No ID, No Entry

“The LORD said to him: I will be with you…” – Judges 6:16

What’s the Pinoy security guards’ battle cry? It stands toe to toe with other great military mottos like the Air Force’s “No Guts, No Glory” and the Marines’ “No Retreat, No Surrender”.

You guessed it right if you said it’s “No ID, No Entry”. This is also a ubiquitous sign in the Philippine landscape together with other famous local signage like “God knows Hudas not pay”, “Post No Bell”, “Sorry, we’re close” and “Bawal mangutang ang may amnesia”.

“No ID, No Entry” is also the title of the first talk in the latest Feast series, TGIF (Thank God, I’m Filipino).  The TGIF talks are about “discovering the true pride of our roots”.  The joke about the military mottos that opened the talk is very typical of our Pinoy sense of humor. We have the ability to laugh about anything, even about ourselves and our flaws.

But what is hidden beneath that humor is a poor self-identity. We like to laugh and gripe about the negative things we find in our country. Take the second and third signage I used as examples. The photos were posted in the internet because of the grammatical error. True they were amusing, but the laughing point was the thing wrong about them.

Three hundred years plus of being under colonial rule has made us look down on ourselves and blind to the beauty of our race – our natural beautiful tan, our cute button noses and a physique that makes us look younger than we are. Because of that we enrich the glutathione manufacturers and cosmetic surgeons in the effort to look like our western ex-colonizers.

Talk 1 encourages us to see ourselves as God sees us, as God saw Gideon, a man of valor, even if this is how Gideon saw himself: “My family is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the most insignificant in my father’s house”(Judges 6:15)

God’s vision for us is different because of two things:

1. God has X-ray vision. He looks beyond our outside failure and sees the champion within.
2. God has future vision. He knows that we are works-in-progress (WIP) and sees the finished objets d’art he originally designed us to be.

What struck me most about the talk was this thought: Because my ID says I am a COG (Child of God), I am given entry into God’s kingdom.

I have that privilege if I remain true to my identity. I am comforted by God’s promise to Gideon in Judges 6:16 that He will be with me as I go from being a wimpy WIP to being da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or make that the more nationalistic Amorsolo’s Dalagang Bukid or Bencab’s Sabel.

Knowing that my ID says I am a COG and therefore the offspring of “The One Who Owns This Establishment” makes me feel I have certain privileges. I feel confident that I can ask God for anything and He will listen.

Let me share a blessing I received last week. For several days, I noticed the car took longer to start. Friday morning dawned and my son couldn’t get it to start at all. I prayed it was just the battery. Anything else could be expensive. And getting the car to the repair shop would be a major problem.

Because I was talking to my Father God, I said a bratty prayer just as a spoiled child would. I am too embarrassed to write the whole prayer here but parts of it said, “O God…please have mercy on this poor widow, whose husband (the one who could have fixed this problem) You have taken away. Please let the trouble just be the battery that’s still under warranty.”

And God, my Father, answered by giving us a new battery and letting me spend only P300 for service charge and tips. That incident assured me of my privileges because God answers His children’s prayers, even bratty ones. 

*image from http://www.busyok.info/2013/02/guard.html