Category Archives: faith

The Story of Our House

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I was caught off guard one Wednesday night in church last April when I was asked to share on stage what God did in my life during our prayer meeting. Caught off guard not because of the sharing on stage part (Trust me, as a former broadcaster and live show emcee, shyness in front of crowds is not one of my virtues.), but because I was expecting to do it on another day.

Since I haven’t blogged about the story behind our getting a house, I thought I’d share it here by letting you hear me talk about it at Bethel World Outreach Center.

Before you click to listen, I must warn you that I choke up in a few places so if that makes you uncomfortable, you’ve been warned.

Thelma Testimony

People came up to me afterward encouraged by my and Kyera’s experience and up until this day, someone from that night will approach me, reminded of God’s goodness and faithfulness to this single parent, and tell me they’re encouraged.

I’m amazed myself. That a wretch like me, sinful to the core, could be loved by a holy God by sending His son to die in my place, and given a house with just $100 out of my pocket.

God’s Grace, Love, and Mercy blows me away.

Breaking the silence: My voice finds work again!

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Mr Blue in my ottoman; click image for how to set up a portable booth

Since I started reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! and Seth Godin’s Linchpin, I’ve been inspired to take serious steps at resurrecting my old voiceover career. It’s been relatively quiet since I moved back to the US in 2007.

Imagine the blow to my once highly-sought after voice’s ego when my CD demos went ignored by the recording studios I mailed them off to and followed up on painstakingly. The shock! It was sobering. My voice don’t mean jack in the US. Ouch.

I was unemployed for a good four months after landing in September 2007 (my two weeks as a housekeeper at the mall barely counts) and the one thing that I knew how to do from the time I was eighteen and starting off on a simultaneous career in radio, was being a voiceover. My first radio ad was a toothpaste commercial, which was followed by laundry soap, and ultimately led to a steady stream of products and formats: live announcing at fashion shows or corporate presentations, corporate videos, signature voice for network TV, for close to two decades while juggling full-time jobs in radio and the corporate ladder.

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Last weekend, last year. . .

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Kyera and I were flown to Nashville from our humble apartment in Orlando. It was the fruit of a back and forth correspondence with a potential new/old employer that started with a message on Multiply from one of my former bosses that greeted me in my Inbox on New Year’s Day 2009: “We might have an opening for you in Nashville. Hope it works out.”

I was so ecstatic at the possibility that I cried as I read the message on my phone. A flurry of emails, direct messaged tweets, and a few phone calls later, Kyera and I boarded a plane the third weekend of February last year and headed out on an adventure with the hope that life would change for us.

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The cold outside our door

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The bitter, beautiful cold outside our door

The cold outside our door

We made it through our first Winter Storm in Nashville! It’s been equal parts freezing, boring, and fun. I took this and some other pictures and was reminded of how easily cold can sit comfortably outside our hearts, waiting for a bitter thought to pry open a window or a door to our souls, and leave us as cold on the inside.

“I tithe! Why are you not blessing me financially?”

“I read my Bible everyday. Why are you not answering my prayers?”

“Um, God, I’m still sick. Haven’t you noticed?”

The list goes on and on.

No wonder why Paul reminds Timothy to “fan (his faith) into flame”.

May I fall in love with God more and more each day regardless of how He makes and allows each one to unfold.

Time Stand Still

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All 7 lbs, 19 inches of Kyera 2 days after she was born.

Just had to borrow the title of one my favorite Rush songs. Geddy Lee sings about the swift passage of time and how important it is to savor each moment in Time Stand Still.

(Time stand still)
I’m not looking back
But I want to look around me now
(Time stand still)
See more of the people and the places that surround me now
Time stand still
Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger

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Grateful in 2009

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I’m a fallen human who was destined to die until an afternoon in August of 1991 when my boss at KISS FM, Al Torres, asked me two questions that changed my life forever:

If you were to die today, where do you think you would go?

If you died and faced God, and He were to ask you why He should let you into His heaven, what would you tell Him?

My feeble attempts at logical answers revolved around me being a good person and not a murderer or thief, and that at best, being a practicing Roman Catholic, I’d end up in purgatory and hopefully would get prayed up to heaven with each rosary, mass, or prayer said on my behalf.

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Three Seasons in Nashville

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I’ve been blogging a little too much about So You Think You Can Dance lately and neglecting the other parts that The Pseudo Expat is about:  single parenting and Christianity. There was a Filipina on SYTYCD though up until last night so that sort of covered the Filipina-American thoughts.

Some things are a bit too private to talk about so I avoided it until I learned from it and can now discuss it here.

I was driving down Old Hickory Boulevard, admiring the leaves in their different stages of death — explosions of deep reds, yellows, greens, and oranges — as if holding on to dear life in bursts of color defying the inevitable, their shouts of, “We live! We live! We live! Look at us!” falling on the deaf ears of their fallen comrades littering the ground, brown and dry, when the prosaic cycle of life came to mind. It is a beautiful death, this being born a leaf: to be birthed, to live, to color, to wither, and then to die, not unlike us humans.

We come into this world, we live for but a sliver of time, bursting with life, and then we slip into eternity. Something I’ve been thinking of a lot these days. It probably has to do with my turning a new decade last July. I’m thinking more and more in terms of “the rest of my life” and “the second half of my life”; thinking more about the impact, if any, my life has had; thinking about how good, or bad, a parent I’ve been.

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In between Orlando and Nashville

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(Re-posted from Exits & Entrances’ The Beauty of Silence)

It’s our final thirteen days in Orlando, Florida. Thirteen days. My head is still spinning when I think about this and I must admit that it hasn’t fully sunken in that we are driving north to Nashville, Tennessee to restart life anew.

I can’t count the times I thought that we would be stuck here – me in my job as a club concierge at a fancy hotel and K as a receptionist at an eye clinic – or how many times I gave up all hope of ever working in a job that would maximize all of my gifts and abilities; a job that would not feel like a job but would feel like a perfect fit, a glove of my former career.

It was well into my third month at the first hotel I worked at (which is the sister property of where I work now) that I plummeted to the depths of self-pity. There I was, in the first job I could get in the US (not counting my three week stint as a housekeeper) after looking for four months and sending out close to 100 resumes, busing tables, replenishing drinks, making gallons of coffee and preparing buffet presentations for high-paying hotel guests, every day. My fingers would sometimes get smeared with leftover food, my muscles would strain from lifting cases of soda and beer, my mind, seemingly slowed from lack of stimulation.

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