The Most Important Thing

on Tuesday, i should have two meetings in a day. one meeting with the doctor for follow-up check up and one prayer in the evening in one of my parish.

but both of them are canceled. hmph!

before i get bored, Jeff asked me to attend one of his three meetings in that day. so i went to one of his parish which is quite far from Manila and i only use bus and tricycle instead of MRT.

in the meeting, we had a song practice and a short meeting to discuss about the preparation. but the most interesting part is happens after the meeting is over.

one of the youth leaders approached me and we had a very nice conversation. from some kind of cultural exchange and until getting know each other.


then suddenly she said,

"i always admire the people like you, a volunteer who do things for others without thinking about themselves. you know these days, many people working to earn money for themselves. but you, the volunteers, didn't think only about yourself but most of the time you do things for others. like you, after you finish your study, instead of working to earn some money for yourself, you do this volunteering, to help people in a country which is not yours."

and then i struck. don't know what to say, so i just said, "yeah you're right."

after that, during my way back home, i reflect a lot. i mean, wowh, what she's said is absolutely true and for these two months being in Philippines, i never think about that. and it's true, just compare how many people who work for themselves and how many people who work for the others, especially on these days.

well, working for ourselves isn't so that bad because of course we have to think about ourself. but i'm thinking, which one is the most important for me; take care for my self or take care for the others?

The Other Side of the Preparation

now it's two weeks away from the meeting. and everything gets crazy.

there's a registration for those parish youth that want to join the five days meeting. but i don't know it's quite difficult to collect these registration form from them, with various reasons. and actually the "deadline" is on Jan 8th but still until now there's some parishes which didn't submit the form yet. as a volunteer, i understand their reasons why they can't submit the form yet because they find some difficulties to spread the word to all the youth. but in the other hand, the brothers want the number of the local pilgrims because they need to submit the number to those who provide meals and merienda. and also we need the number to make the ID and booklets.

the other thing is we have to make sure that every welcome centers can do the morning activity (morning prayer + morning program) by themselves because on the five days meeting, we will not visit them again because we have around 100 welcome centers and it's quite impossible to be in those places in one time. but still there's some welcome centers didn't experience Taize prayer yet, and it's quite worried because if they never experience a Taize prayer before, how they will manage to conduct a Taize prayer for the five days meeting in their own parish? but it's okay, we still have these two weeks. but how about there's welcome centers that didn't do anything yet to prepare themselves?? the core group didn't exist yet, they still don't have an idea, and so on.

i mean, for these things, i'm the one who worried so much instead of them.

we have a team meeting every monday and bible sharing every thursday. for these kind of meeting, i know that i'm not the only one who worried about these kind of stuffs. the other volunteers also experience the same things and some of them are more stressed than me. hm, but at least these kind of sharing encourage each other.