Contraception Linked to Massive Rise in Abortion Rate

Real Joy Vs Shallow Happiness

We live in a time where “personal happiness” is the ultimate good. It has stepped over all other goods, even Good Himself, God. And the media is doing a really good job promoting this new god.

There is nothing wrong about personal happiness, it its right context. God commands us to be a cheerful giver, so we know He is not a kill joy. But when personal happiness becomes king, here is where the problem starts.

When our personal happiness goes before love and before God, it now becomes “personal selfishness”. People have sacrificed everything and even everyone for the sake of finding personal happiness (even though he himself does not know what it is).

The personal happiness gospel is often promoted by T.V shows and movies. We watch an unhappy woman leaving everything behind to eat, pray and love. So she ate. She prayed. She loved.

But did she?

I will not go to the eating part, nothing to explain there.

But did she really prayed? One aspect of prayer is losing oneself. For Christians, praying is more about God than ourselves. But her prayers were self-centered. She was not reaching up to God. She was grasping herself, hoping to find herself.

Did she really loved? Love as St Thomas Aquinas puts it is “to will the good of the other as other”. How about her definition? She wanted to love the man on her own terms, and she wanted the man to love her on her own terms. There was no “other” on the equation. Just her.

These kinds of movie and show reinforce our selfishness, all under the banner of “personal happiness”. A mother leaves her family to “find herself”. A father goes off with another woman because she “gives him what he is looking for”. Children abandon their parents to “explore the world”. Mother’s murder their own unborn child so that her “life won’t be disturbed”.

So what happen to these people who have gone off to leave everyone behind to find themselves?

They find the same self they supposedly left behind. Just more selfish.

The paradox of personal happiness is that it can only happen when you forget yourself in love. It is in loving Jesus first, Others second and Yourself last, that you will find J-O-Y.

There is no joy apart from love. And real love is always joyful.

Love (God) created us for love. Love is the air we breathe. And love is not selfish.

If you want to find personal happiness, then don’t take it personal. Be a person for all. Then, true happiness, real joy will happen behind your back.

“For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.” Matthew 16:25

Written by Daxx Bondoc

Discovering God’s Love in Pain and Adversity

Most of us like to box God’s love.

Many of us have a check list on how God should love us. The check goes like, if God loves me then He should make me rich, famous, powerful, give me what I want and the list goes selfishly on. If God loves us in a way that is not in the “The-Way-God-Should-Love-Me” checklist, we feel that God as abandon us.

When God asked Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt, the Israelites was ecstatic. They have a preconceive notion on how things will work out. They thought that the path to the Promise Land was all sunshine. But it was not so. And so they complained. And complained some more.

What Israelites failed to understand that their time in the desert was something necessary if they want to reach the Promise Land. The Promise Land was God’s land and there are no other gods permitted on it. Because of the years they stayed in Egypt, the Israelites have absorbed the idolatry and pagan ways of the Egyptians. And they needed to be cleansed off it before they step into the Promise Land. So for 40 years in the desert, God cleansed the Israelites. And it was a painful cleansing for the Israelites was not as cooperative as they should have.

God takes us to our own desert. Not because He enjoys seeing us suffer, but because we need to be cleansed. We need to be cleansed of the idolatry of our own ego and greed. We need to be cleansed of our pagan ways, the ways of the world. Most of all we need to be cleansed of our sins. Sometimes taking us to the desert is the only way it can be done. For in the desert, we are free from distraction and superficialities. In the desert we are confronted by our very survival. There, we cannot run away from our demons. And like Jesus, in the desert, God shall help us defeat our demons.

Sometimes, God’s love comes to us in what seems to be pain and suffering. But that pain and suffering are sometimes needed to save us. A cancer patient needs to go through a painful operation to get the cancer out of his body. He needs to endure the pain so that he might be cleansed of the cancer cells. We sinners have something worst than cancer, we have sin in our being. Cancer kills the body, Sin kills the soul. The Divine Operation sometimes uses pain and suffering to bring our souls back to health.

Jesus can give us His crown of gold or His crown of thorns to us. Both of them come from His loving hands.

We should stop selfishly defining how God should love us. We should learn to see God and His love outside of the box. The box is a very small and dark place to live in.

There is no box can contain God’s love.

Let us let God love us the way He does and not the way we want to.

God loves us more than our tiny boxes can imagine.

Written by Daxx Bondoc

Are You Stuck In the Past? Or Are You Anxious About the Future?

495. What are the goods of conjugal love to which sexuality is ordered?

Excuse Me God, I Am Still Doing My Thing Here

494. What is the responsibility of civil authority in regard to chastity?

Are You a Slave of People’s Opinion and Approval?

Do you constantly trying to prove to others that you are “good enough?”

We must admit that most of our actions are motivated to win the acceptance and admiration of our peers. There is something about pleasing people that pleases us.

Most of the time, it is our personal insecurities that cause this “I need to be good enough for you” mentality. One psychologist said that to even entertain this “I need to be good enough” debate in your head is already a choice to go to the path of unhappiness. For you will never be good enough in your mind. You will always find something that you need to be “good enough” to please others.

To live in the mercy of other’s approval and acceptance is like building your life on shifting sands. People’s opinions are fickle. They love you today and then hate you tomorrow. We can see this with movie stars and music artist. Here today and gone tomorrow. Putting the direction of your life at other’s hands is to miss out your own life.

We need to learn to accept ourselves. Even those things we do not like in ourselves. Accepting does not mean liking what you see, but accepting that they are real. If you have a bad temper, you do not need to like your bad temper. But you must accept that you have one!

Only when we accept ourselves for who we really are can we start to grow. We must accept our strengths and also our weakness, the good and the bad in us. Only when we can look at ourselves objectively can we start changing those aspects of our lives that need improvements.

We must first win the approval of ourselves. I approve of me! Yes I approve of me because God approves of me. If God did not approve of me, I would not even be here.

If you want to win the approval of others, win the approval of the God first. God approves of your creation, but do you think He approves on how you are living your life right now?

But why do we want God’s approval on our lives?

Because we want joy!

Happiness can only be found when we are in line with God’s plan for our lives.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant. Come, share your master's joy.” Mt 25:23

Written by Daxx Bondoc

2 Love or 2 Lust?

493. Why does the sixth commandment forbid all sins against chastity?