The Road to "The Blessed Life"

I appreciate this new book I'm reading. It's called "The Blessed Life" by Robert Morris. The author is senior pastor of Gateway Church in Dallas, Texas. This book, for some surprising reason is still not available in any bookstore here in the Philippines. Considering the best seller status of the book, that is indeed very odd. Anyway, I will write about the insights I've gained with this book in another (loooonnngg and boring) post. Today I simply want to write about the long process of acquiring it.

I learned about Robert Morris through a conversation I had with Pastor Timothy Lee, pastor of Tabernacle of Joy in Singapore. He told me of a book called From Dream to Destiny, Morris' first book. After reading that, I wanted to share it so much with our church because it has helped me a lot. I ended up teaching a 12-week series on it in 2007.

I talked about the book with my then best friend (now my wife) and it turns out she has also been reading another Morris book, The Blessed Life. She told me it has helped her deal with her financial issues and wanted to share the book with me. So, in 2007 she sent me the limited hard cover edition of the book (She loves me that much..haha) through a mutual friend in Norway who went back to the PI to spend Christmas vacation with her family. Because of schedule conflicts I was not able to meet up with this friend of ours until she returned to Norway. So she left my package with her family here. The moment I had the time to make that trip to Batangas (a 4 hour drive from Manila, where I live) to get my most anticipated package, I was told that they lost it!

Well, fast track to 2010... since then I tried looking for the book, even ordering it through local bookstores but to no avail. Unsuccessful, I went to my last resort - Amazon.com. Ordering stuff online is still a fairly new practice here in PI so there are a lot of complications with bringing in things abroad thru customs. So I waited. The ETA of my package was 5 weeks. If that wasn't long enough, it actually took 3 months! But I still didn't get the package! What was supposedly a door-to-door delivery, I got a written notice to pick up the package (I bought 3 other books along with it to justify freight costs) at the Post Office instead. It really got to annoying level at that moment but I kept my cool.

Finally I'll get my hands on it -- so I thought. They brought the package out and I held it in my hand!!!! But wait, they have to verify my identity. Joy forgot to bring the purse where we keep all our ID's! We didn't have any ID's on us. Good grief! Haha... Ok, ok.. Make the long story short, I finally got it a week after that.

It took 3 years for me to get my hands on this book but it's so worth it. I realized, maybe this is why God makes us wait before He gives us answers to our prayers. Waiting makes things more valuable and it makes victory sweeter.