welcome home - acquaintance program 2016

Today as we officially welcome to our home our Grade 7 brothers, our grade 11 brothers, a brother undergoing the bridge program, and our new faculty we pray that the warm welcome we have accorded them may make them feel at ease, at rest, appreciated and at home.

Home is where you feel you are safe.  Makasala ka man, maakigan ka man, and yet you know and you are in fact assured that you are accepted, loved, appreciated and forgiven.  As I often say, reprimand if there is a need to reprimand; be angry if there is a need to be angry – that is still formative.  But do not hate, because when you hate, kon may kaugot na sa imo tagipusuon, then you could no longer see goodness in the person, and when you could no longer hope for goodness in that person, whatever you do is no longer formative.

Home is where you feel you are safe.

Home is also relationship.  Relationships does not come overnight.  It cannot be created and completed in one acquaintance program.  It takes time.  It is a process.  Probably we start a few meters apart and then each day, each week we start to take tiny steps toward each other.  It will take a month, perhaps a year or even years, when we at last begin to see each other eye to eye.  The amount of time we spend with each other, the amount of time we waste with each other will determine the width and height and depth of that relationship.  That is why our presence is important, working together, eating together, playing together, talking nonsense together, laughing together.  Formation is relational.  It is not enough to give conferences or sermons or holding classes anymore.  Probably the high school would notice, that when they take my hand to bless, they would feel that their hair is pulled one way or the other or they feel a tap or even a thump on their skulls and foreheads.  I am not being cruel.  It is my way of saying "I notice you, I don't just see you, I notice you, I know you" and I am giving you my 5 second attention as I walk pass down the hallway.  My way of assuring you that you are at home and very familiar to me.

We have our many ways of showing this to each other but the fact is, it is the amount of time we spend with each other that makes us at home with each other.  Home is relationship and only then when things become relational can we truly form.

Welcome home.