PenDrive

I have always loved reading ever since I learned how. Maybe because my mother was an English teacher. Maybe because my father and father rewarded my good grades with books instead of toys. The world of the written word was where I would always escape to. Back then, I wasn’t a very healthy child. I had asthma and I was thin and lanky. The hospital was like a second home to me. So when I couldn’t play with my friends, I would always settle down in my room and have a book in hand and read.

The time eventually came when I was in fifth grade when my friends and I thought about writing a fairy tale. It was a story about a girl who was cursed to look like a porcupine and how, by finding true love, the curse would be lifted. (Talk about being influenced by Disney!) For us at that time, it was already an unimaginable feat. We couldn’t help but share the story with our classmates. We were truly proud of it.

After that, I did not yet attempt at writing more stories. I kept on reading novels. When I came across the Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks, I decided, maybe I should try writing a story of my own. When I got to join the school organ, “The Heights Gazette”, I began writing short stories. I didn’t expect I would get good reviews from my classmates, schoolmates and teachers. I was doubly encouraged and I began to write more. My ‘writing career’ bloomed when I joined The WORD, the official student publication of Holy Name Universitym (HNU) during my college years. I began to have a larger audience. My stories were received well. So I kept on writing and writing and writing. I became fully convinced that being a writer was something I would always be. It was like a passion, like a fire burning within me. Writing became so much a part of my life that I could not afford to leave the house without a pen and a notebook in my pocket.

The more I wrote together with my fellow WORDians, I began to realize how much our words were able to influence others. It was only then that I understood the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword,” (Edward Bulwer-Lytton). I was a student journalist with a flair for the literary. There I exercised my ‘activism’ by promoting radical change and fighting student apathy. I was convinced that words were like raindrops that would continually fall on a placid lake, creating ripples of change.

Seven years have passed since I graduated from HNU and left The WORD. I still continue to write. I have been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Legite, the official publication of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary where I am now currently a fourth year philosophy seminarian. My added knowledge on philosophy has broadened my horizon. I have also grown because of age and experience. The approach and manner of my writing has changed. I no longer write as a student activist but as an evangelist, trying to spread the WORD of God through the written word.

I continue to hold my pen and write. This is something I know I will never let go. I have been given this talent by God and I know I just have to make this right and do it all for his greatest glory. I continue to write and I am continually driven to do so. This drive to write does not lie in the pen that my hand holds, but it is in the heart and mind which weaves words together. And these words shall become like seeds that the sower sows in the hearts of men. I am but a writer, a sower. It shall be God who shall let these seeds grow.