No secret anymore

 

Joining the El Shaddai movement, a Catholic charismatic community, in 1993 (I was 27) has taught me to be true to God, to people and to one's very own self.

I had kept a secret and keeping a secret is detrimental and a blockage to one's calling as a servant of God.

Being fine in my ways and soft-spoken, it was not really a secret.

My family and relatives at the back of their minds have known the real score about me, especially them that saw my childhood.

For me, it was embarrassing.

I grew up hiding it.

I was a secret gay!

By joining the El Shaddai movement, the Holy Spirit convicted me to reveal this thing I held as a secret.

Towards the later part of the 1990's, by the strength of the Holy Spirit, I revealed this secret to the local community of El Shaddai by making a live life testimony and through a written testimony via the group's international newsletter with my own picture published alongside the testimony and through the local weekly archdiocesan newspaper of the Davao Catholic Herald.

I said to myself, having done that, I won't reveal it anymore to anyone I would meet everytime.

That would be the first and last of my self-revelation.

Why on earth am I revealing it anew?

Simply because I fell to the vice of homosexuality again in 2013 after the series of Eucharistic experiences that I had had.

Clearly, it was an attempt to stop me from this calling and the Devil succeeded.

I was devastated.

I was hopeless.

I squandered the graces I had received from God.

And that would be the end of my calling until, one late afternoon, God made a sign through a sunset cloud formation wherein an enormous Hand (representative of God) was trying to snatch up a triangle (representative of myself) in which two lower ends of the triangle were stuck below it (the world).

The Hand was trying to lift or magnetize the triangle without touching it so that the upper end of the triangle and the lower line elongated and stretched upward but two lower corners of the triangle held on to the world (the sin of homosexuality).

While commuting on a PUJ, I saw the heavenly sign and took a picture of it while the vehicle was plying but lost the photo anyway.

I knew, through the sign, God was communicating to my spirit:

He would rescue me!

I only had to lose grip of my hold to the world.

To realize this end, I went to the confessional and revealed my sins amid fear.

These had been habitual sins and I just kept confessing to mostly #TLM confessors despite receiving rage from some of them (one priest even went out of the confessional banging the door open during my confession to see who was confessing, he was probably embarrassed to see the one who confessed was not a regular attender or a church worker) until I was delivered from the vice -- now I have been 12 years "sober" by availing of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.