The Lord Is My Chef Spiritual Recipe by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II
Monday, 27 December 2021
Photo by author, Basic Education Department chapel, Our Lady of Fatima University, Valenzuela City, 24 December 2021.
A blessed Merry Christmas to you, my dear readers and followers, fellow bloggers! Praying for you that the Child Jesus may be born daily in your hearts to fill you with his peace and joy always!
Thank you very much for your support and most specially for your likes and comments these past 624 days since this COVID-19 started. I have decided to blog my prayers and reflections daily as my contribution for those seeking spiritual nourishment and guidance during these difficult days of the virus.
Thank you my dear fellow bloggers. You are all a gift of God to me who have taught me so much about writing and blogging. Your thoughts and insights as well as photos have all enriched me, giving me glimpses of the the beauty and majesty, kindness and mercy of Jesus Christ. Most of all, you have inspired me to try writing poems which I never knew I could!
Will be taking a rest and will resume our blogs on January first, 2022.
Blessed Merry Christmas again, everyone!
The author in our chapel where we celebrate our online Masses, sharing his blogs as homilies and reflections.
Quiet Storm by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II, 15 July 2021
Photo by author, 2019.
Along with the word “please”, saying “thank you” is one of the virtues we have been taught since childhood with hopes the values they impart become part of our lives like a habit or something good we can keep doing for the rest of our lives.
Unfortunately, we only learn but do not necessarily remember our lessons.
Saying thank you and please have long been at the brink of extinction, so endangered in our fast paced and consumeristic society.
Thanks to COVID-19. The pandemic that refuses to end and continues to threaten our well-being and sanity has taught us to recapture and relearn gratitude expressed in the simple words thank you the world has seemed to almost forgotten.
Photo by Mr. Raffy Tima of GMA7-News, 2020.
Gratitude is a virtue that works great wonders for everyone because it makes us live in the present moment. A grateful person is one who lives in the here and now, not in the past nor in the future.
When our heart is filled we gratitude, we have no time to complain and nurse old wounds and pains in the past but simply learn from them and move on with life. Living in the present moment means making things happen, working hard on our dreams and aspirations to become a reality. People who refuse to be grateful in life are busy wishful thinking of how things should be or would be, always looking at the future as a fantasy that would just pop out of nowhere instead of working for it in the present moment.
Unknown to many, gratitude is the fount of all good vibes in life, enabling us to be more positive than negative. It helps us accept the reality we are into – whether it is good or bad.
And that is when we start growing and maturing as persons when we learn to accept our present realities.
Most of all, gratitude disposes us to more blessings and grace from God because a thankful heart is always the one that seeks relationships, with God and with others.
People who go out of their way to say thank you,
to express gratitude are person-oriented.
They see more the persons
not just the kind deeds done to them
and beautiful gifts given them.
People who go out of their way to say thank you, to express gratitude are person-oriented. They see more the persons not just the kind deeds done to them and beautiful gifts given them. When we say thank you, when we let others know of how grateful we are, we recognize their personhood that is why we reach out to them, trying to connect with them and befriend them. Or, to keep our ties alive and strong. As the old song of my father’s generation would go, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
Remember the ten lepers healed by Jesus Christ on his way to Jerusalem?
Only one returned – a Samaritan – to thank Jesus.
Jesus said in reply, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” Then he said to him, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”
Luke 17:17-19
From being cleansed like the nine others, it was only the Samaritan who returned to thank Jesus was healed – or saved – from his sickness. Healing is something more than a cure of one’s disease that refers to total well-being of one who is restored not only to health but into life as whole.
Gratitude is a very practical virtue, “the parent of all virtues” according to the Roman scholar and statesman Cicero. It is the one virtue we need to recapture and reacquire to make through the many challenges and trials this pandemic has brought us.
Instead of complaining and being so sorry with the plight we are into due to COVID-19, let us start counting our many blessings in life to see the vast opportunities and lessons this crisis has given us. In fact, the more this pandemic has persisted, the more blessings we can find that we must be thankful too.
Because of the pandemic, we have learned to cherish more one another as we come to value persons and life more than things again. Aside from learning how to cook and bake during the lockdowns, we learned to value food anew, not to mention the new source of income for many.
There are so many things we have to be grateful in life during this time of the pandemic, perhaps even more than the sufferings and trials we have gone through as it opened to us new views and perceptions about life itself.
Most of all, it had brought us back to the grounding of our being, God who is life himself, the source of all good things we have long forgotten and now remember. And rightly praise and thank. Amen.
The Lord Is My Chef Breakfast Recipe for the Soul by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II
Third Sunday in Easter, 18 April 2021
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19 ><)))*> 1 John 2:1-5 ><)))*> Luke 24:35-48
Easter Vigil 2021.
My dearest Lord Jesus Christ:
Today I am celebrating my ordination anniversary.
Twenty-three years of giftedness and grace and mystery,
until now I wonder why you called and chose me.
Thank you very much
for your love and mercy to me.
You know very well my sins and failures,
my weaknesses and limitations
that on many occasions
I have failed you.
There were times
I was like Cleopas
traveling back to Emmaus
trying to forget you
feeling at a loss and defeated
when my plans do not happen.
But you would join me,
walk with me even if I go the wrong direction
just to bring me back to Jerusalem,
back to the Cross where your Resurrection is.
So many times,
my eyes cannot recognize you appearing to me,
but surely always within me
my heart burns while you speak softly
as you tell me our stories
when you never left me.
In those twenty-three years,
dearest Jesus, what I treasure most
is when you appear and speak to me unknowingly,
an inner awakening happens in me
opening my mind, purifying my soul
that the more I see my sinfulness before you,
the more I see my worth in you
that is when you are so true!
One thing I ask you, my Lord and my God
keep me in your fellowship of the table
of your new covenant; even if I am not worthy
to receive you under my roof, but only
say the word and I shall be healed.
Be my guest always, dear Jesus,
appearing, speaking, and breaking bread
at your altar, sustaining and nourishing me
with the Blessed Virgin Mary
in this journey until you come again. Amen.
Thank you very much, my dear followers and readers!
Today the 13th of April 2021 is my 365-day streak here at lordmychef.wordpress.com.
It was an Easter Tuesday last year when I decided to publish regularly my prayers, reflections, homilies, poems, and essays to help nourish the spiritual thirst of friends and relatives at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine.
It is pure grace from God to reach this milestone.
What I like best in this journey are the many other bloggers I have met who have truly enriched me spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.
WordPress.com for me has become another home providing me comfort and warmth, love and acceptance especially in these trying times of pandemic.
Join me in another 365-day journey until this pandemic is completely wiped out with us celebrating life and friendship, when our weeping finally leads us to rejoicing Easter!
May God bless you and keep you!
In Christ Jesus, the “Lord Is My Chef”,
fr. nick
(philippines)
The Lord Is My Chef Breakfast Recipe, Tuesday of Easter Octave, 14 April 2020
Acts 2:36-41 ><)))*> +++ <*(((>< John 20:11-18
Detail of Italian painter Giotto’s “Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not)” of the Risen Lord appearing to Mary Magdalene.
Lord Jesus Christ, you know very well how on this blessed season of Easter, so many of us are crying, weeping due to the threats and deaths brought about by corona virus worldwide.
Yes, it is the saddest Holy Week and Easter for many people in recent history.
But behind all these sadness, deep inside us, many have experienced your more meaningful presence and coming this Easter amid our tears of sadness, of weeping because this is also the time we have missed you so much, we have sought you so much.
How lovely, O dear Jesus, to contemplate the two occasions in the gospel today when Mary was asked…
The Lord Is My Chef Breakfast Recipe for the Soul
Thursday, Seventh Day in the Christmas Octave, 31 December 2020
1 John 2:18-21 >><)))*> + <*(((><< John 1:1-18
Photo by Ms. Ria De Vera, sunrise in our Parish amid the summer lockdown of 2020.
O God our Father, on this last day of 2020, we thank you so much for all the blessings you have given us these past 365 days. Yes, we shall always remember this year as the most difficult and most life-changing we ever had but we are grateful to you.
No matter how much people would ridicule and play jokes on 2020, despite its being so heavy for many of us who have lost loved ones, lost jobs and livelihood, and forced us to change plans and directions in life, we still thank you Lord for letting us make it through.
The problem, Lord, is not the year 2020 which means “perfect vision”; the problem is us who have lost all our vision for moral and upright living, decency, and good governance. We have lost vision, of the ability to see beyond the surface of things we have gone through this year.
How sad when many of us have seen only the year, the days and the months without realizing the deeper meaning of the events that resulted from our poor and wrong decisions, inactions and indifference to the calumnies and lies dished out daily by those in power.
Open our minds and our hearts that the presence of so many antichrists in our midst who lie and speak without thinking so well what they say signal the final hour of Christ’s coming and judgment as well as the final hour for us to do something concrete to end the reign of evil.
Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. Thus we know this is the last hour.
1 John 2:18
Let us claim, dear Jesus, on this last day of 2020 and into the coming new year the two great gifts you have given us in your coming — light and life (Jn.1:4).
Your light has always been there present among us. Give us the courage to bring out your light, sweet Jesus so there may be more truth, goodness, justice, love, beauty, compassion, kindness, freedom, and peace in this world that have ironically reached great new heights in science and technology but has remained inside the caves of evil and malice.
May we rediscover anew the value of every life, that one life being lost is too many, whether due to the pandemic or the war on drugs.
On this last day of the year, may we do something so good, so kind, so true as if today were also our last day on earth. Amen.
Photo by author, Gaudete Sunday (13 December 2020).
The Lord Is My Chef Sunday Music by Fr. Nick F. Lalog II, 15 November 2020
Photo by author, after the floods, typhoon Ulysses, 12 November 2020.
We try to be subdued and sober this Sunday in thanksgiving to the gift of life as we remember and pray too for our brethren in Cagayan and Isabela suffering from the worst floods in decades after typhoon Ulysses pummeled our region this week with heavy winds and rains.
Here is Mexican Pepe Marquez and his band for his cover of William DeVaughn’s 1972 soul song “Be Thankful for What You Got” that was released two years later in 1974, selling almost two million copies as it reached #1 on the US R&B chart and #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that year.
There are other versions of this cool, cool music notably by Curtis Mayfield who had actually influenced DeVaughn in this song; thanks to Manny Pagsuyuin who shared me this music recently that I now prefer than the other covers for its superb percussions and instrumentations plus Marquez’s trademark videos of classic cars.
The song is so simple with gospel-like lyrics that remarkably hit home specially in a time of calamity like this when we have to be sensitive with others’ sufferings.
Most of all, despite its oft-repeated line “Diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene, with a gangsta lean”, the music is so clean and crisp with its second part reminding us that of all that we have, the most precious are our loved ones.
Part of the Lord’s message today in being vigilant for his return is for us to be thankful for everything we have because he gives us according to our abilities. It is not how much or how little we have in life but how we make use of it that matters.
How sad we only realize this after a calamity or a crisis in life.
Let’s make it a habit to be thankful daily for our gifts, use them wisely in serving others as we thank and praise God for his goodness. A blessed Sunday, everyone. Amen.
Directed by: Pepe Marquez & Carlos Guillen with Gabriella Guillen for LA CIMA MUSIC along with Cj Infinito & Carlos Alvarez Aragon for CJ Infinito Productions. #lacimamusic Featuring: Jeff Lewis on Trumpet – Dora Sanchez on Vocals & Lorenzo Martinez on Percussion. Album available on, Spotify, cdbaby, Amazon Music and all digital download sites. https://www.facebook.com/pepe.marquez.33
Every day, every night, we thank you Lord for so many blessings you have showered upon us. But, every time we thank you Lord, I wonder if we have rightly thanked you?
Saying thank you is not only being grateful for anything given or shared with us; saying thank you is more than recognizing the goodness of the giver, especially you, O Lord our God.
Saying thank you, Lord, is being like David giving his very self wholly to you, for your praise and glory, in the service of your people.
Thanking you, O Lord, is most of all bringing out to share whatever gift you have given us.
The best expression of gratitude especially to you, O Lord, is to be a lamp giving light to others, leading others to you, reminding others of your light and guidance.
Help us, O Lord, to come closer to you to become like you so that it is our life becomes a thanksgiving and praise to you always. Amen.
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