Gushing

Received a "gushing" email from a friend today... If it were an email regarding a girlfriend, a potential girlfriend or even an ex-girlfriend, I would definitely say he was "kinikilig". But it wasn't about a girlfriend (present, past, or future)... his email was about an answered prayer. Reading his testimony made me ask myself: when did I last "gush" about my answered prayers? When was the last time I felt "kinikilig" about my God?...

When was the last time thinking about the Lord of my life sent shivers up my spine?

We throw around the phrase "falling in love" as haphazardly as we throw our bags around. We experience a few emotional highs here and there and immediately mistake these bursts of feeling for the real thing. Faced with love as its truest, however, our hearts freeze and our psyches harden.

We hesitate to give our deepest, "gushing-est" thanks when they are most deserved and we choose to hold back our most flamboyant expressions of love when they will be most appreciated. And it's not as if we lack the reason to fall in love with our God "with all our soul, all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength", right? To borrow (crudely) from the movie "A Beautiful Mind": He is all our reasons. The problem with us is that we use reason when we shouldn't and we don't when we should. Looking at it this way, it seems such a stupid, nonsensical way to behave. But we continue to behave like this anyway.

Thank God He knows when to apply reason and when to forget it: just reflect on God's paradoxical identity of Justice and Mercy and you'll know what I mean. His patience and understanding for us defy reason. True enough, when all reason fails, trust God to answer with something else. Thank God He applies Love instead of Reason. Instead of punishment, Grace.

So to my friend--you know who you are--thanks for your email. Gave me a check on the difference between "the real thing" and its poor shadow. Reminded me to be more discerning about to whom I give my heart to. That it's also prudent to gush, but only about things worth gushing about. And that there is no other feeling in this world quite the same as "kilig", but only for the (true) Lover of our souls.