BACK ON TRACK

When I was twenty-three years old and heavy with our first child, my husband and I were installed as ministers in our old church in Cebu. Suffice it to say that after six years of faithful service, we got caught in the crossfire of church politics and we decided to retreat rather than be annihilated.

If you could have talked to us then, when we were young, aggressive, volatile and hurting, we would have told you that ministry life is hell on earth.

For many years after that traumatic experience, my husband and I vacciliated between religious devotion and compromise. The good thing was we took turns at being depressed and discouraged. We never did it at the same time.

Eventually, after years of running away from people who looked to us as ministers, we found ourselves in a small church called Victory Christian Fellowship in Iloilo. That was in 1999.

We tried to remain as nondescript as possible.

But somehow, one's calling has a way of creeping back into one's life. Other than that, no matter how hard we try to deny it, people who are sensitive to the promptings of the Spirit can see the invisible neon lights flashing on our foreheads: called to minister.

One day, my husband's friend who was our pastor, pulled him aside. Our pastor was being called back to the mother church, he said, and he needs someone to take over his position in our church.

My husband's and my response were loud and clear: over our dead bodies!

I should have known as soon as the words left our lips that we would not be able to sleep that night. Nor the next two or ten nights after.

To cut the long story short, here we are again, after being badly burned and after having to pick ourselves up from the rubble and ravages of church conflict.

It's back to ministry life, so help us God.