Count Your Joy is a personal blog, a host to my many musings and reflections, my prayers, my letters to God. But it’s also a place for the little joys I find in life — food I enjoyed eating, lovely places I visited, people I hold dear in my heart.
I am an accounts executive and social media manager from the Philippines, a coffee lover, a traveler, and a fan of Kdramas, mangas, and anime. Depending on who I’m talking to, I introduce myself with any of the aforementioned. But at the core of my being is God’s daughter and a writer waiting to write stories that entertain, educate, inspire, and hopefully bring someone else closer to God.
I have been on and off blogging since 2008. I’ve had several personal blogs, a book blog that used to be so active (and introduced me to lovely booknerds), and I also dabbled in travel blogging from early 2015 to late 2016. 2017 was a tough year though. I was busy with work, constantly tired, and uninspired. As the year’s end drew near, my heart broke at the fact that I didn’t write anything except for work-related stuff, no blog posts or anything creative.
This year, I started praying that I’ll get to write more non-work, creative stuff — blogs, stories, poems, long forms, hand-written letters to friends — and to keep a journal. Writing is one of my faith goals this year, and I even challenged myself to produce one written work per month. For someone as busy as I am, this is borderline impossible. But like what Psalms 37:4 said, I only needed to set my heart right. I needed to look to Him. And somehow, He gave me the desires of my heart. After struggling finding a topic, starting and not finishing, Breathe and Miss Out happened — a piece I was so proud of that I ended up creating this blog even if it wasn’t part of my plan.
I may end up taking other roads in the future but I remain a writer. Strip me of every hobby, every passion project I took on, every work I carried out, and what remains is my writer self. I express myself best in the written word, and life sucked when I was not able to write. What makes this blog even more meaningful is that this time, I’m not writing for myself or for a hard-to-please audience, but for the Lord who gave me the talent and the heart to write.
My prayer is for you, the reader, to encounter God in my writing, and for you to pass on the blessing. Happy reading!