Aside from all the other things He is, all the other titles He has acquired, to me God is the Father of all.

                When I was six years old, my biological dad started having stroke and because of his sickness, I did not get to spend much time with him. You can say that even when he was around, I did not feel the secure fatherly presence and this made me different from most of the kids I knew. I excelled in school not because I was smart, I was actually a slow learner but I had the determination. I became more serious and responsible than some kids my age because people kept telling me how my mom relied so much on me. But even though I had a tough facade, in reality I was very sensitive and I thought a lot about what it would be like to have a father. Whenever I saw my friends' families, I could not help but be envious of them. Sometimes, I even questioned God why He had to do this to my family, and sometimes I even utter such questions as why I had to be in this family. I love my family and i have no problem with them perse, but this issue was a serious strain to my relationship with God, there were even times when I refused to believe that He existed.

                When i was in elementary, I rarely went to Sunday school and when i reached high school, i dropped it completely because I thought that the explanations of Bible stories were already being too shallow and I was not getting anything from them anymore. I still prayed at home before sleeping but for me it was just like a routine I had to follow. For many years, i lived as if i did not have a true, personal God. When I stepped into second year high school, we started having these 3-day retreats and I started attending the Summer Bible Conferences of our school; by this time, I was already hungry for answers to the many questions that kept lingering on my mind about who God actually was.

                i immediately felt how these retreats were true blessings that on my first retreat, when I was listening to the speakers, it was as if the ears of my heart were opened for the first time to the word of God. Whenever we came home from the retreats, I would feel energized and excited to do my daily devotions, but this enthusiasm faded away along with time. At first I did not understand why my fervour for the Word would just not stay permanently, until I slowly became disheartened and felt like these feeling were just fake spurs of the moment. Not for long, I started to become more lost in my walk of faith than ever.

                On my fourth year in high school, a few days before my graduation, my dad passed away. He was not getting better during the past years and our family has already been physically and emotionally drained. The loss even drained us emotionally more, but even if we were emotionally drained we felt comfort in knowing that my father has finally gone to the better place, free from suffering and serving the God he loves. My dad was actually a devout Christian. On the earlier days of his stroke when he had difficulty walking and talking, he diligently went to church when we who were perfectly healthy were too lazy to go. We were amazed by how until his final breath, he would not hold any grudge against God even if he was afflicted with such sickness. To me at that time, my dad was an enigma. At the same time, I kept questioning God why he had to be like that to my dad and how my father kept His faith on God even during his weakest moments.

                On my dad's funeral, while I was looking at him in his coffin, I was suddenly overcome by a peace I could not understand. It was as if a voice whispered into my ear a very clear answer to both of my questions. The voice told me that I should've seen the real importance of life while looking back at the life of my dad. I should’ve realized that my father saw this importance and lived by it even when everyone else ignored it.

                The importance of life was not the wellness of an individual based on the standards of the world but the wellness based on the standards of God that which could only be attained by having a Father-child relationship with Him. Trusting that all He plans for my life is at the same time for his own good and also for the greater good, which includes the wellness of all His children, was what kept my dad’s faith going. And by God’s grace, i am seeing the light that my dad saw, acknowledging that God knows what He is doing and i simply have to trust in Him.

                I have to admit that now I still have moments of weakness in faith. I am actually ashamed how easily I fall into temptations even after such a powerful testimony of my dad's life. But I also know that God, my Father loves me, provides for me and will not forsake me.  The life of my dad and my whole family is a testimony to this in countless ways and we could not just appreciate enough how merciful and graceful God is no matter how unworthy we are.

                By His grace, I am continuously being moulded into a new person, I am not a lost sheep anymore; I now live for Someone great. He all along was my greatest and most effective refuge in this dangerous world. He will constantly mould me into the person he plans me to be and I am thankful and blessed to be His child.

I can eat pasta baked, boiled, sauced or tossed. Some of my favourites are the carbonara and lasagna. When I was younger, I was accustomed to eat at birthday parties that served tomato based spaghetti and because parties and pasta usually went together, I probably had a positive association of my emotions to pasta. I went through my childhood eating the famous jolly spaghetti from Jollibee as my favourite and from there, my taste preference matured from only enjoying jolly spaghetti to enjoying all kinds of pastas.

            The most famous variety of pasta in Philippine urban areas is the long pasta, spaghetti and the short pasta, macaroni usually served in fast food places and parties with tomato based sauce or white cream sauce. There are different kinds of pastas; special pasta, egg pasta, diet pasta, fresh pasta, wholemeal pasta, durum wheat pasta, and a whole lot more. Both spaghetti and macaroni we are accustomed to eating are usually made of durum wheat flour which is a natural element that tightly holds the pasta together and is high in protein content. Another thing to take note of is that we usually prepare our modern day pasta boiled and drenched with sauce and eat it using forks, but this was not evident in the early development of pasta. In earlier times pasta was usually fried or grilled and eaten using bare hands either plainly or with sprinkled cheese. In fact, it was found in the 1st century writing by the Roman poet, Horace, that there was a certain food that was described as fried, fine sheets of dough called lagana which might have been the ancestor of our present day lasagna. Boiling pasta can actually be traced back as a devise of the Arabs so they can carry along with them dry pasta and reconstitute it into hot meals, while drenching it with sauce was introduced centuries much later.

            Making pasta can be a very tedious process. Even in earlier times, pasta making was labour intensive; the Sicilian term “macarone” meaning making dough forcefully was used to actually depict the hard labour. Pasta can be done home-made or in an industrial scale.

            A basic process in making pasta is mixing and kneading the flour with warm until the dough gets lumpy, then rolling out air bubbles and excess water to flatten the dough, pasteurizing it and finally cutting it into its particular shape. After all these is the vital part, drying the dough that can last for hours depending on its shape, because this can determine how easy the pasta will spoil or break. Before the invention of mechanical drying, the first large-scale production of pasta was in the early 1500s during the industrial revolution in Naples, Italy because the fluctuating temperature of site was suitable for the drying needs of pasta. This kind of production then enabled pasta to have a longer shelf life and can take credit for bringing Naples out of economic depression.

            But, Italy was not the only country to benefit from the invention of pasta. Though there are numerous variations of pasta dough mixtures, pasta is generally composed of simple yet important ingredients: flour (usually durum wheat flour), salt, and usually eggs. This might be one of the reasons why pasta had become favoured, because its components were not really hard to find. Pasta then had become one of the staple foods for the poor and the rich alike throughout centuries when meat and other fresh produce have become expensive or scarce.

             Like many other foods, pasta has a long and confusing history. Contrary to popular belief, pasta was not introduced to Italy by China via Marco Polo; neither did it originate from Italy although they might have been the first to serve pasta as a main dish. There really is no clear origin of pasta since a good number of locations around the globe seemed to have discovered and use it, without foreign influence. Even today, different countries use different ways to cook and serve their pasta.

            But regardless of different forms, different processes of making, or even different ways of eating pasta, I think pasta is one of the dishes that carries on the adage that food is a global language. Although we know pasta only by the dishes familiar to us as presented by our location, we all agree to enjoy the moulded dough as a scrumptious delicacy. 

I’m a full blooded Chinese, and just like my parents, I was born and raised in the Philippines. This being, we’ve been detached from the traditional Chinese culture and have been used to some of the Filipino (and Western) customs.  Nevertheless, our family, and particularly I took great pride of our ethnicity and have always been convinced that our race was the best there was. One of the biggest ethnocentric attitudes I had was that when people complimented me for my complexion, I felt really proud; I thought being “white” was the standard of beauty and people who were darker were plainly unfortunate. There were even some moments of my life where I considered not marrying Filipino men as to not “taint” the complexion of my bloodline. To my surprise, skin colour apparently plays a big role in health; and in terms of being prone to skin cancer, darker people are at the advantage.

                Another thing that caused me to think ethnocentrically was because apart from the Filipinos I knew from the limited society I revolved in, I had stereotypical ideas about the rest of the Filipino people –the labels of being lazy, inferior, and lowly. Being in this age and society where multimedia access can give you information regarding just about everything, I was conditioned that I had the power to be familiar with everything, therefore I had the notion that the simplistic things I knew about Filipinos enabled me to truly understand the entirety of the Filipino culture.

                I now realize that I’ve just been exposed to a very little fraction of the culture and its people’s fascinating nature – to say at the least, their exotic beauty and sophistication throughout generations. I’ve never known enough because I’ve always been in my comfort zone- my home, my school and my routine schedules, all this has deprived me from seeing the bigger picture. When I became aware of the world beyond me, I realized that the even the rich culture of the Philippines by itself can be very overwhelming, what more for all the other parts of the world.  Now I just regret that I can only experience so much. If I could, I would marry myself into each and every culture, live in each era there will be even if it means to just to have a glimpse of the world’s rich diversity. I know now that one life time is not enough, and I certainly would not want to waste it by confining myself in my comfort zone. Indeed I want the world to be my oyster.