At one part of my life, I was living in chaos. I was drowned in hopelessness. I had no direction. I was thirteen years old when I gave in to the many temptations of life. I was into sex, drugs and whatever I believed belong to the “rock and roll” kind of lifestyle. I was also into fraternity, gambling, drug peddling and every vice one can think of. I just didn’t give in to cigarettes. But I even came to a point of attempting to have myself kidnapped for ransom so that I could sustain my vices with the money that my family would produce. I drifted away from the love of my mother, my family and that of the Lord.
I was like the prodigal son in the Bible – living a meaningless life. But there came this incident in my life when I was humbled to the ground. The Lord met me even when I was blinded with the darkness of the situations I dived myself in. I found myself surrendering to the Lord, giving effort to come back into His loving arms.
My friends and I ran into a rumble one day where we almost killed a man. I felt so guilty and haunted, so I left the group. I went away hiding from them, running away many times. When the Catholic youth group that I belonged to held a conference in their place, I prayed so hard to be saved from any harm and told the Lord that if He would let me get through it, I would surrender everything to Him, that I would serve Him with all of my life. It was like the desperate moment of the prodigal son in the Bible upon the realization of how much he needed his father’s love when all of his being has been stripped away. It was like the conversion of Saul, better known as Paul, when the Lord let him experience total darkness for him to yearn to see light.
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God is good. He heard my prayers, and I was able to get through it. We patched things up. True to my promise, I committed my life to the Lord. One moment of safety was all I asked and needed. But our God is a generous God. The Father in Heaven was preparing a banquet for this prodigal son and gave me once again what I needed in order for me to stand up and walk back on track. I went back to college and graduated with a degree in Advertising. I was able to land a good job, made my own name in the world of visual art, t-shirt design, and print, and eventually in graphic arts. I was earning a large sum of money as I work freelance for big companies and influential people while actively serving as a mission volunteer.
But God is never done with me. The Lord wanted me to witness to His greatness. He wanted me to tell the story of His unending love and grace – one of forgiveness, of second chance, of hope. It was in year 2011 that the Lord presented me the calling of going on full-time pastoral work. The calling was personal. I accepted it without hesitation. Now, I am in my fifth year as full-time missionary, and still happily serving the Lord.
The story of the prodigal son is a story that gives hope to the lost, the least, the last and the little ones. It is a story of the Lord’s unending love and forgiveness. No matter how many times we screw up, the Lord will always welcome us with open arms, full of love and grace, if we only totally surrender ourselves to Him.
This is my St. Paul story: from a world blinded in darkness to a world full of light, I now devote my life to let others see what I saw – a God of faith, of grace, and of renewal.
