Innocence Returned: Prayer of a Survivor
366 days. 8,784 hours. 527,040 minutes. A lot of things can happen in one leap year. Indeed, I have taken the mighty leap this past 2008. When things have been said and done, when your future has been decided by people who play God, the real God does the saving in the nick of time. A survivor was lost…then found this past year. Deliverance was granted.
Thank you Lord for that fateful night in Fully Booked in the Fort last March when I met my old highschool classmate and his mom who rescued me from the path of least resistance which leads to a minefield. God is good and He does have a plan for everyone. I am in a better place now. And for the first time in seven years, I am spending a Christmas break at home without worrying about papers to grade, deadlines to meet and bosses to please. It is indeed a homecoming. Though I always go home at the end of the day, when I went home last May 15 from work, there is a feeling that I am finally and truly home again.
This coming 2009, as I turn 30 in four months time, I pray that God will deliver me from people or institutions who see me as a utility function that needs to be maximized subject to a cost constraint or its equivalent dual program of me being a cost function that needs to be minimized subject to a utility function. I also pray that God will make me more aware of people’s intentions. I also pray to the Lord that He will deliver me from people, specifically people at work, who decide my future without my knowledge and consent and will eventually make me suffer in the end because of my ignorance or naivete. I also hope that He will deliver me from people who wash their hands clean out of self-preservation.
The past year Lord, I thank you for making me aware of false promises and Trojan horses. It was indeed an answered prayer.
I also ask for God’s blessings to keep my mom and kid brother safe from harm all the time. I also ask for His gift of wisdom in making decisions and His gift of good health for me and my family.
Though there are a lot of people who did me wrong where forgiving is fairly easy, the forgetting part is more arduous than what I have expected. Going back to that place once or twice a week to finish my Ph.D. is extremely difficult for me. Every step I take in those halls reminds me of a past badly shortchanged I’d rather erase from memory, as if it never existed in my life. I just hope and pray that this coming year, I will finish my remaining 12 units of course work and 6 units of thesis within the soonest time possible so that I can finally and completely move on with my life as I aspire for better things.Lord, as I study Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility in school next term, please grant me the humility to learn from my experience in that place where I will ironically learn these things from. Being asked to report to work in between contracts with no pay and be humiliated by the dismal state of my office prove to be very difficult situations to reconcile with the teachings.
Lord, I also pray that I will get my tenure in Assumption College come Summer 2009 so that I can finally make long-terms plans in my life. This tenure was never granted by my past employer despite 7 years of dedicated, wholehearted and passionate Outstanding service, as a student, professor, and administrator. And Lord, I really don’t want to go back. I am happier now where You have led me. I am grateful for the warm hearted people at work, the very eager and considerate students, and the very nurturing superiors You blessed me with. I ask you dear Lord to bless me with very positive and uplifting experiences this coming year so these shortcomings will be finally buried in the dark abyss of my past never to be recalled again.
When God closes a door, He opens a window. As I have witnessed the realities of life and people’s self-preserving intentions at best, I did lose part of my innocence to the world.
A prayer for a better 2009, for a richer and fuller life, a return to innocence, by a survivor of the past year.
“Return To Innocence” (1994) - Enigma from “The Cross of Changes” (1993)
That’s not the beginning of the end
That’s the return to yourself
The return to innocence
Love - Devotion
Feeling - Emotion
Love - Devotion
Feeling - Emotion
Don’t be afraid to be weak
Don’t be too proud to be strong
Just look into your heart my friend
That will be the return to yourself
The return to innocence
If you want, then start to laugh
If you must, then start to cry
Be yourself don’t hide
Just believe in destiny
Don’t care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don’t give up and use the chance
To return to innocence
That’s not the beginning of the end
That’s the return to yourself
The return to innocence
Don’t care what people say
Follow just your own way Follow just your own way
Don’t give up, don’t give up
To return, to return to innocence.
If you want then laugh
If you must then cry
Be yourself don’t hide
Just believe in destiny.
