‘Who will take care of me?'

That's the question Blanche Gallardo asked recently. She lived and worked in Hong Kong as a writer, editor and publisher for nearly 35 years. She returned to the Philippines and is now in her early 80s, also long widowed.

“My own journey took me from the Philippines Herald to Asia Magazine, and from thence to the Orientations Group as editor of Chic, the first regional women's magazine”, University of Santo Tomas graduate Blanche wrote:

“From there, I joined the HK Tatler group to create and edit women's magazine “Eve” and the “Home Journal”, a publication for homemakers. Before retiring in Manila with my husband, the late Bert Gallardo (who worked as Art Director for Asia Magazine), we published an interior design magazine in Hong Kong.

“I wrote under the byline of Blanche, Blanquita being virtually unpronounceable in the then British Crown Colony,” she adds. Recently, she hit the opinion pages with her Social Security System tiff.

SSS has been hounding her to pay back-dated contributions for driver/kasambahay. Blanche objected to the driver passing off assigned tasks to another kasambahay. She threatened to quit. Blanche let her go.

“A few months later I received the first of two Demand Letters from the SSS demanding that I pay contributions for her years of service, plus penalties. It took SSS 13 months to reply to my enquiries --- only to repeat the same demand or else.”

“Even more galling is the fact that although they found a file of my own SSS contributions from decades ago, they are unable to trace it, or tell me what happened to it. All I could gather was that I was working with a taxi company sometime in the late 1980s, a period I was not even a resident in the country, as my passport will bear out.

Tell me, what am I supposed to do? HELP!”

We never heard if SSS did haul Blanche to the clink. But a friend in Iligan City emailed us a copy of a thoughtful – and as usual polished – feature by Blance. Below is: “Who Is Going To Take Care Of Me?”

Providence says that a year isn't just one loop around the sun. It is a forward journey along a timeline over which God stands at the start and simultaneously stands at the end, and at every point in between.

It is as if God were viewing a parade - but not as we do, standing in one place, watching each event pass us. Rather, God's perspective is like a person standing on a tall building, simultaneously viewing the parade at its start, middle, and end.

For that band in the middle of the parade, there is a definite past (That spot where two of the trumpet players fainted) and an anticipated future (Are those kids ahead holding water balloons?) But the person on top of the building sees everything, all at once.

Providence comes from the Latin word meaning “to foresee.” God looks ahead, in other words. His vision is like the wheels ringed about with eyes that move to and fro in the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.

God's eyes are not the like spots on a pair of dice that turn randomly up and around and over. This day is more than the breathless hope that the dice will come up in our favor, only to watch them thrown tomorrow again. The only people who think it's okay to look at life as just a big gamble are those who have not done very much gambling.

Here's a word from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount that we would do well to ponder within the first waking hour of every day: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:25-27). It doesn't get any more practical than that.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made some of the preeminent statements in Scripture about the providence of God. He was addressing one of the universal pressing questions we all ask: Who is going to take care of me? At your eightieth birthday that question might have a special urgency, but in truth it is no less urgent when one is twenty.

The answer?

“Your heavenly Father knows you need them.” So don't get caught in the rat race or, we might say, the pagan chase (“the pagans run after all these things”). There is a better alternative, in other words, to living a life of hoarding.

As someone said, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. Our security does not come from the bank statement telling us how much we've saved up, or from the number of suits in the closet.

Food in the pantry is a good thing. But no matter how much any of us have to eat or drink or wear or drive or shelve, we will never know security until we see the face of providence: the God who clothes the lilies of the field and who tends to the birds of the air. And he knows. He knows what we have and what we need. He knows those days when we have less than we think we need, too.*

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