“The poor do not need our compassion or our pity; they need our help.”
Categories
Author: Jocelyn Soriano
See her books like "Questions to God", "Mend My Broken Heart", "To Love an Invisible God", "Defending My Catholic Faith", "Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief" and more - click here.
Subscribe to Single Catholic Writer and get the free e-book "Single People Can Be Happy, Too!"
(You may freely quote excerpts from this website as long as due credit is given to author Jocelyn Soriano and the website itakeoffthemask.com)
Categories
God does not rush
God does not rush
I’ve learned that the Lord does not desire to rush me. Rather, He wants me to grow in His time, and so I must be patient.
Before He sends me forth, I know that there are some things He wants to deal with first. Though I thought I was prepared, He showed me I wasn’t ready yet. He made me come face to face with my weaknesses and I knew that it will take time.
I trust in Him however, that He will finish the good work He had begun!
Categories
So many things can’t be explained
So many things can’t be explained
We all seek for answers, we all want to make a box and fit everything neatly inside. Yet despite all the advances in science, so many things still can’t be explained.
For instance, do you believe in love? In courage? In beauty? How should science explain all these?
Is love nothing more than the outward appearance of things? The fine arrangement of one’s molecules? And if it is not, if you tell me that love, as well as beauty consists not only of the external, how can you define it? How can you believe in that which you cannot explain?
Is courage the strength of one’s muscles or of one’s heart? And what is a heart if not more than an organ pumping blood into one’s fragile body? What makes a man courageous and what makes another man a coward? Is it courage to die for the sake of another? Why should a living organism defy nature’s law of self-preservation anyway? Why should one die for another creature which would only be tomorrow’s dust or another one’s fertilizer?
To what extent must we risk our lives? To what extent should we love? And what is love anyways?
Can you grasp it? Can you see it? Can you measure what it can do? Can you explain the reaction of the atoms of a person falling in love? Why must we love anyway? And why is there such a thing as love? Is it a power or a sickness? Is a person who loves still rational or merely crazy?
There are so many things we cannot explain, so many things our minds cannot grasp. Yet is this the most important thing?
To the person who has really known love, there are no more questions, only declarations of the salvation he has found.
Categories
Being Melancholic
Being a Melancholic Person
Being a melancholic person is no easy matter. For one thing, you easily get depressed. You also have the tendency to be overcritical of yourself and of other people. But being able to understand yourself is one of the first things that can help you in overcoming your difficulties.
When I learned I belong to the melancholic type of temperament, I was able to understand myself more. I’ve learned to accept myself and avoid being more depressed whenever I make mistakes and fall below my own expectations. I’ve realized I’m not so different after all with other people having the same difficulties. I’ve also discovered many of the gifts given me, gifts that came along with all the weaknesses I saw.
Now I know that God created each of us for a reason. And though I have the tendency to be down, I mean, really down and all, I also have the capacity to experience inexplicable heights of joy, a high that many people can never even imagine.
It is true that being a melancholic makes me sensitive and easily hurt, but it also helps me to be more understanding of other people. At times, its like I can almost enter into other people’s heart and experience their joys, their sorrows, whatever it is that other people find so hard to grasp.
Melancholics also have the capacity to undergo great sacrifices, and they are loyal and dependable friends. They are also creative and have sharp analytical skills.
For all the difficulties that come with being melancholics, there are also priceless gifts one can’t help but be grateful about. It’s up to us now how we should use the gifts given us, and how we should learn to focus on the brighter side of life no matter how dark some seasons seem to be.
Melancholics have a heavy cross to bear, but they also have a lofty heaven to look forward to. Must anyone fear love for all the sorrows it can render us? Must anyone fear life? When one is able to truly grasp the happiness that comes along with life, with love, one is able to embrace anything, even the heaviest of crosses in order to enter a heaven whose joy overpowers all pain and all sacrifices.
Categories
So what if you like pink?
Women are different from men
I’ve learned that men and women are different. And in order to be your best self, you have to nurture who you are, your masculine or your feminine side.
It is easy to forget who you are and just fit in into the roles that rarely consider the uniqueness of each person. In a corporate setting perhaps, it is so easy to neglect the feminine side of a woman and merely focus on her needed skills in order to achieve corporate goals. What’s needed is her being analytical or compliant to rules and regulations, or her being competitive enough to get promoted and to assert herself. Instead of being treated as a person, as a woman, sometimes she is treated as a man, or worse, as a machine or an asset that needs to perform, nothing more.
It isn’t wrong to expect performance from a person, especially if that’s what the job requires. But let us not forget our true nature, our being human, for it is in being our best selves that we also serve best the people around us.
In being a woman for instance, we need to nurture our emotions, and our need to talk and be heard. We are communicators by nature, and if repressed, we feel that our thinking process is incomplete. If expressed properly however, people benefit from us because we serve as channels of understanding where we are. We provide a flowing channel of emotions that enable us to have insights we may never even arrive at had we remained stiff and detached from our hearts.
Women provide a sense of peace, a sense of beauty and of expression, let no one take it away from you. Women are also healers in that they are able to guide people thru their pain, being more familiar with pain themselves. Like nature, we could be buffers that absorb what is hurtful and blunt, and turn them into something more fluid, accepting and resilient.
Nurture your feminine side, for women are different from men. Shop around and pamper yourself once in a while, if that’s what’s needed to bring out the woman in you. Don’t be afraid to express your eccentricities or your fondness of things men may not have interest in. So what if you like cute figurines or hello kitty characters? So what if you like pink? So what if you needed to talk while processing your ideas? If you are to nurture your feminity, guess who’d be the first ones to be thankful about it?