Today is dubbed “Gabii sa Kabilin” where six museums - Casa Gorordo, the Cathedral Museum, Santo Niño Museum, the Fort San Pedro Museum, the Yap-Sandiego Ancestral Home and the Museo Sugbo of the Province of Cebu - will be opened from 6:00PM until midnight to allow families to experience life as it used to be in the olden days. For a small fee of P100, you can visit all these six museums and for an additional P50, you can take a tartanilla to any of the participating museums. You can just park your car in one of these museums and ride the tartanilla.
What a visitor can expect in the Gabii sa Kabilin is a night of live performances, music, poetry and song. Some venues offer native delicacies and the like. Come and experience this once-a-year event, something that Cebuanos should be proud of because this is only happening to Cebu museums. This is in line with Presidential Proclamation no.439 declaring the Month of May as National Heritage Month. Indeed, museums tell the story of our past that very few people get to know. It is time to take a peek back in time and relish the days when Cebu was a sleepy town, when war came into our shores and above all, how Cebuanos used to live in those days.
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Once more war clouds are up in the Korean Peninsula and threaten the peace in this region of prosperity. The problems of the Middle East has been there for centuries and solutions are nowhere to be found. When will the world ever see genuine peace? No doubt peace will never come unless people learn to find something they have in common by which we can live together in this planet.
My sister Adela Kono just loaned me a book entitled, “The Hidden Messages in Water” written by Dr. Masaru Emoto, Japanese scientist and Doctor of Alternative Medicine who in his research on water apparently stumbled on what he calls a “Mystical Treasure.” He used a high-speed photograph using an electron microscope and discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed to water. This fellow is not a Christian, but what he discovered jolted him to the presence of a higher being, which to us Christians is God.
Dr. Emoto learned that if you place loving words in a letter form or even speak to a glass of water, after it is frozen, the microscope would show colorful and brilliant patterns of snowflakes, almost like your sparkling Christmas decorations. In a stark contrast, when water is exposed to negative sayings or words, like I hate you… or Satan, the results show, dark and dull colors with incomplete, asymmetrical patterns. In short, water responds to either positive or negative thoughts or words.
Dr. Emoto’s studies brought him to ask, why is the world in so much turmoil, violence, war and chaos? To quote him, “So what is the cause of all this chaos? What is the center of it all? Whatever it is, it is pushing the world away from harmony and towards discord. Perhaps this is an inevitable phenomenon. Though we all belong to the same species, if we live in different places and in different skin ways, the way we think is bound to be different. And to make matters worse, most people have difficulty accepting things that are unlike the things around them.
The result is a never-ending process of trouble and suffering. It would seem that as long as people are people, any solution proposed is certain to come up short. And so now we are back where we started. Can there ever be a single solution that can apply to all people on the globe, that everyone can understand it? In fact, I have found the answer, and it is just this: The average human body is 70 percent water. We start our life being 99 percent water, as fetuses. When we are born, we are 90 percent water, and by the time we reach adulthood we are down to 70 percent. If we die of old age, we will probably be about 50 percent water. In other words, throughout our lives we exist mostly as water.”
Since the average human is 70% water, it is the water in us that responds to love, kindness and charity, while at the same time when a person shouts at another person, it is the 70% water that responds to hateful and vicious words. Dr. Emoto’s studies brought him to the realization that water is indeed “Living Water” and responds positively or negatively to what humans would say.
This is exactly what we learn in John chapter 4 when our Lord Jesus talked with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, when Jesus told her, “If you knew the gift of God, you would ask of me, and I would give you living water.” In another Scripture passage in John 7:37-39, Jesus said, “If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” If only man learned to use softer or loving language, then we will see our discords vanish.