The last few months of 2008 also known as "my first few months in Houston"

After Joshua left for Houston on our Anniversary...

September - i spent most of the first week being depressed and missing my husband so much. Then Delia Casas envited to me a women retreat in Baguio. I was hesitant to go but God is convicting me to go to get away from all the depression I'm into. The Retreat turned out to be a good thing for me and there i was remeinded that God is working im my life and that He wants me to trust him more especially in the situation i am. During the retreat also i was so blessed to hear from Joshua that the Immigrant Petition that we are waiting for was already approved and that we can start the Visa Application.


October- I got involved in teaching a class in our church outreach program. I got so busy also working on my visa papers. On October 20, my visa was approved. Josh on the otherhand is considering going on moving to a new Job.

November- I am so excited to be able to be with my husband. On November 14, 2008 i left the Philippines. The travel was so long but so worth it since i can be with my husband and be able to meet his family and friends.

Josh gave me an i-phone as a welcome gift. I so love this device, i think this is the coolest thing ever!

Grocery Shopping! I can't believe how big stores are here and how i was overwelmed by the numerous choices.



Josh showed me around Houston, we went to Menil Park in these photo.

I also was able to celebrate Thanksgiving. We went to Hempstead and all the family gathered and enjoyed turkey, ham and other yummy food. Dad, gave a short history of why we have Thanksgiving. We played a game and fire some gun. Gun firing really scares me and I never have fire a real gun before. Josh taught me how fire it properly, the first time i click the trigger i think my scream was louder than the sound of the gun. I was shaking after that gun firing adventure.

December - this was a busy month for us. We moved to our new apartment. We have lots of gathering, parties, and my parents and sister came to visit here in Houston and Heidi and her family arrived from PNG for their 6 month furlough. We also had our two receptions which our friends hosted for us. Then I also had my first Christmas here celebrated with the Crank Family at Hempstead. Then had my first road trip going to Alabama to visit my sister for the new year and then went also to Georgia to visit Samuel and Aimee.

Our Apartment complex.



Our apartment before cleaning and organizing. 95% of our stuff is Joshua's from when he was still a single and 75% of which are books!





Our apartment after...





We had a great deal with our furnitures, we just spent $1500 on all of it.

Oh I also experience first snow fall for the first time. They said that it hadn't snow in Houston for years so I'm lucky to be here when it happened.




Christmas Holidays:

We had a chance to get all the family in one photo.


here are some photos i got from our i-phone.









Road trip to Alabama and Georgia!

It's been a long while

wow, i can't believed how long has it been since i last posted an entry. There has been lots of events that happened that i failed to share.

Anyway, i will try to catch up.

Teaching

This past 4 weeks i was given an opportunity to teach kids again. I was assigned to teach 7-8 years old in our children outreach ministry. I love the experience and I'm so glad that I was able to be around children again after a year of not working as teacher. I do really love children and it really gives me so much joy just being around them, learning and doing fun stuff with them.

The 4 weeks of teaching made me want to reminisce my past 4 years of teaching... In the 4 years i have lots of nice memories of being a teacher. The best memories will be meeting different children and getting to know how special they are. As a teacher i spend a lot of time thinking about each of my pupils and try to observed and understand their temperaments and pray for each of them. And in the 4 years of teaching here are some of the experiences and children that i will always remember:

-my pupils greeting me "Good morning, Ms. Nacion!" in a peculiar intonation.

-the boy who just after i told the class that i will not entertain non-math related question, will frantically raise his hand in the middle of problem solving and ask "Ms. Nacion can we sing the "with Christ in my vessel" song".

-times when you decided to sports new hairstyle or just wear a new shade of lipstick, student will instantly comment on it as you enter the classroom. Sometime i will feel like i'm in this celebrity show that either praise or ridicule celebreties for their appearance, or a contestant of "America's Next Top Model" being scrutinized by more than 10 judges. And hear comments like, "teacher i don't like your lipstick", the other one will say "no, it's nice", the funniest one was a group of girls debating whether i am still pretty or not for cutting my hair short.


-Christian: a cute little boy who is very smart but very hyperlexic. He likes all subject, gets excited about singing time and will just burst out something in the middle of the class. There was a time when we are studying math and while im explain he pranctically raise his hand and when i called him he stood

-Justin: a boy who comes from a very messed up family, and has attitude issue, will always find away to irritate me and openly say that he hates me. Only to find out that he just wants attention. I was given a chance to tutor him after class and during the time i spent with him I was able to understand him and why he has this kind of attitude. I was glad that i was able to talk about Jesus and how He loves him a lot. I found a soft spot in his heart and im glad to be able to minister to him even for awhile before he was expelled from the school.

-Samuel: one of the student in my advisory class. He is a smart boy, he loves English and speaks very fluently with it. He likes to read books and tell stories. But i don't with the other boys in the class, he is always being bullied but rarely that i see him retaliate toward the other boys treatment to him. I tried to comfort him though by showing interest in what he does and listen to his stories. One day his mom wrote me a letter and it was so sweet she mentioned that one of the reasons Samuel wants to go to school was because of me. That was really a nice encouragement to me to continue being a caring teacher.

These are just some of the memories I have and I will always remember how wonderful it is to be a teacher.

Our anniversary

One Funny morning...

the last couple of months before joshua left... we often had a rather amusing morning.

I'm having hard time sleeping at night so my sweet husband will let me stay in bed a little longer but sometimes i extend sleep a little longer than his grace period so josh job is to wake me up and he can really so be creative in how to wake me... so my morning can go from waking up with kisses to waking up to a bed shaking or someone jumping on bed...

but one morning was different... no kisses, no pulling, no bright lights, no shaking and jumping... i wake up by my self and when i opened my eyes here is what greeted me that morning...


little bears looking at me... (joshua wasn't in the room that time) so i was a bit surprised how did the bears get there. Of course no one will do that except my husband... i was laughing so hard that morning.

a little background about the tebby bear joke... one day i was with josh on bed. Josh is working and I'm trying to put a new SIM card on my cellphone, it took me awhile to figure out how to open the phone so i placed the SIM card just beside but when i was about to put it on the phone the SIM was no where to be found. We look all over the room and couldn't find it. It was only the two of us and teddy on the bed. Josh didn't get it because he's busy working so we conclude that it was the teddy who got it. Until now we haven't found the SIM card, it's really a mistery to us. So our joke is that all the bears in the house are schemers and plotting to overtake us and that they move when we are not looking.

Some happenings in naga.

last week was a very busy week for the catholic community here in Naga. It's the festival of their patron. This festival is the biggest marian festival in the Philippines so this is really being taken seriously by the people of Naga. But of course to some it is a source of annoyance.

Some People really don't get the point of their own festival(aside from the more obvious points missed in the Bible). So during the festival that supposed to honor their patron saint, there are street parties with people making so much noise, music that is not edifying and has nothing to do with what they are celebrating, and dj shouting "hey people in the house, make some more nosie" as if the heart pounding noise that they are making is not yet enough and fire some firecrackers at 2:30 in the morning!. And then there are overflowing of achoholic drinks and of course some people just drink in gusto and get drunk (so some go to masses the next day with hang over from last night drinking sessions), then there are all these street vendors that blocks the traffic and people littering all around. By the way, our place is in with in the main celebrating area so we are witness to these perrenial activity.

Im not maligning or something, it's not only me that observes these umpleasant happening even the catholic bishop is againts all this. But this has become the tradition and this tradition degenerates... What is really the essence of this festival? Do all the people attending it knows what they are celebrating or they are just there for the fun and profit they can get out of the feista. Just like celebration of Christmas, most people are missing the point...


from the inside of our church, you need to excuse yourself going inside the gate because vendors are blocking the driveway.

The street becomes a market overnight. You can find all sorts of stuff on sale...

We are in the coner of the street going to the Basilica where the patron is.
The sides of our church was occupied by vendors (without even asking permission from the church)

Symbols

I've been spending a lot of time recently studying the covenants and sacraments... two aspects of Christian theology that seem rather connected and which I feel have layers of meaning that I've never really understood. I find it interesting that when God makes covenants with people and this relationship is intended to remain for future generations there is a sign, something tangible, physical, involving the senses and not just any sign... the sign is involved in the relationship. When the rain comes down and all creation sees the bow in the clouds it is a reminder of a promise to not flood the earth again, when Abraham is promised a great nation with a prosperous future, the anatomical element most involved in that process is marked. But the really interesting ones to me are the sabbath and the Lord's supper. The sabbath seems to be both the sign and the expected resolution. The Jews are to take part in a restful celebration which only the prosperous, at peace, and landed could really be expected to have. In an agricultural society you don't take days off during peak periods unless you already have more than you need. And the idea of taking a year off is totally absurd. Only a nation with incredible prosperity could allow everyone to take a year off. And so they take a day off to experience by faith a taste of what they are promised. The Lords supper is even more complex... complex because there are so many symbols at work in upper room meal that it is like a venn diagram of Hebrew theology. The night before the passover is when the people remember the blood of the lamb presented to the angel of death as a model of substitutionary atonement, Jesus then says that the cup is the new covenant in my blood, inaugurating the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel where a law written on people's hearts, the Holy Spirit indwelling, God dealing with the individual rather than the nation and personal forgiveness will be the relationship. But what does the symbol have to do with the relationship? The way that sacrifices worked in the Old Testament was commonly that of a shared meal between the individual, the community and God. In the same way, this is intended to place focus on the new community, a community of even more complete access and community with God through Jesus, the once for all sacrifice, and through that a community with people called out from every tongue and tribe and nation. Since the sacrifice of Christ ends the need for other sacrifices and inaugurates a new mode of relationship the symbol of a meal, the most communal point in both Ancient Near Eastern Custom as well as Greco-Roman culture (and in most other cultures in the world) so the symbol appropriately points to the nature of the covenant.