For the past few days, my early morning quiet time has followed a comforting ritual: reading the Catholic Daily Reflections.
Lately, these readings have centered on the Book of Ezekiel. I will be honest—God’s severe dealings with sinful humanity in those pages left an unsettling, heavy feeling in my chest. Ezekiel’s world is one of stark choices, broken covenants, and divine boundary lines.
Then came the headlines. I looked at my laptop screen and was met with a barrage of distressing news.
The Morning Diagnostic
The floods are rising yet again. For days now, businesses have slackened, classrooms sit empty, government services are slowed up, and the ordinary laborer is left stranded in waist-deep water. It is a scene of utter exhaustion.
Yet, as I looked at the muddy waters on my screen and then back at the open scripture, something counterintuitive happened. A strange, wondrous glimmer of hope pierced through the gloom.
Through the lens of Ezekiel, I realized we are not just witnessing a natural disaster. We are witnessing a spiritual intervention.
The Severe Mercy of Clogged Storm Drains
God is using these floods—as disgusting as they are, mixed with dirt, plastic bags, and the literal filth of scandalous, collapsed flood-control infrastructures—to perform a violent, diagnostic mercy on the Filipino soul.
Look closely at what the water is trying to wash away.
First, it is exposing our external filthiness and corruption—the backroom deals that build cheap canals, and the undisciplined garbage disposal of a citizenry that has lost its civic conscience.
Second, and more deeply, the water is drowning our idols. It is exposing the false dependencies we have placed in money, naked power, greed, and political messiahs who promised to save us but left us drowning.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Philippines stands as the foremost predominantly Catholic nation in Asia.
During his historic papal visits—most notably echoed during the sea of humanity that gathered for the 1995 World Youth Day in Manila—Saint Pope John Paul II beautifully anointed our nation as a Light of Asia. He charged us with a sacred vocation: to be the beacon of Christian faith and evangelization across the entire Asian continent.
The Mutation of the Beacon
But a beacon cannot shine when its fuel is poisoned. The advent of the Duterte presidency in 2016 marked a severe, dark mutation in the moral compass of the Filipino psyche.
The moral decay was crystallized for eternity by former president Rodrigo Duterte’s infamous, jaw-dropping blasphemy: "Who is this stupid God?"
It was a foreboding moment that the world saw coming. When he was elected, Time magazine ran a chilling banner that stripped away our collective denial: "Why Did the Philippines Just Elect A Guy Who Jokes About Rape As President?"
We shook our heads, we made excuses, and we allowed the threshold of decency to be utterly demolished.
The late, great Jaime Cardinal Sin hit the scriptural nail squarely on the head decades ago when he affirmed a harsh theological truth first articulated by John Calvin.
Cardinal Sin was speaking of Marcos Senior at the time, but the spiritual law remains unbroken. Why does God punish a people with wicked leaders? Because the leaders are a mirror of the people's compromised hearts.
This connects us directly back to the indictment in Ezekiel 16:49. God declares that the sin of Sodom was not just moral deviance, but that she “had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not help the poor and needy.”
Today, 1 in 4 Filipinos lives below the poverty line. We build megachurches and host grand religious processions, yet we tolerate a system that starves our brothers and sisters while enrichment flows upward.
A Nation Getting the Leaders It Deserves
Since 2016, our moral and political landscape has been in a dizzying downhill slide.
When the electorate went to the ballot box and chose Ferdinand Marcos Jr., we proved the somber truth of the old adage: A leader you elect is a leader you deserve.
Cardinal Sin’s prophetic warning hit two birds with one stone. By electing the son of the former plunderer-dictator, the nation revealed that it was still under judgment, still blind, and still clinging to the idols of nostalgia and revisionism.
Once again, the foreign press looked at us nakedly, with a headline that should make every Filipino weep: "What's Wrong With The Philippines?"
This brings me back to the rising, murky floodwaters outside our doors today.
But as biblical history shows us, water must kill before it can make alive. It must drown the old world, the old slave masters, and the old pride before a new creation can step onto dry land.
These floods are our national reckoning. God is violently scrubbing the canvas of our nation, forcing us to wade through the physical consequences of our moral compromise.
This is a spiritual boot camp prepping the Filipino people for the crucial, pivotal presidential election in 2028.
The Blueprint for a Heart Transplant
In his book Kingdom in Conflict, Charles Colson observed that Cardinal Sin always saw himself strictly as a spiritual leader, not a political one.
Watching our nation endure agonizing grief, the Cardinal provided the cure. He preached to both the poor farmers and the wealthy elite a simple battle cry that took root across our lush islands: COR — the Latin word for heart.
For Cardinal Sin, this acronym was the map out of exile.
“C” demands a true Conversion—a completely transformed life birthed by repentance and God’s forgiveness. “O” requires the offering of our Obedient lives back to God, because genuine conversion must radically change our outward behavior.
Finally, “R” calls for structural Reparation—the painful work of making right what our sins have broken. If we want a true national revival today, we must look into this COR.
We cannot afford to fail the test again.
The waters are rising to ask us a defining question: Will we cling to our stone hearts, allowing ourselves to be ruled by unjust leaders we deserve, or will we let this severe mercy wash away our filth, break our pride, and grant us a "heart of flesh"?
Only when we allow God to cleanse our national conscience can the Philippines finally step out of the mud and truly become the Light of Asia.
Content & editing put together in collaboration with Google Gemini
Head collage image created by Google Nano Banana 2 Lite, photos courtesy of Facebook, Philstar.com, NBC News, Instagram
Photo art app by Canva
Still photos courtesy of Istock photos, Instagram, & Adobe Stock
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