Choice and Grace

TONY MELOTO

This serene photo on a balmy afternoon shows a family enjoying a simple picnic by the lake, seemingly oblivious to the pervading doom and gloom in many parts of the world.

This is a photo of my family lazing in our backyard in Sta Rosa, where we have soft sunlight at dawn and a cool breeze under tall trees at dusk. The wide-open space of the golf course greens made social distancing a natural practice before it was mandated and face masks unnecessary though mandatory.

God’s ways are indeed strange when I look back at how cold I was initially to the move to this idyllic piece of paradise in the south as it would take me away from old friends and familiar hangouts in Quezon City and the poor communities we have transformed that have become my second home.

But I surrendered to the will of my family, who needed a secure and healthy environment away from the pollution and congestion of big city life.

The words of Jeremiah resonate in my head now when I think of the extreme difficulty for my wife and me, who are most vulnerable if we were trapped in the city during the Pandemic. “For I know well the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare, not woe, plans to give you a future full of hope.”

I often stumble and fumble when I fail to heed the word of God or ignore the voice of people who love me in my single-minded pursuit of heroic causes.

It was in surrendering my will that I gained victory for my family and spared them from unimaginable woe.

We often pray for family and friends who are coping with quarantine and stringent health protocols in the big city and hope that they too will discover the simple life and freedom of space in the countryside one day.

This piece is about the flow of grace when we embrace humility after making bad choices and letting go of the stubbornness that comes with it.

At the core of our life journey are the day-to-day choices we make – big and small, good and bad – and the consequences of those choices. Human justice is about judgment and punishment as a consequence of bad choices. God’s justice is about mercy and forgiveness, about many second chances and handholding of the fallen to get back on their feet again.

I chose to devote my life to building homes for the poor. My wife Lyn chose to build a home for our children. Two complimentary choices anchored on love of God, family and the poor with its ample share of tension between marriage and mission.

Lyn brought light to our home, I brought light outside to the homeless.

To make the world safer for my family, I have to love and serve the poor as family.

In growing spiritual and social movements as well as raising our children, our driving energy came not only from the right things we did but from mistakes we learned from that tested our determination not to give up. Quitting on family and advocacy was never a consideration for me and my wife despite serious differences in opinion and many difficult disagreements.

Amazing grace calms the spirit and heals the heart when we call upon the Lord.

Our humanity is not defined by our mistakes but how often we seek mercy and grace.

This is what marriage is for me.

The person we marry is our choice, as imperfect as we are.

Our children are pure grace and perfect at birth, unblemished by the sins and mistakes of their parents. They are our unmerited gift from God to strengthen the bond of familial love and commitment between two imperfect partners designed differently and sometimes disastrously from each other by their genetic, social and cultural DNA.

Each of us receives a measure of unmerited grace from God – an undeserved favor that he gives to humanity through his son, Jesus’ death on the cross. This is to save many who suffer from the consequences of their choice to ignore, defy or deny God.

Without Jesus, marriage is a powder keg of temper and ego, of pride and vanity, of pettiness and self-righteousness. With Jesus, it is a chalice of grace, kindness, and tenderness, loving, giving, and living for each other.

Still, it is our choice to embrace or reject Jesus.

That picture above which says a thousand words speaks also about a lifetime of day to day decisions to hang on to Jesus.

That decision weighed heavily on my big choice who to marry.

I chose a woman of grace from a Christian community who could bring me back to the Jesus I knew as a man for others in college but lost in the corporate world of ambition and self-promotion.

And we worked hard to stay together. We discovered that it was better to love than to be right. This meant dying to self for our marriage to live.

This is unconditional love that comes with immeasurable grace.

With self-sacrificial love, the home is a harbor of happiness and peace and makes it less difficult for our children to make good choices in their own big life- decisions.

Our four children married volunteers who genuinely cared for the less favored.

They chose to stake their fortune in the Philippines, including the two who are married to foreigners – an Englishman and an American. They saw our country as a land of opportunity contrary to the flow of Filipinos leaving for greener pastures abroad.

They all decided to build their homes and raise our twelve grandchildren next door to us to create a family ecosystem where faith, values and milestones are celebrated together.

At the heart of our wide-open space of grace is the mother of my children, who fought every battle to keep our family whole. She is the living inspiration for our children to become good parents themselves.

When Big Mama calls, everyone drops everything to come. She is the glue that sticks us together, especially to the little ones who know where she hides her treasure trove of goodies.

Soon, our grandchildren will start to leave the nest and make their own big choices – where to study, who to marry, what battles to fight. My eldest grandchild is already dreaming of art school in Melbourne.

Wherever they roam, their heart already knows that there is always that place called home waiting for them, with early morning bike rides, afternoon walks, stargazing on cloudless nights, and picnic by the lake, without a care in the world.

More precious than gold will be the fond memories of these magical moments we will leave behind to those we love long after we are gone.