The Guinayangan Republic

I grew up under the steady and nurturing guidance of my parents. It may have been the fact that I was so sickly when I was born that every single doctor that saw me told my parents that I wouldn’t last the week, but my mother was especially caring for me. We may have been poor, but I was never lacking in attention and care by my mother.

Fortunately, my mom’s tendency to be over-protective was balanced by my father’s firm and Godly guidance that I grow up as a guy: wounds and scratches, broken windows, lizard-in-my-pocket, mud-on-my-cheeks, slingshot skirmishes that constitute a boy’s childhood. While my mother cleaned up my lacerated knees and made sure I had milo every morning and took my vitamins every night, my father took me to community basketball leagues and introduced me to isaws, fishballs, and bruce lee movies. While my mother attempted to inject some culture in me by enrolling me on piano lessons (I lasted for about two sessions, I think), my father took me fishing, bought me boxing gloves, made me a makeshift punching bag, and bought me a mountain bike, which left me pasted on a wall after I forgot to break while I was speed-turning on a steep slope. He even bought for me my first ever gift to a girl classmate I liked – a troll doll I never would have thought of giving to a girl. Why would you give such an ugly thing to a beautiful creature, after all?

I remember when I was around seven years old. My father allowed me to spend my summer vacation at my grandfather’s house in Guinayangan, Quezon – my father’s hometown, alone; seven bumpy hours of travel time and a couple of hundred kilometers separated me from my parents. Naturally, my mother was against the idea. My father was firm, “lalake yang anak mo. Kailangang matuto yang mag-isa.” (Your child is a boy. He has to learn to live alone.) Entrusted to my grandparents and several of my father’s siblings, I spent the summer on the beach.

The summer turned out to be a boy’s dream. For two months, my feet were covered with wounds from the sharp rocks on the beach, which I dived in every other day. I got bitten by a dog on my ass (I kid you not) when I tried to steal kaimito (star apple) from a neighbor. I spent every afternoon choosing half a dozen or so comics that my grandmother and I rented (there was no electricity at the town back then so no tv, or anything) so we’ll have something to read every night. My cousins and I played on the streets all day every single day. I first came to love oral storytelling on my grandfather’s lap. I blew off my allowance on champoy and siopao. My cousins took me to the shore and we followed the water up the ‘river’. We hiked on the forest and came across an NPA camp. If I could wake up early enough and catch the low tide, we scoured the uncovered miles of the beach looking for stranded fish, crabs, and one time, even a baby octopus. There was also a girl, but that’s another story altogether.

Two weeks before school was about to start, my father took me home. I returned to Quezon a year later, and spent every summer vacation there hence. Never in my life had I ever been as busy than when I was a boy.

I have no idea how to raise a daughter, but I have a good blueprint on how to raise a son. My parents raised me well. I could come crying home, secure in the knowledge that my mother would wash my wounds and make the hurt go away whenever accidents ended my childhood adventures. I would also be confident to take on new and amazing adventures the very next day, because my father has given me the courage and strength, and he has encouraged me to explore more and more.

The purpose of parenthood is to rear up children who could one day be good parents themselves. Much as a parent would want to take care of their children, it is only the cruel parent who protects their children from every single challenge, every single hardship, every single hurt. They would end up with adult children – those who have grown old but never grown up. My father and my mother are good parents simply because they raised me in a way that I could stand on my own – even if they’re not around.

God is of the same way. When we are new believers, He makes His presence known to us and envelops us in His hands as we crawl around. Being a good parent, however, He does not want us to crawl around for the rest of our lives. Slowly, He raises us up and gradually withdraws His hands so that we may learn to stand and walk on our own. This is the only way we can grow – for there is no room for faith where certainty dwells. As C.S. Lewis said in his famous letters, when a man who stumbles and looks at the universe and sees no presence of his God yet continues to stand up and obey, that is the moment when God is most pleased.

:by wandering storyteller

Repost From Still Earth Bound