The rain has not stopped all August.
It drums against my windows with a persistence that feels both nostalgic and heavy. And while that sound usually brings me comfort, this month my feed has been full of something else; flooded streets and submerged homes in Pampanga, the place that holds the chapters of my hardest years.
Last Saturday, Allen and I ducked into our favorite noodle spot to escape the downpour; that warm, savory comfort you crave when the whole world outside has turned gray. Our bowls had just arrived when my phone pinged. It was a relative back home, asking for a small amount of money; just enough for instant noodles and eggs to get her family through the flood.
I sat there holding a steaming, expensive bowl of noodles in a dry, safe restaurant, and something tightened in my chest. It was not only empathy. It was memory.
I was suddenly twelve again. Trapped on the second floor of our house with my siblings, watching the water rise, our stomachs rumbling while my mother scrambled to find whatever food she could; usually noodles and eggs, the exact same thing my relative was asking for now, more than twenty-five years later. Those floods felt less like an event back then and more like our permanent condition. And in the years that followed, life took even more from us; both of my parents were gone before I reached adulthood, and the future felt like a dream I had not been invited into.
The distance between that twelve-year-old girl and the woman sitting in that restaurant is not a distance I traveled alone. I know that with everything in me. The road from poverty to peace was never a straight line, but the Lord’s hand was on every turn of it; delivering us out of a hunger that once defined our whole existence.
That moment over the noodles was a collision; who I used to be, sitting down across from a grace I did not earn. I could not finish the bowl.
“More Than Able.”
I carried that weight into our church, New Life North Metro the next morning, telling Allen the whole story as we drove. And I found myself asking the question that surfaces every time gratitude gets this heavy: who would I even be without the Lord? I genuinely do not know. And I do not think I want to.
As I walked into the sanctuary, the last worship song still playing was “More Than Able” by Elevation Worship. I do not think I have ever needed those words more than I did in that exact moment. Because that is the whole story, isn’t it? A twelve-year-old girl on a flooded second floor with nothing, and a God who was already, even then, more than able. More than able to bring her through it. More than able to make a way out of a home with no future in sight. More than able to seat her, decades later, in a warm restaurant with a family of her own, undone by a bowl of noodles she could not finish.
I sat down in my seat still holding that song in my chest when Brother Roi Gomez stood up to preach.
The “Us” in going to the other side.
His message was on the word us in Hebrews; specifically the invitation to go to the other side, together.
“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together.” (Hebrews 10:23-25)
He asked something simple that has stayed with me: who is the “us”? Because Jesus never said you go. He said let us go. God designed the other side; His promise, His plan, His purpose for this season of your life; to be a journey traveled with people, not a solo crossing.
Brother Roi talked about how the right people propel you toward your destiny, while the wrong ones can keep you circling for decades. He brought up the spies Moses sent ahead, the ones who came back saying they felt like grasshoppers next to the giants in the land. An eleven-day journey turned into forty years, all because of who was in the room and what they were saying.
Forty years. Because of the wrong voices.
And then he did something that undid the whole sanctuary. He got personal.
Fatherless twice, and finding home.
Brother Roi shared his own story; that he came from a broken family, fatherless from a young age. He found a small church community that became his family for a season, until division tore through it and he lost that too. Fatherless again, this time spiritually. Watching a home he had built his faith around simply come apart.
And then he found New Life North Metro. He called it finding home.
I sat there and thought about my own noodles that same weekend; my own floods, my own losses, my father and then my mother, and years afterward of wondering who I even was without the people who were supposed to raise me. Brother Roi lost his home twice; once by blood, once by faith; and found it a third time, standing at that pulpit, whole. I lost my home to water and then to grief, and found mine at a table with Allen, in a church pew the next morning, in a bowl of noodles I could not finish. Different floods, the same Hand pulling us both to shore.
I thought about how many of us in that room were carrying some version of the same story. Fatherless in one way or another. Displaced from a home that did not hold. Still, somehow, sitting in a sanctuary on a Sunday morning, found.
That is what community is actually for. Not to perform faith at each other. To catch each other when the ground gives way.
Brother Roi said that when we see someone else healed, blessed, or delivered, we should never ask why them and not me. We should say, I am next. There is room in the Kingdom for everyone to shine; nobody has to be dimmed for someone else to be bright. That reframe matters so much for those of us who grew up with scarcity wired into our bones. When you have known real lack, it is easy to look at someone else’s provision and feel the old fear rise; that there might not be enough left for you.
But He is not running low.
“For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen.” (2 Corinthians 1:20)
If He already gave His Son, He will certainly give the smaller things too.
Don’t go back.
The Sunday before, Pastor Dens Jabonita had preached something that ties directly into all of this; Jesus is better, and we should never go back.
He talked about how easy it is to start something and how difficult it is to finish it. Easy to enroll, hard to graduate. Easy to begin a ministry, hard to stay in it when it gets heavy. And he reminded us that when life gets difficult, that does not mean God has abandoned you.
He said the Greek word for confidence in that passage is parresia; bold confidence to speak honestly without fear. And that sometimes God allows a hard season specifically so that one day you will have a testimony of exactly how He delivered you. Do not throw that confidence away in the middle of the story. Do not go back to who you were before He rescued you.
You might forget God’s promise. God never forgets His promise to you.
I keep sitting with that line, and with Pastor Dens’ charge not to turn around, as two sides of the same truth. He remembers what I have forgotten. So I do not need to go back.
My history is not shame. It is stewardship.
Here is the biggest shift in me this month.
I used to carry my history with poverty quietly, the way you carry something you are not sure you should say out loud. But I am seeing it differently now. It is not a badge of shame. It is a testimony of stewardship.
Every flood I survived. Every night of hunger. Every year I did not think I would make it through. God was not absent in those rooms. He was building something in me that I could not have received any other way.
“Neither death nor life… nor things present nor things to come… shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
It is not your love that keeps you close to Him. It is His. You get tired. You give up sometimes. He never does.
If you are standing in your own flood right now.
You are not walking through it alone. That is not a comforting phrase. It is the actual design.
Do not let the struggles of your past derail the purpose of your future. Surround yourself with people who fuel your faith instead of your fear. Be planted somewhere that calls you forward instead of holding you back. And when you see someone else receive what you have been praying for, practice saying it out loud: I am next.
The floodwaters receded for me. More than twenty-five years later, I am sitting in a warm restaurant, holding a bowl I could not finish, undone by grace, still humming a song about a God who has always been more than able.
They will recede for you too.
You are held by a promise He has not forgotten. 🌿
“God can be trusted to keep His promise.” (Hebrews 10:23)
What promise are you holding onto right now? I would love to stand with you in it in the comments. 🤍
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