I had started working on this blog post about the fear of death and the brevity and preciousness of life – I’d already written the body of it – when we heard news of another Filipino tragedy. We’d already received the bad news of two other incidents in the past week…
Just two Sundays ago, an overseas Filipino community in Vancouver, Canada was having a Filipino cultural festival and celebration (the Lapu-Lapu Festival named after our hero), when a speeding SUV rammed into the crowd at the foodstalls and killed 11 people, including a 5-year-old girl. On May 1, in Tarlac, Philippines, 10 people were killed when a speeding bus hit several vehicles that were waiting in a tollgate queue, essentially squeezing a passenger van and SUV into a truck – the riders of the van were headed to a children’s camp (all eight passengers died) while the SUV had a family going to vacation (only the two-year-old son survived).
I’m used to hearing bad news on the news networks in the Philippines, but the past two (although I heard about the Canada story from my dad first) hit home. The Canada story involved a Filipino community abroad – it’s not easy living in a foreign country then you have this tragedy happen to your people, and I also felt connected to them as someone who also lives abroad and is involved with our Filipino community in Armenia (we had just cast our votes last April 20, ahead of the senatorial elections in the Philippines). The May 1 Tarlac story made me really sad because some of the victims were kids were going to a church camp, and it just felt so relatable and terrible…
And then last Sunday, at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in Manila (where I have flown from countless times), an SUV suddenly rammed into the departure entrance area and killed a five-year-old girl and an adult man. The girl’s father, an OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker), had just said goodbye to her and their family several minutes before. The other victim was going to Dubai for work meetings, and he was actually going to celebrate his 30th birthday in a few months. Apparently the SUV driver had just dropped somebody off (bringing their suitcase), and was supposed to drive backwards, but somehow sped forward (we still don’t know how/why), and the barricades did nothing to stop him (also an unspeakable error on NAIA’s part).
Delivering the news to me on Sunday, my dad said, “We should pray for Secretary Vince Dizon [the head of transportation] – he had just attended the funerals of the Tarlac victims and now he’s at another funeral today.”
I’m just grieving with my people and it actually feels superfluous to be expressing this here in this blog post, it feels weird – but I felt that I had to write about it somehow. I guess I wanted to remember those people who died, to somehow make a tribute for them just by talking about them.
We’ve felt anger at how institutions were unable to protect people’s lives. We’ve felt grief for those people who were just living their lives and had beautiful plans, but suddenly it was all taken away from them. We’ve prayed for the healing of people in those three incidents who are still injured. I don’t know, is it God allowing our people to be united in grief before the elections in the Philippines on May 12? And thinking how, especially for the kids, people’s futures were stolen from them by death…
A few days ago, I remember reading in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters how the senior demon, Screwtape, is advising his nephew demon, Wormwood, to “zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’” Let him feel annoyed and gravely insulted when other people interrupt his day, because he believes he owns these 24 hours and they have stolen some from it. Let him feel entitled to an amount of time which is his “own” life, and when he allocates his time to work and volunteering for God’s causes, he should feel pride that he “withdrew” from this deposit of his *own* time to be charitable to these things.
But in reality, he doesn’t own his time, or his life. He owns nothing. “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.”
So this passage from Lewis continues to make me sober in the face of those deaths in the news.
The other night, we watched a Jewish-Christian testimony video where there’s a speaker from New Zealand, Ray Comfort (he was born right after the Holocaust, but what a beautiful last name) – and he talked about how he was a secular Jew but he came to follow Jesus. He also talked about the climate in recent years, since he has a ministry focused on sharing the Gospel.
Interestingly, he also said this: “COVID did a magnificent favor for the church, because it took a whole generation and caused them to face their mortality. You know, young people think, subconsciously, that death is for the elderly. But every year, 54 million people die. 54 million. …And what COVID did is it brought them face-to-face with their own mortality. So when I say to people, ‘are you afraid of dying?’ It widens their eyes. They say, ‘Yeah, a little bit.’ Say, ‘a little bit?’ Are you kidding? You know, God’s placed eternity upon his heart. I know he’s got a fear of death. He’s got a will to live.”
That struck me because of how true it was. It made me remember when I watched Interstellar in the cinema a couple months ago, and when I saw the scenes of people frantically escaping the dust-wracked town and wearing their masks to survive – it struck me how, wow, the whole world felt the same way during COVID just a few years ago. We were all trying to survive too, you know?
Besides losing people to COVID or during the COVID period, this fear, this scrambling to survive became real to me when I began to have bouts of insomnia during those years. I worried myself to sleeplessness, wondering if I’d survive this pandemic to still be alive to do God’s will… I don’t even remember if I explicitly thought about that during those many nights that I couldn’t sleep. Obviously I was stressed about college, too. But I’m sure that my insomnia was exacerbated by living under COVID.
I smiled the other day when an old instrumental song came up on my playlist – I used to have that on repeat at 3am, 4am, as an attempt to help me sleep in those fear-gripped nights (I feel like songs I played then barely helped, but eventually I would drift off to sleep).
I used to play this album called ‘Labyrinth’ by David Baloche. It had beautiful songs wrapped in cello orchestrations that created a restful mind-space that became kind of like a cave I went into when I couldn’t sleep. He wrote certain Bible passages like Psalm 61 (Lead Me to the Rock), Psalm 55 (“I will call to God and the Lord will answer me, I cry out in my distress… and He hears my voice”), Romans 8, and so on – placing them in meditative repetitions that became my lullabies.
Now I don’t have long nights of insomnia anymore. Yes, I survived COVID. But I know He also delivered me from those fears. He taught me to trust in Him in greater degrees as time went on.
Maybe I didn’t realise it then, but His Word was like Theseus’ thread in the dark labyrinth of the Minotaur. Even if I still couldn’t sleep after listening to so many worship songs, His Word was constantly being imprinted on my heart, and that encouraged me during the day and through my struggles. His Word led me forward to face my minotaurs – the tests of character: the struggles I had during college, with relationships, moving houses during the Russia-Ukraine War, my anxiety, and so on – and He strengthened me to slay all of them.
He didn’t make a shortcut for me by taking me out of the labyrinth altogether. But He values the formation of my character more than my comfort. That’s why He allows me to face challenges. It’s like a father allowing his child to trip so they can learn how to walk.
And I realised that my worrying was a sin. I’ve always struggled with this as an overthinker. And my dad had once taught me – back in Nepal so it was a long time ago – that worrying is a sin because it dethrones God in our hearts. We either doubt God’s ability to provide for or protect us, or we assume that we can control the future by our own might. But it’s a hard lesson to apply to one’s own life. I’ve been struggling with it for years, and my insomnia became a symptom of that.
I guess I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t control tomorrow. I don’t even hold control over my own life. He does.
These past months, He’s reminded me that my life does not belong to me. I am made of dust – and yet He holds me in His hands.
(Wow…) He loves me more than I know, protecting me with a wisdom that goes beyond my logic. Even if I have to face many problems and sorrows, one thing remains constant – I can run up into His everlasting arms for comfort and real peace – and joy that lasts longer than happiness.
I find myself needing that more and more, and I find Him filling me with Himself, His peace, more and more.