to celebrate it!  

Instead of bringing the people to us, we traveled to three barrios and brought our singers and dancers with us...appropriately masked, of course!  We were the ones who danced and sang for small groups at a time and they loved the action and togetherness that had been missing from their days for quite a while!  Then, going house to house in the barrios, we delivered relief goods: groceries, rice, soaps, and snacks and people were so thrilled with our visits to them!

One of the barrios we visited was called Sabang North.  It is a barrio of migrant workers from Mindanao who are fishermen and have been away from their families for a long, long time.  When we got to the barrio, I saw this amazing tree, it was like out of a fairy tale or something and I kept thinking the tree was really something quite special.   

It's trunk was massive- it would take about 12 people holding hands to surround it!  It was actually made up of lots of trees all winding around the huge trunk with lots of different kinds of leaves growing from the millions of branches.  After our work of giving food packs to the people and doing our presentations for them, I went back to the tree to take some pictures of it.  One of our volunteers came over and told me that the people here believe there are spirits in the tree and taking pictures of it was offensive to them, so I stopped with the pictures, but even until now I haven't stopped thinking of that tree. A tree such as that has been around for a long, long time, and it has deep, deep roots in the ground.  It got me thinking about love and humility.  Humility is the nutrient-rich soil from which deep love grows.  

Surely, you can love without humility... loving only yourself, loving money, loving the game of "moving up the ladder" at work.  But you don't grow in that deep love, and it becomes really difficult to receive true love from others.  That kind of love grows in dry, cracked soil in which life cannot grow well.  

But you cannot be humble without love.  Love, rooted in humility are the tools we need to succeed in anything, and I've found that so true especially in missionary work.

Why would anyone put themselves last, desire to be humiliated, give and give and give of themselves completely to others unless love was the motivation behind it?  Humility is like the soil in which love grows strong and straight towards God, and that love is seen by all, and many, many people benefit from the effects of it.  

When I think of love rooted in humility, I think of that tree, of it's strength and perserverance to grow so beautifully, even amid typhoons, tropical heat and all the pollution in the atmosphere. That tree will be around for years to come, and it will continue to become more beautiful, give more shade, offering dwellings to animals and will naturally raise its branches to God, giving of itself naturally, for that is what it was created to do...

That's it...that's the point - when we love with humility, we give of ourselves naturally, for that is what we were created to do!  

In the mission, as well as in life in general, even amid trials and pain and temptations to be prideful, the more we give of our selves, the more joy we feel, and people see it, they long to experience that joy and they begin to give of themselves as well...and so the teeny root of love we humbly planted grows and grows until the world begins to change.  

Inspirations from a tree...who knew??

                                                God bless and to Him be the Glory!!