When your discipler is broken...

Dedicated to Ate Flor. Yes, you. :D Love you!

Guys aren't the only ones with the macho attitude, the I-have-to-be-strong, nobody-should-ever-see-a-weak-part-in-me mentality.

Girls have that too. I, for one, have such an attitude. I think it stemmed up from realizing that crying never really made things easier. As an infant and a toddler, I bawled to get something - anything - I wanted. I think I began to realize that tears had lost its magic for me when I was about seven or eight. All the other times beyond that age, I was humiliated whenever I cried, and-I cried whenever I was humiliated.

You get the point: I saw crying as a weakness. (Sometimes, I still do.)

This is one part of my life which God is still refining. I rarely cry in front of other people, not even my family. Not my friends. Definitely not my disciples. Often do people expect other people to behave the way they do; I expected the same behavior from relatively all others - from my family, from my disicples. I expected the same from my discipler.

So when my dear, dear discipler wept to us yesterday afternoon... well, I was sort of stunned. Not that I hadn't been expecting it. I had heard some about the difficulties she had been and still is going through right now, and she has already shared how God was teaching her as well to disclose to others. Baka daw kasi bumaba ang tingin sa kanya.

But no, at that moment, when she was sharing to us, fighting to smile through her tears, sharing to us her hopes and fears, I couldn't help thinking: I have yet to see her more beautiful than she is now. I have yet to see God greater in her life than at this moment. How lovely, lovely she is.

I have always wondered why the statement "Jesus wept" was given a verse on its own in the Bible. It seemed too trivial, too small a thing to be bothered to be even recorded. Now I believe it must have been written there to show Jesus' connection and ability to relate to other humans. It was to show that God, after all, does understand his creations above anyone else. It was to show that He was something other than a legalistic, cruel, stoic Being who did nothing but execute punishments; Someone more than a vending maching humans pester to grant them their wishes and desires.

Similary, I believe there is a bond created between the mentor who shares not just the joyous, but the painful as well, to his / her disciples. It implies a beautiful trust, an offering of a part of this older person's life.

What do you when the person you look up to is in a broken state? You look at his / her reaction. You look at how he / she handles it. The person is, after all, your mentor. It might seem or sound heartless, but really, once you have accepted your position as a learner from this person, you inevitably, unconsciously try to learn from this person's every move, every word, every attitude - even at the person's expense. How privileged the learner is who is able to learn wise things from a wise mentor who reacts wisely in every circumstance! Just as the the twelve disciples and early Christians learned much from The Great Discipler's brokenness, so do we - must we - learn from our mentors and leaders in their brokenness.

Now I see how privileged I am.

And no, hindi bumaba ang tingin ko sa kanya. If anything, my respect for her has deepend two-fold.