Reset Your Life

“New wine must be poured into new wineskins.” – Luke 5:38

Blogging/writing is something I enjoy doing. It is also my small way of giving back the glory to God for all His blessings. But these past few years, it has taken a back seat to other interests. I only blog diligently to journal my travels abroad.

Day 21 of QuaRetreat, Bro Arun and Sis Lallaine Gogna’s nightly quarantine retreat on FB Live, gave me something to think about. These are the things they said that pricked my sleeping passion:

“When your gadget is not working properly, you reset it so it will function very well. In this lockdown, the Lord is resetting the world, even us. Do you know what it is the Lord is changing in you? There’s something there that you don’t see. When this lockdown happened, you saw it in a different angle. The Lord is changing us. The Lord is showing us something we need to reset.”

Bro Arun added this prayer: “I pray you say yes to God and press the reset button.”

That talk stirred the waters. I thought about my blogs. I have 3 – My B.A.G. of Miracles, Happy Faith and Happy Fit & Fab. The first two were unfocused and I somehow “lost” them. (Read more about that in Start Here of this blog.) Days after that fateful talk, I began to research, to refocus, to redesign and more importantly to repurpose my blogs. As I did these, excitement to write again gripped me. The clearer focus for each blog filled my head to overflowing with ideas of the things I wanted to write about. These are the new directions my blogs will be taking:

•         Happy Solo Faith will be dedicated to solo parents. I performed surgery on my old blogs to cut out its heart for solo parents and transplanted it here. My aim is to make it a survival guide for them.

Hero Independent Parents 2019 Retreat 

(Photo from HIP FB page)

•         Happy Feet & Travel B.A.G. is a new blog that will be launched very soon. It will be dedicated to travel, what else 😊 This was a segment of my old blogs and given its own home. It will feature more than my previous travel logs. This is exciting me no end. How excited? I’m writing a blog post and already ideas for two or three more articles are already knocking...no make that pounding…on the door. That excited!

Marian Pilgrimage 2019 

•         Happy Fit & Fab has always been clearly focused on fitness but this lockdown prompted me to make the focus more defined and reboot it into a fitness and fabness blog for people over fifty. (So, when I reach that age, I’ll know what to do hahaha)

Sun Warrior with Walis for the creative yogi under lockdown

There Lord, I’ve pressed the reset button.

I’m passing on Bro Arun’s question to those reading this blog especially solo parents who feel lost and afraid: What is the Lord asking you to reset in this COVID-19 lockdown? 

RESURRECTED

Happy Easter!!!!!!

Notice the proliferation of exclamation points? It’s because I’ve never been so excited to write my reflection for today. How excited? On Sunday pandemic mornings, I have the luxury of not rushing out of bed to go to mass or to The Feast because I can catch them online…in my house clothes…without makeup. But here I am, at 6:26 a.m., writing.

I’ve been writing reflections for Didache for years. My three blogs are filled with reflections. So, what makes today different that my emotion is moved almost to the point of tears? I don’t know. Maybe God gave me such a powerful insight that I can’t contain it. The message is actually age-old, something that we have been told over and over again. It’s probably the experience set in this crisis that moved me. Or maybe it’s the different way God led me to present the reflection that is so exciting. It’s been done before, but it’s a novel experience for me.

“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”  - Psalm 118:17

In my last blog, Rescued, I mentioned I was going to make, as my reflection activity, two paintings – the Rescued Sunflower and the Resurrected Sunflower. I posted a picture of the first painting. It’s been yearsss since I last held a brush, so I wasn’t too happy with it. But I was grateful for the love and appreciation showed by friends for the little my talent could produce.

I was more eager to make the second painting because I already had a design which I liked. It’s from an oil painting I made in 1994 that has been condemned to the darkness of our bodega. Even if the canvas I used was recycled from another painting that I wasn’t happy with, I still wanted to frame it because it came out well. (Note: it’s not my design, I interpreted it from a picture I saw.) But I never got to apply the finishing touches, so it gathered dirt in storage until it became unframeable. So, the design becomes resurrection number 2. Number 1 is the paper of a painting of lilies that wasn’t good enough. It was recycled for the sunflower paintings.

Halfway through making the Resurrected Sunflower, I realized the Rescued Sunflower did not match it in scale, style and quality. I decided to make another version. Back to my art supplies I went. I was lucky to find a paper sculpture I was working on and, again, never got to finish. I used half for version 2. Then I felt the other half still looked promising enough to finish. Resurrections 3 and 4.

So, here’s my Resurrection reflection in pictures.

Our God is a God of second chances. In Him is our hope! 

Rescued!

“Create something that will depict your resurrection when you finally embrace your cross.” That was the reflection activity Mike Viñas asked us to do for this morning’s Holy Week Retreat of the Light of Jesus Family. When he added, “You can draw, paint, watercolor…” I immediately thought of what I was really planning to do after the retreat – make a watercolor painting of sunflowers for my kitchen to accent its yellow theme.

Last night, I had already rummaged through my arts supplies drawer to look for watercolor pencils, brushes and watercolor paper to recycle (in a lockdown, you make do with what you have). They  were ready on my bedside table. But, how do I connect sunflowers to the resurrection? I decided to Google “rescued sunflowers”. It’s a stretch, but who knows what I might find. Surprise, surprise! There was a video on a rescued sunflower. A garden enthusiast showed how she rescued the seeds of her dried-up sunflower from being eaten by ants. That’s the inspiration I was looking for. I decided to create two paintings – one that will depict sunflowers in their dying stage that yielded seeds and another of bright and happy sunflowers in full bloom that “resurrected” from those seeds. I’m almost done with the first painting. I hope to finish the other one tomorrow.

Disclaimer: I paint like a person who likes to sing, knows the lyrics but doesn’t quite know the tune, so don’t expect a Van Gogh.

Reflection: Accept your cross and the reality that there are things you can’t control much like the cycle a sunflower goes through. Trust that the Divine Gardener is always there to nurture you and, in due season, will make the seeds  within you resurrect into a beautiful blossom.