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PLACE OF REFUGE

HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
By Ramon Martillano

For God so loved the world that He gave us His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). There is no question as to how much God loves us. The question is how should we show our love to God?

In The Book, several ways were mentioned on how we could love God. (a) By showing our love to needy people whom God loves (Matthew 10:42); (b) By obeying Him (John 14:21); (c) By guiding and helping Jesus’ followers (John 21:15-17), and (d) By worshipping and praising Him for His love for us (Psalm 122:1).

Let us relate this to our daily lives and find out where we stand. For parents, this would mean spending quality time with our children at home. This could also mean having more time with our wife/husband. Some of us would bring home unfinished office work, which should be better left in the office unless it is extremely necessary. We would justify our actions by saying that we are doing this for the future of our children anyway. After dinner, some of us parents would rather spend watching TV alone instead of being with our children and sharing with them how the day was spent. Well, we all have our own individual reasons for not doing most, if not all of these things.

In the office, we are paid by our employers to render at least an eight-hour worth of meaningful, productive work for a day. But for some of us, what is the first thing we do upon reaching office. Share a gossip or two with an officemate during office hours. Open our e-mail and spend at least 30 minutes to answer our personal mails. After answering our e-mails, we call a friend and spend another 15-30 minutes over the phone, discussing purely personal matters. For managers, we also have a tendency to call “unnecessary” meetings. Comes lunch break, we leave our desk earlier than 12:00 and come back way past the required time to finish our lunch. There are other instances where we waste company time. At the end of the day, we would have spent 30%-40% of our time for “unproductive” activities. Moreover, do we show our love to our subordinates by being patient with their mistakes and at the same time coaching them on how things could be done better? Do we pray for the company we are working for, including our superiors?

In our community, do we share our blessings (time, money, talents, etc.) with the others wholeheartedly? Do we share our blessings until it hurts or we only share what our wallets could not accommodate? Do we help the poor without expecting anything in return? Do we help our less fortunate brothers and sisters regularly (at least monthly maybe) or once a year only, i.e., on special occasions like birthday, anniversaries, etc.? If you are a community leader, are you doing your very best to help your members grow in holiness? Do we pray for our church as well as for our national leaders?

In our prayer time, do we pray “mechanically” just to comply with our daily routine? Only you, brothers and sisters, could truthfully answer these questions. Overall, I could honestly say that I am guilty on most of the items mentioned above. Thus from a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 as the highest), I would say I am just a little above 3 or maybe even lower. How about you? You maybe in the same situation as I am, but what is important is we are fully aware of our shortcomings and we strive everyday to get a higher score with the guidance from our Lord Jesus Christ. I sincerely believe that these are simple and yet just some of the better ways on how we could reciprocate the love and sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. During the Lenten season, let us reflect on these questions and try to set our directions on how we could love Him more. Amen.