Itaga mo sa bato

Just came home from mass. :D The priest gave this really cool homily. I won't go all Catholic preacher; I just need to share the story he gave.

There were two best friends walking in the desert. The two friends began arguing about something, and one of the friends slapped the other in the face.

The one who was slapped was hurt. He then bent down and wrote in the sand:

"Today, my best friend slapped me in the face."

And they moved on.

They stumbled across a large oasis with a big pool of water in the middle. The two decided to go swimming, so they shed their clothes and jumped in.

Suddenly, one of the two - the one who was slapped - started crying for help. He was drowning in the deep end of the pool! So his friend swam over to him and saved him.

When they got out of the water, the one who was just saved took a small, sharp rock and carved into a bigger rock:

"Today, my best friend saved my life."

The other friend said, "I don't get it. I hurt you while we were walking and you wrote it in the ground. Now I saved you and you carve it onto a rock. Why?"

The one who finished carving looked up, smiled, and said, "When you hurt me, I wrote in the sand so that the winds of forgiveness would blow it away. When you saved me, I wrote in the rock so that it would be etched in the stone of my heart for the rest of my life."

It's kinda sad how a lot of us (including me) do the opposite... We easily forget the good others do, but we hold in our hearts grudges against their mistakes and wrongdoings.

The priest also said something that made me kinda cry inside. I haven't confessed in a while, and a lot of the crap I'm doing is piling up. He said:

Sins are not born from our weaknesses. They are from our strength - the strength to deny and to forget what it is like to forgive.

Something to think about.