Our first paracletes Witnessing my wife become a mom made me appreciate more how our respective mothers are our own paraclete. Being a mom can be like a thankless job – being an authentic mom means it is a mom’s job to shower all the love she can to her child; and going above and […]
The price of trying to be better No path towards being better is easy. Progress and change have dips and birth pains. From a technical perspective, this separates the beginners from the masters. From a values perspective, this separates the hypocrites from the virtuous virtuosos. And sometimes, the material rewards may not even be worth […]
Co-create I find that a question that stimulates creative insight is: how can we co-create something with each other? It requires attention to what we can and cannot do and faith in another. It also allows for a greater good to emerge that couldn’t be possible for any individual. John 15:12-17. I will not now […]
The love of a parent We can have an idea on how much our parents love us, but that idea won’t ever capture the totality of what it means compared to when we become parents ourselves. There is something powerful that is hard to put into words – to love someone before that someone actually […]
Synchronizing We are always in this dance of trying to understand ourselves and trying to understand others. Synchronizing with ourselves (as in being authentic to who we are and being responsible to who we are shaping up to be) and synchronizing with others is a whole new level. I have reflected multiple times already on […]
Towards impact that makes a (lasting) difference (a short reflection) It is easy to measure outputs but tricky to measure impact. Impact needs time. Outputs are more about efficiency (which is easier to document) while impact is more about effectiveness. It is easy to say that pursuing impact requires faith. But faith can be such […]
Words should not be cheap The advent of generative AI makes it easy to produce cheap words or words that may sound good but are not really meaningful. If we listen to standup comedians, orators, artists, performers, and songwriters, words are far from cheap. They can mean more than what they literally denote. Carefully chosen […]
To deeply know another is to share vulnerabilities with one another The depth of relationships between people is not necessarily driven by time, but rather, how open people are in terms of sharing their vulnerabilities with each other. If we think about it, if ever such person who is invulnerable does exist, wouldn’t it be […]
(Another reflection on) inherited will I’m such a sucker for shounen anime. Maybe it is because of the context of my childhood – from watching Filipino dubs of Japanese anime in local channels, getting excited by Japanese dubs with English subs in cables, to internet and Netflix access. A common theme in shounen anime is […]
How can our hearts avoid being troubled? These past few days, my barely 2-month-old son caught a persistent cold and had fever-like symptoms. I had to go to work, so it was my wife who shouldered bulk of the burden caring for Franco. Understandably, we had some fears. We consulted medical professionals (special thanks to […]