Straight From Pastor Ey

Background photo from Electronic Gospel “Have you heard?” That line and others like it are so hard to resist. No wonder at times gossip is labeled as something juicy. Gossip is so yummy. It appeals to our desire to be in the know. Proverbs 18:8 tells us, “There’s nothing so delicious as the taste of gossip! It melts in your mouth.” (CEV) Somehow, it tends to make us feel superior to others not only because we are in the loop but also because the person we are gossiping about did something that we think we will never do. In the study guide of Jerry White’s “ Respectable Sins ,” Stephen Sorenson wrote, “We gossip or lust because of the sinful pleasure we get out of it. At that time, the lure of that momentary pleasure is stronger than our desire to please God. … So when I gossip, I am rebelling against God.” And it doesn’t have to be a lie to be gossip. It can even be true. But what makes it gossip? Somebody wrote, “A tattler tells lies or even truths with the int

That’s  “Seed of Life” in the local dialect. I’m here now down South at Manolo Fortich, Bukidnon, going through the Business Development and Training workshop in the Semilya sa Kinabuhi  business leadership center.  It’s an out-of-the-box training approach  After a much-delayed, two-hour Cebu Pacific flight from Metro Manila to Cagayan De Oro City, we traveled by car for another hour to reach Bukidnon. Semilya’s facilities are clean but spartan. After a simple pinakbet (local ratatouille ) and fried chicken dinner, we had a short orientation about what Semilya is all about. Its mission: “Semilya sa Kinabuhi will be a model of business stewardship and the greatest influence of intimacy and complete obedience towards God.” Simply put, it seeks to show that business and the Bible are actually compatible. I’ll write more about that in future blog posts. Let me share the first four hours of day one. We woke up before 5AM. For an hour, we read the assigned passage

Picture source from Yahoo! News “One in every eleven Filipino Catholics admitted that they sometimes think of leaving the Church.” That is, if we are to believe the Social Weather Station (SWS) survey. (Source: Yahoo! News ) According to SWS, “Having thoughts of leaving the Catholic Church is more common among Catholics who do not consider themselves as very religious, who attend Church monthly at most, and whose church attendance is less now than five years ago.” (Ibid)  [When the survey was released, there were those who questioned its timing. They feel that its release was due to the clash between the government and the Catholic Church on the Reproductive Health law of the former and the “Team Patay” campaign of the latter against the proponents of the said law.] Image source: Yahoo! News Philippines But it appears that Father Robert “The Running Priest” Reyes agrees with the survey results. “We’re hemorrhaging. It’s not massive blood loss but there’s blood loss. I se