November 14, 2023
Around this time, Donn, a good friend of mine, visited his family land in the Bolinao area, for some business transactions. I tagged along to get away from it all. Some thoughts and lines gathered:
In a toxic world, detoxification is very necessary. / @DejaRu22 / Rubi
I thought that keeps lingering in my mind as of late is the other definition of famine. First, famine is one thing that is being mentioned as a sign of the end, but I’m learning that it isn’t just about a lack of food; Usually you’d get those images of half-dead children (whose ethnicity you are free to choose) with bloated stomachs and stick-thin appendages, vultures and flies, dead crops and the occasional bull’s skull.
See, that’s just one possibility of famine. It’s just as much an overabundance of junk. And this is where you get the lesser-known mental images – actually, just visualizing it now, really – of morbidly obese adults (again, whose ethnicity you are free to choose), seemingly hypnotized by fast ‘food’ commercials, gorging on piles and piles of fried exaggeratingly colored nothings adulterated with all sorts of synthetic, chemically concocted flavorings; The vultures and flies are replaced with candy zeppelins and high-fructose fairies, and where there were dead crops, we see a landscape right out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Sugar plants, leaves, and trees, everything but the chocolate river where Augustus Gloop met his fate.
And the bull’s skull has been replaced with a barely functional CPAP machine. I go through that feat of imagination only to stress that famine is the lack of nutrition, whether it be scarcity of food and/or abundance of junk.
In a toxic world, yes, detoxification is very necessary. And this means eating less of the wrong foods as much as it means eating the right foods. But the idea of detoxification is not limited to just our food intake, but also our mental exposure. Detoxification of the mind involves our seeing, listening, and interacting with more of the right sources, and less of the meaningless and outright wrong sources.
There’s a high demand for nutrition in the form of life giving food… But might I also communicate that more than bread, man lives by the Word of God. We in the body of Christ have Christ HIMSELF as our bread of life; and while we have the Bible, and while we have Scripture to keep us sufficiently nourished, we have Christ, who is not only the Bread of Life but also our literal Word of Life, as much as He is our Living Word.
We in the body of Christ live by the Word of God, who IS Christ Himself. He is the Word that sustains much more than our earthly bodies, by way of taking care of our entire beings, far beyond the physical aspect, but also nourishing our soul and our spirit.
I feel I spent a little too much time here but I think that’s one of the things I’d like to keep in mind, moving forward.
#Detoxification #ToxicWorld #FamineAwareness #HealthyLiving #MindDetox #NutritionMatters #BodyAndSoul #WordofGod #MinistryJourney #ChristIsLife
I was thinking, what was I going to do in Bolinao? Clarify – clarify by rearranging, maybe? – The idea of rearranging first came to mind last October. Now I can say, a little less than a month later, that we are truly in a #SeasonOfRearranging. And I have observed that this rearranging involves more than just things (times, schedules, routines, and physical stuff); It’s BOTH people and things that are relocated, removed, and added.
I’m also reminded that people and things are being clarified in this season, as well. Clarified – redefined, refined, revived? We’ll see as the days progress.
#SeasonOfRearranging #LifeAdjustments #NewLife #Reflections #MindfulLiving #PersonalGrowth #LifeChanges
The darker the night, the brighter the stars. / Dostoevsky – Lemme be honest, I’m definitely using this as a photo post caption.
Sadly my friend worked nights and still had a shift that evening despite being at the beach, so he had to sleep a little – after all, he did drive all the way down. That gave me time to have a rare phone call with my Mom that night, one where there were a lot of quotes and a lot of wisdom being passed down. While the lines were not verbatim, they were as follows:
On Attraction
- “if someone likes you don’t be anxious about it. I had a lot of suitors in my day and I (learned) how to handle it until I met your Dad. Glory in it!”
- I’m thinking maybe I took my claims of being an introvert a little too seriously. Now that I realize it, the best way to handle attraction is not to react to it, but to flow with it – that is, not necessarily to acquiesce, but to respect to openly acknowledging, and being in control of yourself; After all, you can only control your reactions and your responses.
- Incidentally I saw the following tagline on a packet of a prominent coffee brand here: “The right boldness and sweetness”
On What I’m Doing
- After telling her how I think I’m taking (and possibly wasting) more time in ministry, that it’s taking time away from me doing my other personal stuff, she responds matter of factly: “The Lord will provide for those who do ministry”
- In the process of talking about the two activities (ministry and everything else), seeing them as separate ventures, I realized I could try to mix it all up – cybersecurity, ministry, AI, OSINT, finances, visual arts. As I’m going back to these thoughts this December, I’d like to indicate that I’ve been re-reading Ultralearning by Scott Young (in between Tintin comics) before sleeping, and I think that what will matter in this upcoming ‘unifying’ project is my being intentional and practical about it.
- Practice separately, apply as one project? – This seems to reinforce what I just mentioned about ultralearning – there’s more learning to be done in application and practice, more than there is in merely reading and listening. To that end, I feel like just completing my ongoing Google Cybersecurity Certificate program, and then going on towards more practical projects.
- I’m reminded of the conversations in one of my favorite movies, The Bourne Supremacy, where Nicky Parsons talks to everyone else trying to track and take Jason Bourne:
- Tom Cronin: He’s making his first mistake.
- Nicky: It’s not a mistake. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t do random. There’s always an objective. Always a target.
- Pamela Landy: The objectives and targets always came from us. Who’s giving them to him now?
- Nicky: Scary version? He is.
- I’m reminded of the conversations in one of my favorite movies, The Bourne Supremacy, where Nicky Parsons talks to everyone else trying to track and take Jason Bourne:
- Avoid overthinking. Don’t be so fixated on the outcome.
#BeachRetreat #WisdomQuotes #Attraction #IntrovertRealizations #LifeBalance #MinistryJourney #Ultralearning #MomsWisdom
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