Lenten Series Tips: Free Cebu Pacific Flight

Let’s talk about travelling – both the geographic hops and our spiritual skips.  Isn’t travelling exciting? Especially when you’re nailed in a place the rut sense of boredom, seemingly eternal sameness, routinary stress, relational rough edges are nothing but piling up day after day after day. You need a break for Pokwang’s sake!

Before we get to the free lunch tips of this post, let’s swerve a li’l bit to some seasonal flavor of Lent. Let’s assume that Lent is a way of travelling commenced by way of Ash Wednesday, an Amazing Race of sort for 40 days, a copy-and-paste from the 40-year itinerary of the Israelites in the desert. Exodus was both a landmark geographic hop and spiritual skip minus those Habagat backpacks and Gatorade supplement (Mark, I notice one in your gravatar, hehe.) Lent meanwhile is ritually packed as a spiritual escapade – ash, palms, Holy Oil, footwashing, or the Cross. No desert-hopping from Meribah to Massah. The travel for us now is more inward both individually and as communities. Will we dare to travel?

If Lent is too spiritual for you and you really want to move geographically within the season or even thinking of frolicking in Boracay come Good Friday, okay, here’s the leeway:

Will you dare to ride a real train (or any transport mode) while being open to be found by God in between imagining the white sand of Boracay or the summer cold of Baguio?

Mother Teresa discovered her “call within a call” while riding a train from Darjeeling to Calcutta.

CS Lewis got off on the wrong train station in London and realized he had been walking on the wrong direction.

Gandhi was so pained after being shoved to get off a train for simply being dark-skinned. Justice became his life’s passion since that incident. (Anybody who have watched Ben Kingsley’s acting prowess in Gandhi?)

Thomas Merton was moved to believe in God after his travel to Rome, amazed by the towering, old Byzantine churches.

And our classic traveller – St. Paul who was converted on his way to Damascus with his horse (did that make his horse saintly also?)

Travel na kung travel. But remember – God can knock us off anytime at the LRT, trisikad, MRT, boat, plane, helicopter, subway train, habal-habal, horse, bike, tricycle, colorum buses and FX, taxi, or government “for non-official use also” vehicles.

Who knows? Next post na lang about Cebu Pacific. Mahaba na to.

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Photo credit: jill in cottonwood