CHANGING HEARTS

I’m so happy for Brazil today for bagging finally their first ever gold medal in Olympic men’s soccer/football.  I never stopped believing in them, I knew seeing that country gold-less for long would be next to impossible.

But my heart belongs to their women volleyball team after they were ousted in the race by the newly crowned champs Chinese.  I felt the agony of the crowd in tears, knowing that among their religions, next to soccer, I sure think volleyball is the biggest. 

And to think that their tormentor was, of all countries, China which I really thought did not even have a Chinaman’s chance.  Yet, to paraphrase my favorite cliché, all is fair in love and Olympics, even if what you hear only are your enemy’s chants.  Perhaps the still dumbfounded Brazilian ladyspikers would like to think that when they were soundly beaten, they were not awake.  And I could only wish the Chinese victory was, especially the latest, like their products the world always known to be:  fake.

Please don’t judge me harshly if my sympathy is to Brazil instead of our Asian neighbor who gave the heavily favored South American squad such surprising loss.  Between me and China, yes, there’s no love lost, yet don’t blame it to the West Philippine Sea row but to the one and only love of mine in volleyball:  Ms. Leila Barros.

Yes, Leila Barros came at a time when I was healing myself back from emotional destruction while I was still a fumbling nocturnal student of friar-run University of San Agustin.  It happened one night when after my last night class then, I saw her being watched by my mucho gigolo housemates on TV while she was playing in a world volleyball game.

Since then, for more successive nights I would think only of volleyball and skip my class that started at 9PM.  I loved to make a viand out of her games, I watched her while I ate dinner:  that was in 1997. 

Yes, I loved Leila three years before the starstruck Filipino male idolaters worshipped her when she strutted around her wares here in Manila back in 2000.  Yes, I was already an avid, no, crazy follower of Leila although the newly installed very first internet service in San Ag had yet to hear about FB and Instagram.

I have loved Brazil just because of Leila then and even sworn to her posters I’d do forever and would never ever change.  But alas, when I met my soon-to-be-wife classmate in Marketing the name Leila Barros went beyond my lying heart’s range.

Truly, as far as loving and paying vows are concerned, it seems no one has ever been constant in this Earth, living or dead.  People love to vow on someone’s grave but sooner or later we find the heart to be quite deceitful and desperately wicked (Jer.17:9).  For we know that all flesh change frivolously.  It is in its nature, being born imperfectly.

Only one Man in history and the Scriptures never changes and is a perfect lover.

Who else but the Man-God Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrew 13:8).