What I Learned Most at the Recently Concluded Camp Meeting

These past two camp meetings, I have
been assigned to work with the children in a separate class. I spent the mornings and the afternoons teaching them scripture songs, memory verses, Bible stories, and the basics of our fundamental beliefs. This meant that I missed four of the five daily plenary sessions, since I am able to attend only the morning worship and the evening session each day.

But this has not hindered me from receiving some very important reminders from the Lord. One of them I learned through a mistake I made while teaching.

I was doing a lesson on the Judgment and the Book of Life, how we need to get our names written in that book so that we be judged worthy of eternal life. I was trying to make it easier for children to understand the requirements. I told them, “If you are good children, doing good things, helpful to mother and father, kind to other children, obedient to the commandments, your name will be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.”

Right? Right?

The children all agreed. “Who wants to go to heaven?” Every hand went up. “Then be good kids, alright?”

A resounding yes!

I was happy with the attentiveness and the response, contented happy. I was doing my job as well as I could. I smiled from the inside. But then I glanced at my presentation notes, and in a split second I knew I made a grave mistake.

Of the way to be registered in the Book of Life, my notes said, “Receive Jesus into the life.”

Had I mentioned that? Had I told them that they had to have Jesus in their lives so they could be obedient, kind, good kids? Had I told them they couldn’t do it on their own? Had I told them Jesus died to make it possible? Had I told them how to receive Jesus?

Just then, one child or another began to be distracted from the class and in the next split second I was losing their attention.

So I let the thoughts slip by. I had them sing songs, memorize their verses, and color in their activity sheets. I drilled them on the sanctuary furniture, and on which things are holy and which are common. They really enjoyed that. Then we prayed and I let them go to their parents.

But today, more than a week later, it still bothers me.

So this is how it happened. This is one of the reasons why when I look around me and inside me, I see “adults” who have difficulty grasping that we are not saved by our own works, that it is the blood of the righteous Son of God alone that can cleanse us from sin, that only through Him can we have righteousness, that good works apart from an intimate, saving relationship with Him (if that is at all even possible), can avail nothing.

It is what we have been taught even as children.

God help me. God help every Sabbath School teacher all over the world. God help every parent and teacher. God help the children.

What Moves the Earth?

Early this morning, as I made my routine visit to our vegetable garden, a little prayer kept running in my mind: 

"Please, Lord, help the seeds to sprout. I have no life to give them but You are the Source of all life."

I knelt low and checked the radish and pechay seedbed, and lo and behold, some seeds have already begun to sprout. One here and a couple there. Amazed and grateful, I drew even closer and saw the teeny tiny crack in the teeny tiny seed, where a white-yellowish stem had come through and struck root in the soil. And then the thought:

“But I buried that seed!” Not very deep, of course, but deep enough to cover it entirely. Now the seed has emerged to the surface, having pushed away the soil above it.

I look around at all the vegetables and flowers and the big trees. They all started this way and have continued this way - moving the earth by simply reaching higher and wider and deeper.

So what moves the earth, really?

In the garden today I realized: growth.

The development of all our powers is the first duty we owe to God and to our fellow men. No one who is not growing daily in capability and usefulness is fulfilling the purpose of life. In making a profession of faith in Christ we pledge ourselves to become all that it is possible for us to be as workers for the Master, and we should cultivate every faculty to the highest degree of perfection, that we may do the greatest amount of good of which we are capable. Christ’s Object Lessons, 329.2

Lessons the Weeds Taught Me

“Laluma paglimpisa (Make the blade go deeper),” my mother said as she came up behind me weeding in our vegetable garden. Almost immediately I recognized the life lesson in her words.

My mother is one of my two gardening mentors, the other one being my father. Between the two of them, I feel like a little child playing in the dirt: Most of the time, I get dirty, I don’t know what I’m actually doing, but I have fun anyway. Besides, gardening is a wonderful time to be alone, work my underused muscles, meditate, and learn something new.

Whenever I come to the garden, I always think, “This is my heart.” As I struggle to break the ground with a hoe, sweat streaming down my face, I tell myself how I must persevere and be patient because God is at least this patient with the fallow ground of my heart.

So when Mama said I should make the blade go deeper, I knew that the lesson for today was to allow the Word of God to take a deeper, closer search into my heart, and take sin out of my life by the roots.

The work of sanctification is not just about the dos and don’ts. It’s not just about correcting the behaviour that shows. When I’m only cutting away the weeds at the surface, it won’t be long before they come up again because the roots are still there and very much alive. The blade must go deeper. The wellsprings of the heart must be cleansed of selfishness.

Truth must reach down to the deepest recesses of the soul, 

and cleanse away everything unlike the spirit of Christ…. 

                                                -EGW, Our High Calling

The thought also led me to remember a tip that a good friend told me a couple of years ago: “When you’ve pulled out the weeds by the roots, make sure to cast them away from your garden. Don’t leave them there because they have a way of taking up root again.” This was also very true in my spiritual life. How many times have I “decided” to quit a bad habit only to come back to it later because I kept the uprooted sin close? Countless.

It’s like the time I decided to never read fiction again, but kept the books in the shelves anyway. There would be times when I’d look at the books and think, “there was that part in this one that I particularly liked.” And I’d take that book out and scan through it, find the part I was looking for, and spend the rest of the afternoon reading through to the end of the book.

Cast the uprooted weed away.

So I strike deeper into the ground, pull out the weeds with my other hand and throw them on top of a growing pile to be taken away later.

These are what I was reminded of today among the peanuts, eggplants, talong, sili, and what-nots. These are the kind of lessons I learn in the classroom that my father had enclosed with a net fence – itself another object lesson, another story. But that’s for another gardening day. Today I was only beginning to prepare the soil for planting.

I got dirty, I had fun, and I learned what I ought to be doing.God be glorified.