BUYING rosaries has become one of my hard habits to break. I don’t know if this is going to be a new collection because I can’t put rosaries in the same level as my piggies, books, and travel souvenirs.
My most recent purchases were the pink and black rosaries at the Sacred Heart Parish while waiting for the priest to finish his homily one Sunday. Oops, did I just inadvertently reveal that I don’t listen to homilies? But I can multitask: listening to a homily while buying rosaries.
Family and friends will probably be shocked with that revelation since I’m neither religious nor pious.
In “The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth,” M. Scott Peck wrote, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
And because life is difficult, wonder no more on why some people rely on prayers to survive or at least to face Mondays especially after a long weekend. That’s why Sunday is the time to reflect and refresh, to prepare us for another week.
I may not be religious and pious but in January 2021 when my blood pressure went crazy, no thanks to the pandemic and my stay-home strategies during the lockdowns—eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow I’ll eat, drink, and be merry again—I asked God to please help me control my high blood pressure. I went on a no-red-meat diet then and lost 25 pounds that year.
It was in October 2021, nine months later, that I saw a video of Dr. Josephine Grace Rojo-Tan talking about the low-carb diet. This caught my curiosity, making me watch all of her other videos, which then led me to other low-carb doctors.
But I had many reasons then not to follow the low-carb diet yet: a birthday in October, birthdays in November, Christmas and New Year’s Eve in December, birthdays in January, Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day in February. I couldn’t imagine eating lechon and dinuguan without rice, thus, the reluctance to be a low-carb dieter.
By the fourth week of February 2022, I had run out of excuses, er, occasions to justify the high-carb intake, so, I finally went low-carb.
It was only when I began to notice that my blood pressure was going down that I remembered my novenas about finding a cure to my hypertension. So, it’s true: God answers our prayers in His time. But we have to do our part.
Faith has always kept me sane. If not for a supreme being that I could respect and look up to, I’m sure I’d be aimlessly roaming around daily, or staring at nothing the whole day, with no hashtag goals to work on.
