“HUH?” PHOTOS or Guess Who?

Watcha looking at, PUNK?

Quotes from C [01]

MUSIC: When God Made You, Newsong

Back in college, I had a set of clique known as the Phazies, a contraction of Pasaway. We were once eight but some of us had to go. The Phazies were a crazy bunch, as most BSOT students were. Weird conversations and disturbing mannerisms abound in our group. Plus the scandalous pet names we had for each other (which in itself must require a whole different blog post).

Among us there were a lot of budding writers. I would like to think I’m one of them. C was one of them, and for reasons of privacy I’m gonna stick with calling her C.

She emailed me a year ago, asking me to critique her work. I loved editing, much to the chagrin of the high school newspaper staff that I commanded almost five years ago.

But when I received all three files and opened them,  I was beside myself. I loved her writing style! I couldn’t bear to slash out words from her work! There were poems, stories and quotable statements.

And so I am taking liberty here, but I will begin ANOTHER series of posts, this time taking C’s statements and applying it in my own life.

You succeed with others; you stumble alone.

Cooperation is one of the most important things. Rarely are we Lone Rangers in the world. Yes, as pioneers we often find ourselves alone, but most of the time we need people around us.

I know I am who I am, I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved because of people who believed in me, encouraged me and never saw my apparent coldness as a barrier in reaching out to me.

Shunning counsel and guidance from people who matter and not being accountable to others for your actions can be disastrous. Look at King Solomon, no matter how wise he was, he still made a BIG MISTAKE. And have you noticed how unlike his father’s reign, Solomon wasn’t accountable to any prophet/priest?

But working on how to deal people…that’s a different thing for me.

Lord Help Me See

Music: Heartbeats, Jose Gonzalez

For Bible Study this week Jin Lian told us that Debbie and I will share a vision from God. The vision should relate to  the first lesson of the Bible Study book – Foundation Truths 1.  So Monday last week as we went for the Morning Prayer at Paya Lebar I asked God to show me something. When I received it, I was like, “Really? Are you sure this is it?” . It seemed a bit off and plain weird to me, so I asked another vision. The great thing about God is that He didn’t say, “Why can’t you just work with the first one I gave you?”, He did give me another one.

Today, I shared with Jin Lian the second vision first, because I thought it was better than the first one. I wasn’t even planning to share the first one because I was embarrassed, but then I just said it anyway. And Jin Lian said that the first vision (which I thought was a bit scratch-your-head type) gave her goosebumps! Just goes to show how limited and simple my mind is and how God had been right all along the first time.

Anyway, this is what I received:

The First Vision: Indoor Climbing

Have you ever gone indoor climbing before? If you’re a beginner there’s someone called the belayer who’ll help you through the climb. In my vision, there were three things that struck me about climbing and how it is paralleled to our Christian life.

The Grips : Which look like rocks on the surface of the climbing wall. It symbolizes God’s Word (both rhema and logos), without His Word we’re unable to navigate through our Christian “climb”. We cannot go from where we are to where we should be if we don’t hold on to the Word that God gave us. God’s Word is our foothold and handhold, to steady us and to support us.

Some grips are colored and mark out a route, different colors for different levels of difficulty, in the same way we must know the path that God has marked out for us and not stray from it.

The Belayer: What was powerful to me was the concept of the Belayer. That the Holy Spirit was the one holding the rope for us. According to Wikipedia:

By using a correct belaying method, the belayer can hold the entire weight of the climber by using relatively little force, and can easily arrest even a long fall. By using a mixture of belaying angle and hand-grip on the rope, a climber can be lowered gently by the belayer to a safe point where climbing can be resumed.

What a nice picture of the Holy Spirit! I remember that one time I went wall climbing, I am scared of heights, and having seen another girl reach the top and then begin to cry hysterically because she couldn’t go down terrified me. But I also remembered that during my ascent, one of my closest friends belayed for me. I felt confident and secure that my friend won’t let me be harmed during the whole climb. That’s what God was telling me, the Holy Spirit is there to support me, and He can keep me from falling.

Another thing that’s important with belaying is that the belayer and the climber must communicate. There must be an ongoing communication between me and the Holy Spirit.

The Climber: I also realized that the attitude of the climber is very important. Because even if the grips are there and the belayer is very skillful and communicative, if I release my hands and feet from the grips and call out “I give up”, no matter what the belayer says to keep me going, there’s no way that I’ll finish the climb. I will just hang wherever I am or let go. Plus climbing is hard work and mental conditioning, it involves discipline and a love for what you do…kinda sums up being a Christian, right?

The Second Vision: God the CityBuilder

In my vision I saw first a beautiful city with a wide array of buildings, some tall others wide, some nicely decorated, others minimalistic, and then I saw a big piece of paper being unrolled right in front of me. It contained a lot of geometric shapes and measurements, then I understood that it was a master plan, a draft of what the city needed to look like.

I asked for wisdom about what I saw, and God told me that He’s the Citybuilder, and people are buildings, before the city was built, God had already planned for everything, the layout, the position, the purpose of each building. He had planned that every building (that’s us) to have a sure foundation (Jesus, the cornerstone) so that the city will be not just be stable but be eternal. How beautiful or how tall the building will be depends on the materials that were used to construct it. Our life experiences, lessons we’ve learned, attitudes, spiritual disciplines we practice etc…are the building blocks of our buildings – our lives. We decide the quality of our life by what we do or how we react to what is given to us.

Anyway, by sharing this, I hope you guys have been blessed as I have learned a lot. Not only about the visions but also on obeying God.

How Well Do You Know Elle? The Answers

 MUSIC: How Deep is Your Love? , The Bird and the Bee

Some of you may be scratching your heads, some of you may be so confident with your answers, how well did you match up to my questions?

Let’s see:

1.  Actually, the guy’s name is Eagle and he stopped me in front of the Supreme Court, just when I was hurrying back to class. I was like, my national TV debut and I look like I just came out of my house to buy vinegar!!!

2. My best friend calls me Jay, my real nickname is Jay-el.

3. Yes!

4. The first musical I watched in the cinema is Moulin Rouge, the first ever musical I watched was Les Miserables.

5.  EEEEWWW…NO way, I prefer “isaw” or “kwek-kwek”

6. Since we had expat playmates, we actually had a British accent, which was lost when we stayed in the Philippines for good.

7. YES! 100% TRUE! It’s so cool!

8.  YES! It may seem weird but my conversion wasn’t really an Altar-Call type of thing, it was more of personal revelation, I didn’t realise that I was praying the sinner’s prayer. Most people who hear of my conversion are amazed, it’s a long story, call me or talk to me to find out.

9.  In a fit of anger over an overripe mango my brother slammed the door on my LEFT pinkie. I will always know where my left from my right is.

10. Weird as it may seem I went through the rigorous, hellish COCC training and was doing well until I fainted TWO HOURS before the end of HELL DAY.

11. TRUE. It was called informally as the sex club but what we were really interested in was peer counselling, abstinence and awareness of STDs and STIs.

12. Actually my friends and I joined a national songwriting competition at age 12! Haha, we got a commendation. I never was able to pursue this path!

13.  TRUE.I collect embarrassing moments, this is one of my first.

14. Yeah, like I was committing suicide inside my mother’s womb. This is sooo true.

15.  The first poem I wrote was when I was 9, it was about birds, it had four lines and I was so eager to go home I just made sure that alternate lines rhymed. I was the first one to go home that day! Haha…but I really seriously wrote at 12.

16. Sad but true, I was like the Zit Who Grew A Face. I have the pictures to prove it.

17. Yes. I skipped 7th grade just because the teacher liked me…hehehe..

18. For the first six months I didn’t apply to any other university, but since my graduation was coming up without any news from the prestigious university, I applied for De La Salle University – Dasma (I had no other choice). But then the UP results came out…haha.

19. Although TWENTY THREE people will say this is TRUE, for *ahem* ONE REASON (and it’s not because I was the only one who got a 1.0- the highest mark), my fave subject was actually Social Science 1 – even if half of the semester I wasn’t really attending class. Because I still got a higher grade than most students who were attending…ok that was a mean thing to say!

20. YES! Gerby from Gervase! Haha… Sir Mikee was like flipping over why I had a frog in HIS COMMUNICATION CLASS! Sadly Gerby had to say goodbye a few hours later, I poked a bodkin through his spinal cord!

21.  FALSE. Sad but true, I always found an excuse to cut classes, the sadder thing was that I was so encouraged because I never got caught or never really suffered any consequences haha…except Math haha..

22. If I say this is FALSE TWENTY FIVE PEOPLE WILL THINK I’M LYING. But my fave field trip was the LONNNGEESTT one of all, the Humanities 2 field trip where we like had the WHOLE DAY on the bus and travelling and being touristy haha, plus the fact that I woke up late and had a near death experience in the taxi :

ME: Uncle, please step on it…I’m gonna be late.

DRIVER: OK

a few moments later…

DRIVER: I think I lost my brake

ME (began praying that I will reach my school in one piece)

23.  TRUE. After so many years, I can still recite it! Word for word, King James Version. My parents had the habit of making us memorize verses. And I’m so glad they did!

 If you enjoyed this survey, or you want to contest any of the answers (especially numbers 19 and 22), I am glad haha.. I don’t need your input. But yeah, I also want to KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU. Link back to this post if you’re in!

 

 

20/08/2008

Wow…I didn’t realize that my birthday date was so…LUCKY? Haha…kinda nice though, to see this type of thing, it’s like once in a lifetime! This has been a very whoosh whoosh birthday, I don’t feel it at all.

But, a really big THANK YOU for the greetings and those bearing gifts! I’ve never felt so loved. And I think I was utterly surprised last Sunday. It didn’t cross my mind that the cellgroup was going to celebrate my birthday. After the briefing, I was hunching over my bag preparing to leave when:

JERB: Today, we’re gonna celebrate Elle’s birthday!

ME (thinking): Eh? How come we’re celebrating a birthday I don’t know about (I clap my hands automatically), WAIT! That’s ME!

Haha…anyway, it seemed weird for people that I squealed when I opened my present – an Esprit notebook, if you know me a bit, or if you’ve been reading my blog, I am a paper/pen addict!

And yes! I have finished all ten days of Morning Prayer, which is by God’s grace, especially the waking up early part. Awesome! Haha…I’m very happy, renewed and refreshed – FIGHT!

My songs have been reduced considerably since the crash…but anyway, at least my musicals/OSTs are intact.

I am figuring things out, not out of pressure or the quarterlife crisis, but out of curiousity…

How Well Do You Know Elle?

 

 MUSIC: How Deep is Your Love? , The Bird and the Bee

OK, just for fun, are you able to say which of the following statements about me are true and which of them are so untrue?

1. I was ambush interviewed for a national TV show by a guy named Arnold.

2. Jay is my original nickname.

3. My favourite color in the whole wide world is bottle green!

4. The first musical I ever watched was Moulin Rouge.

5. In Pinoy street food, I love to eat betamax and adidas.

6. Growing up in Saudi, I spoke in an Australian accent.

7. My full name literally means, worthy to be praised-helmet-reserves.

8. The day I accepted Jesus in to my life was also the same day I received my baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.

9. When I was a kid my right pinkie was crushed by my brother when he slammed the door on it and they had to remove my fingernail.

10. I got the rank of Cadet 2Lt when I graduated from my  Cadet Officer Candidate Course.

11. I was president of the Reproductice Health club at school, also known as the club which talked about sex.

12. My friends and I joined a national songwriting competition at the age of 16 years old.

13. I fell into an open sewer when I was five or six.

14. They had to perform a caesarean birth for me because my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck – I was a blue baby.

15. I started writing poetry and stories at the age of 10.

16. I  had the most awful outbreak of acne from the 3rd-6th year of grade school.

17. I skipped seventh grade by the skin of my teeth.

18. UP was the only university I applied admission to.

19. My fave subject in University was History 1.

20. When we had to bring a frog for dissection for our Zoology class, I was so bonded with the frog that I even named him Gerby and made him a model for our communication class.

21. I was always present in all the classes during my first semester at UP.

22. The field trip that I really count as my favourite was the Corregidor field trip.

23. I can recite the whole chapter of Psalm 91 in the King James Version.

 

I realize that I know few stuff about people and I just wanted to see how much (or little) do people know me.

Answers will be up soon.

 

 

 

FOUND: Sounds Familiar…

Season’s change, but apparently I don’t

I had one of my favorite things happen; I found an old journal.  As I panned through it a few things jumped out at me. 1) I still stuggle with the SAME few things 2) My life has not progressed at all.

…  i’m sick of the “stills” I’m ready for the “and’s…” and “am doings”.  I am a creature of change.  I long for it.  Everything in me loves and craves change.  I rearrange my bedroom furniture and constantly change decorations so that it doesn’t sit idol.   Is God trying to teach me something?  I BEG to be ripped from my comfort zone, yet God has me basking in it.  I wish I understood!

- like taking words exactly from my mind.Read her blog here.

Because I Find It Amusing:

 

Overwhelming Trials vs. Overwhelming Love

 Fished out one of my pre-2006 writings, I can sense the confidence that I had when I wrote this, I’m so sad, can I get her back? But reading this was very encouraging, like I’m writing advice for myself in advance…

An excerpt:

There are times when I feel I’m succumbing to regression in terms of my development as a person. Like in Psychology, one of the common defense mechanisms is Regression,which can be defined as “a defense mechanism where one reverts to a previous stage in development”. What am I talking about? For example, I have reduced my vocabulary at times to “baby talk”.

Read more by clicking here.

Ako Si Kim Samsoon

Kim Sam Soon Poster

 

 My Lovely Samsoon is the only Korean TV series that I have watched twice. Aside from the fact that Hyun Bin makes a good aloof, mysterious lead guy, the plot is unique and fresh.

As I said before, Philippine TV is in to adapting foreign shows to Filipino taste, I was extremely excited, happy, elated – insert other ecstatic adjectives here to the superlative level- to learn that GMA Kapuso has adapted MLS and is now known as Ako Si Kim Samsoon (I Am Kim Samsoon – rough translation). I LOVED the fact that they got Regine Velasquez to play Samsoon, she’s like, made for the character! The big surprise was that the network chose Mark Anthony Fernandez to play Hyun Bin’s character (Cyrus). I was a bit skeptical but when I watched the preview, I understood that it was the right choice.

Aside from the kilig  moments I want to see any alterations they have made to the original story. Plus the fact that they have a stellar cast, but I have to admit that not being exposed to Pinoy TV especially to the  Kapuso channel, I have no idea who the other actors/actresses are. I was also disappointed with the subplots, and how they gave Samsoon a younger sister obsessed with rich guys instead of a spunky elder divorcee sister like the original, or the fact that Samsoon’s mother is infatuated with an extremely younger guy. The original version was straightforward and not branched out but I guess that’s the Pinoy way, there should be a lot of things going on to keep the attention of the viewers.

On the whole, I am still giving it a chance. Admittedly, now that story is getting more  complicated I know for sure that there’ll be a lot of nauseating twists and turns compared with the original version, I think I will stick around.