One Because of a Thousand Whys (Novellete)

A TESTIMONY

MY JOURNEY OF KNOWING AND HAVING A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LORD JESUS CHRIST

Note: I decided to include my own experience of the Lord's love and grace here because I believe that the best story in the world is the one that happened in real life and is touched and empowered by the Almighty's hands.

The moment of knowing and accepting the Lord Jesus Christ does not IMMEDIATELY mean blessings, peace, and light afterward. In my case, it's a journey. It's a journey of stumblings and stand-ups. It's a journey of pushes and pulls. It's a journey of certainty and uncertainty. Thus, my journey of accepting the Lord with all my heart and having a deeper relationship with him is not an overnight process.

To start, I grew up in a non-Christian family, in an environment wherein knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and reading the bible were never done and established. On the contrary, my grandmother was the religious one and she always tagged me along with church activities. As a kid, I never understood the importance of religion and the essence of faith. I just forced myself to follow and perform all the religious rituals laid on my shoulders because of fear that in failure to do so, I would be sent to hell once I breathed my last.

I reached my 12th year of being a human, and one Sunday, the preacher told us that one of God's commandments is: I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt not have strange Gods before me. Right after I heard the statement, my eyes wandered around the church and my brain began questioning the presence of the wooden statues and the plastic saints displayed in every corner of the room. If we should only worship one God, then, why do we have to light candles and pray to these gods? The sermon didn't make sense to a 12-year-old me because the words of the preacher and his beliefs were contradictory.

Hence, I stopped showing up at Mass on Sundays. I gave up my beliefs. And I ceased praying.

Months passed, and one late at night while I was browsing through my social media account, I encountered a video entitled: Father's Love Letter. Bored and cannot sleep, I watched the full video and when it ended, I couldn't explain why these words: if you seek Me with all your heart, you will find me, struck my heart. Furthermore, they kept on ringing through my head day after day but I didn't take them seriously and just drown them by being busy with my school requirements.

When I reached the age of starting to find and establish my own identity, I sought it first by looking for the real meaning of happiness in this life. I thought if I could find the answer, then I might have found the road to fulfilling my purpose. However, after asking about the real meaning of happiness from my friends and kinship, their answers only knifed my heart. I was told: you're so deep; you're weird; you're too serious!

From that day onward, I did not find myself on the road to knowing and fulfilling my purpose instead, I found myself drowning in the ocean of pain and the abyss of emptiness.

After that, I learned about Howard Gardner's theory and through that, I was enlightened that my dominant intelligence is existentialism which only explains the reason behind my love and interest in abstract concepts and the hows and why of life and human behavior.

That being the case, I began my journey of finding my purpose through reading various self-help books, finance books, philosophy books (stoicism is my fave Philo!), and of course, psychology books. Despite learning different concepts and views from all my readings, I knew that they did not fill in the growing hole within me.

As days passed by, I felt more alone, hopeless, and worthless and I began hearing mental voices that whispered nasty lies trying to distort my reality and making me doubt my future by connecting it with my wounded past. I came to the point of thinking of ways to cut the thread connecting life and death but every time I put them into action, I always failed. For the reason of keeping myself alive and stopping the pain (and sometimes, numbness) inside temporarily, I had to draw lines on my wrist just to feel another pain (in that case, physical!) so, I can stop the whispering voices: you have no value, just die.