yesterday, around lunch time, i received a forwarded text messagefrom a friend in singapore. it read "what is faith? it is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. it is the certainty that what what we hope for is waiting for us. even though we cannot see it up ahead" (hebrew 11:1). i was a little surprised to receive it because since my friend went abroad he has not been sending forwarded messages. he gets in touch because of some favor he wants to ask or to ask how we are here but no more forwarded messages. i smiled when i received it because i needed reinforcement in this time of waiting and because i already received the same message from him months before. when i scrolled back to my inbox, i saw that there were two more messages from him but when i opened his next message, it was still the same. so i scrolled back to my inbox again to open the third message. alas, there was something wrong with my phone. it still showed that there were still two unopened messages and when i tried to open the second to the last message, the same faith message appeared. i went back to the main menu to give my phone time to recover. since my inbox was almost full, i deleted some messages from my inbox. i then forgot about it because the friend i was waiting for arrived. we had lunch then waited for another friend and her family pick us up. we went to global fun carnival for a day of liberating the kids in us. when we got there, another surprise was waiting. majority of the instructions for the rides and were written in german. a fleeting thought passed through my mind, "hmm... is God trying to say something?" but i did not dwell on it.
around 7pm while waiting in a very slow moving long line to ride a very short unsatisfying ride, i thought of writing about the forwarded message and the german instructions here in my blog, like what i'm doing now, so i checked my phone to see if the message was still in my inbox. when i saw that i had deleted it, i texted the roaming number of my friend in singapore to forward the message again to me. imagine my surprise when he asked what message that was since he can't remember forwarding any message that day. when i searched my inbox for previous messages, because i can faintly remember saving that same message months before, i saw that he first sent it last september 9, 2007. i felt a little light headed. what if this was really God's way of telling me not to lose hope? that somehow, someday, i'm going to go to study abroad. one rational explanation is that my friend just forgot that he forwarded the message earlier or another most likely explanation was that there was a glitch in the technology. it has happened to me before. i received text messages several days after they had been sent.
but what i choose to believe is that God sent that message through my friend because He knows how down i have been feeling regarding how my life seems to be going in no particular direction.
this was further reiforced when i attended mass earlier today. today is epiphany sunday, when the three wise men brought gifts to the child Jesus to reveal to the world that he was Lord and King. i just had my epiphany a day earlier but considering that saturday night can already be considered the start of sunday in the church, as evidenced by the celebration of anticipated masses on saturday nights, my epiphany was just right on time. now, i'll just have to wait for God to reveal his plan for me, i just hope that it's not going be 33 years, the life span of Jesus' human life according to bible scholars. that, just maybe 2008 is going to be my year after all.
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