Escape To Egypt

“Why would King Herod look for my Child to kill Him?” she asked Joseph.
“I don’t know…” Joseph replied.
Mary asked him where they would go.
“The angel told me to go to Egypt with you and our Child, and stay there until he tells us to leave,” Joseph replied.
Mary felt a certain joy when Joseph stated “our Child” to her even though he knew that the Child Jesus was miraculously born of the Holy Spirit, and not by natural means. She appreciated Joseph for his kind gesture, and told him so.
“The Child is the Lord. It is our duty to take care of Him and to protect Him. I will be a father to Him…” he told Mary.

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Parched Fields

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This question of Uncle Gadong rang in my ears as I sat at the base of the Ambuklao tower in the western field of Lanat, San Manuel, Tarlac, my birthplace.
He asked me this question sometime in November 1961 when he visited us. He is the younger brother of my mother Francisca Lacierna Mercado.
My mother and Uncle Gadong Lacierna were both born in San Clemente, Tarlac, and both grew up there. They had other siblings – Uncle Kardo, Uncle Quirino, and Aunt Ninay. All of them were born in San Clemente to Francisco Lacierna and Victoria Lucero.
“What is your dream? What do you want to be?” Uncle Gadong asked me again. He was holding my report card in his hands, and he saw that I was given very high grades in the first and second grading periods by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Conchita Lorenzo-Fernando.

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Sunflowers

Edmund de los Reyes and Carla Quinzon were both sophomore students of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. They were also members
of a Christian campus organization called Campus Crusade for Christ.
In September 1973, a year after the declaration of martial law all over the Philippines by President Ferdinand E. Marcos, a very strong typhoon struck Central Luzon, killing many people and submerging many towns of Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac with the floodwaters it caused. The typhoon’s local name was Welming.
U.P. Campus Crusade for Christ launched a project called Aid for Welming Victims. The project aimed to gather donations of food, clothing, money, and other items that could be of use to the victims of the typhoon.

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Coming Home

Kara sang well. It was amazing how she memorized the lyrics of the song at such a young age.
As she sang, my thoughts wondered to the time when my mother Francisca Lacierna Mercado, and her younger sister Ninay, fetched their sick brother Gadong who escaped from his Japanese captors during the infamous Death March in April 1942…

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Back To The Parthian Empire

The Magi, their families, and their servants slept in the tents they put up in a field near the house where the Child was. It was already past midnight when they slept, and the big star which they saw in the east shone over the village.
That night, Melchor had a dream.
In his dream, he saw the same angel who spoke to him, the one who told him to see the Child in Bethlehem and bring Him gold as a gift. In his previous dream, the angel’s face was glad when he told Melchor to visit the Child in Bethlehem, together with his friends Gaspar and Balthazzar.
This time, in his current dream, the angel’s face was stern. He warned Melchor not to go back to Herod after their visit to the Child.

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