What is God Telling Us

What is God telling us as the dengue epidemic continues to kill our children and our loved ones? 

What is God telling us as the pangs of polio surface again after being declared extinct years ago?

What is God telling us in the bangus fish kills and the African swine flu endangering our food supply?

What is God telling us in the recurring earthquakes in many different parts of our archipelago?

What is God telling us when our grains and vegetables ready for harvest are destroyed by destructive floods and eaten by new pests never heard before?

What is God telling us when we see our rivers turned septic tanks? 

What is God telling us as we see plastics and styrowashed ashore in our gulfs, bays, and seas?

What is God telling us when we see dead bodies on the streets and on dark alleys killed because they are considered “not humans” anymore because they are drug addicts?

What is God telling us in the agonizing faces of poor fishermen driven away from our familiar fishing grounds by Chinese boatmen?

What is God telling us when He Himself is cursed, bishops are threatened, and priests are killed?

What is God telling us as our youth are taught confusing moral ideologies about gender and life and love?

What is God telling us when babies killed before they are born keep piling up and later on are flushed down like trash?

Maybe God is telling us something, or maybe they are just coincidences, and maybe I am just imagining. We will not know if God has a message or not, if we do not pray. 

To pray is not just to say prayers and sing hymns, to kneel and stand and bow. To pray is to allow God to take over us so that we may see as He sees, we may feel as He feels, we may think as He thinks, we may love as He loves, we may be disturbed in our complacency, we may repent and turn away from sin.

Where is God in the series of natural calamities we are experiencing? There are scientific explanations surely; but could there be a heavenly message too? Where is God as we see before our eyes human frailty being extolled and sin being considered exemplary? There are sociological-psychological explanations; but could there be divine challenges too?

When we remove God from our lives, we will not be able to understand life itself. We will soon forget who we are. We will blur our identity and not know where we are going. We will be like floating paper boats in the stormy sea. We will be like floating logs in the muddy river of ecological rape.

More important than the question “Who am I?” is the question “Whose am I?” When we forget that we belong to God, God will remind us about it. When we play deaf and ignore His voice calling us to repent, we put ourselves in peril. There will be a day of reckoning. We cannot run away from the justice of the Just God. 

Is God not telling us something in these calamities and crimes, in these abuses and abominations, in these murders and blasphemies? Where is God in our lives? Where is God in the Filipino? Where is God in this land? Where is God in Pangasinan?  What is happening?

Let us listen in silence to the whisper of the Lord. Lord, what do you want to tell us? Lord, disturb me now as Amos disturbed Israel. Jolt me now as Lazarus was shaken; for the rumbling You create in my soul can only make me better. 

Amen.