The Dala Tribune

© Paolo Dala

The Crowd-less Traveled

Find me where the crowd is less, the sky is blue, and the wind is free. Find me in the midst of the forgotten and abandoned.

To the one who seeks my presence, find me in the company of the unseen.

© Paolo Dala

Beer And Chocolates

© Paolo Dala

San Candido’s Silence

© Paolo Dala

Enjoying Rest

Whatever it is that you're thinking about right now that gets you off the hook of taking Jesus' call to rest seriously, it is probably the thing you actually love and worship more than Jesus. We refuse to rest because at some deep level, we're convinced that if we stop the thing for which we're really living won't be fed, pleased , or produced. If you're happier at work than in Christ, rest will never feel good.

© Paolo Dala

Do Dogs Go To Heaven?

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

© Paolo Dala

San Candido Side Quest

© Paolo Dala

52 Assignments: Instagram

I self-taught myself photography the art of photography through National Geographic Your Shot. They would have these monthly creativity challenges like photograph ‘Quiet Moments’, ‘Adjectives and Adverbs’, ‘Water’, etc… I still don’t understand why they discontinued those challenges. That was a fun way of learning photography.

Ang Tadhanang Nahanap Ko Sa'yong Pagmamahal

© Paolo Dala

Remembering My Oath

I, PAOLO S. DALA of, MARIKINA CITY, hereby solemnly swear that I will support and defend the 'Constitution of the Philippines'; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I will obey the laws, legal orders, and 'Executive Orders' promulgated by the duly constituted authorities of the Republic of the Philippines, and that I impose my obligations upon myself voluntarily, without mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

I further solemnly swear that at all times and places I will adhere closely to the ethical and professional rules generally accepted by the Civil Engineering Profession in the Philippines, and that I will well and faithfully discharge to the best of my ability the duties and obligations incumbent upon a legally authorized Civil Engineer Practitioner.

So help me God.

© Paolo Dala

Cafe Birthday Celebration

© Paolo Dala

Scary Restaurant Experience

01 March 2019 Entry:

My friends and I were eating at Shake Shack IFC [International Finance Center] Mall in Hong Kong... All of a sudden, there was a commotion happening behind our table. It turns someone was having a heart attack and collapsed.

© Paolo Dala

Capture The Moment And Carefully Compose

[Capture the moment or carefully compose?]

Can you do both? I think the art of photography is both those things simultaneously.

© Paolo Dala

Cheese As A Subject

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

© Paolo Dala

Warheads Sour Galactic Mix, Overrated

© Paolo Dala

The Tre Cime Journey

At this weight and age is tougher to do assaults at 2,800 m altitudes. So when I was hiking up the Tre Cime, I had to go back to one of the beginner's rules of mountaineer : 1 minute of steep assault, then 5 minutes rest after. Haha...

© Paolo Dala

Appearances

"How do I look?"

For many, there are few questions we ask ourselves more often. We may not voice or even think the words, but our actions speak for us. In the morning, we wake and comb our hair. Pajamas find their way back to the drawer. Cracked knees see lotion; oily noses get powder. Throughout the day, we frequent the mirrors in our bathrooms, pockets, and cars. After we eat, we pick food from our teeth. If we’ve lunched with friends, we’re sure to alert them to stray spinach. Spilled coffee calls for a clean shirt. Even those who say, “I don’t care how I look,” make some effort to look as if they don’t care how they look. Whether we climb into bed with a freshly washed face or with a month of unshaven growth, at the end of the day, appearance matters to all of us.

But should it matter to Christians?

No - and Yes Perhaps we’re tempted to say, “Only the flesh judges a book by its cover, and only the flesh cares about its own cover.” Certainly, we would be capturing much truth (1 Samuel 16:7; Proverbs 31:30; 1 Peter 3:3–4). Scripture is clear: God regards us not according to the color of our hair but the condition of our hearts. How dear to him are the souls of those who believe it!

But does this make our appearance - the ones he sketched in his mind’s eye an eternity before we were born - un-dear to him? As we sense the wrongness of beauty, activity, and judgments that are solely skin-deep, should we likewise disregard just how wonderfully God made our skin (Psalm 139:14)?

Perhaps some of us have let our countercultural logic run lopsided for too long. When it comes to salvation, we are right to believe that our appearance doesn’t ultimately matter. When it comes to sin, we should sense how strong an idolatrous stakeholder our appearance can be. Yet when it comes to loving God and neighbor, we are wrong to think, feel, and live as if our appearance has no part to play.

Freed by Christ not to care about the ultimate value of appearance (Galatians 3:28), in what ways does appearance still matter in the Christian life? Consider four examples of how believers might care about their looks for the glory of God, not self...

Often, when Christians wrestle with the way they look, we tell them to simply stop looking. “How you look doesn’t matter,” the saying goes. While the words capture some truth, they also lack a resurrected vision of appearance. To paraphrase Abraham Kuyper, perhaps what we need instead is to hear Christ say, “Mine!” over every square inch of our bodies and not only our souls.

So, don’t merely “stop looking” at your appearance. Yes, stop looking in idolatrous, vainglorious ways. But then every morning when you wake, start looking at your appearance as a means to serve others. From hospitable smiles to cross-cultural missions, reverent dress to happy masculinity, oh, how many ways our “very good” appearance (Genesis 1:31) can point to our very good God!

Let’s give Satan a reason to hate mirrors and not only to love them.

Speed So Fast I Felt Like I Was Drunk