A Slave Cannot Serve Two Masters

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Nikos Kazantzakis, one of my favourite authors, wrote what he called an “intellectual autobiography” – it was the tracing of his intellectual thought through the telling of his life story. This is the first blog I’ll write in that vein, which is less about the travel I’m doing and more about my personal and spiritual development.

As I’ve explained before, I came to the Philippines originally for humanitarian work. It didn’t turn out that way, so I arranged to check in with my dad’s friends who run a Christian based NGO out of Baseco. It was very eye-opening and my trip has been very positive, but one downside is that I spent two weeks in Manila dividing my time between essentially partying and holidaying, and visiting Baseco doing church work.

Here’s what I learned: a slave cannot serve two masters – for the record, a Bible verse at Matthew 6:24. What I mean by that is I feel like my time was divided between two conflicting purposes. In hindsight I wouldn’t have intermingled the going out and sightseeing with the Baseco trip. I would have gone hard with Baseco for maybe a week possible even staying inside a hut there, and then have a week of just seeing Manila, relaxing, going out etc. Mixing up the two was a bit stressful at times and don’t feel I gave my all to either.

What I needed to do was immerse myself in one or the other – which I learned a very hard and valuable lesson on later during my relief work. I’ll have more on that in upcoming blogs.

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