Joseph Daniel B. Alina

A Decade Behind The Camera

When the announcement came, Apostle Jonathan looked at me and asked, “Are you the best director here?” I answered with faith and full of confidence in what God would do for me and the whole team: “Yes po, Apostle. By God’s grace.”

It did not return as I remembered it. Apostle Jonathan brought with him a new breed of workers-younger, sharper, fluent in a media landscape that had shifted entirely in the years the program had been silent. Where I once knew broadcast television, I now found myself learning everything I had no formal claim to.

One night, meditating with my co-ministers after a long day at the Media Festival, I told God, “Let me, Your humble servant, take part in it.” Then my nose bled-from the sheer weight of what I had just asked to carry. I did not think much of it then. I simply wiped it, sat back down, and kept meditating, though for a moment I felt small beside the standards of what was being built.

But that is not the posture Apostle Jonathan ever allowed us to keep. He had no time for self-pity dressed up as humility. I remember how quickly he would correct that kind of thinking by reminding us that God does not call the equipped, He equips the called. He needed workers who trusted the God who assigned them.

So, we got to work. The new state-of-the-art studio rose inside the very walls of the old studio the past literally holding up the future. For three weeks, I watched Apostle Jonathan supervise construction, check on the workers’ welfare, and review programming, all while carrying the weight of the entire church-all at once, all in less than three weeks.

Everyone was exhausted, grinding through days that stretched into longer nights. Equipment arrived piece by piece-until key units didn’t come on time, and our production schedule collapsed around us.

Apostle Jonathan was upset-not loudly, but in a way harder to sit with. He gathered us and made us reflect: every mistake here was costly, not like a missed deadline, but because everything we were building had been entrusted to us-invested by the Church, by members who believed in our mission, gave their offering, and their trust. We weren’t just behind schedule. We were stewards who had grown careless with what others had sacrificed to give us.

Then he told us why he pushed himself the way he did-in the studio, the meetings, the pulpit, the church office, all at once. It was there I first heard him say it: “Ain’t no time to bleed.” Not as a boast. As a burden he had told himself many times before he ever said it to us.

And yet, for more than fifty episodes now, that same pressure has never curled into resentment. If anything, the staff has only grown more eager. Apostle Jonathan does not lead from a distance he is in the work with us, checking every sequence, every outline, every material before it airs, as if the smallest detail still mattered to him as much as the sermon itself.

And when the camera stops rolling, he does not leave. He stays to fellowship with us, to teach us lessons meant to make us better-not just as broadcasters, but as people. To all of us, he has become a father, a mentor, a leader, and an adviser, all at once.

Because in the end, this was never about building a program. It was about pointing and ushering people to Christ-the weary, the sick, everyone quietly searching for truth on the other side of a screen. Before every taping, the staff gathers for a devotion, asking for God’s anointing, His grace, His help-for the studio, the equipment, our hosts, Apostle Jonathan, and most of all, for the viewers we never meet yet whom every episode is truly for.

But somewhere in the middle of that production year, the wound I had been carrying quietly caught up with me. I had told myself, like Apostle Jonathan, that there was no time to bleed-that the mission was too great to stop for what I was feeling inside. So I didn’t stop. Running only on God’s grace, I kept showing up, kept reviewing scripts, kept calling shots-until my body finally said what I had refused to say myself. For a season, I could barely function, much less direct.

I remember that first nosebleed, from the night I prayed, “Let me, Your humble servant, take part in it.” I had thought that was the cost. I did not know then that the deeper cost would not show up on my face, but somewhere I could not simply wipe away and sit back down from.

And here I have to be honest about a line I had carried, from a man 1 deeply respect: there is a time to bleed. Not as a contradiction of everything Apostle Jonathan taught us, but as its completion. If stewardship meant caring for what God entrusted to us the studio, the equipment, the offerings of the faithful-then surely it also meant caring for the body and mind God had entrusted to me. Getting the help I needed was not a departure from faith. It was faith, practiced honestly. God did not remove me from the assignment; He met me in the middle of it-and I have not been the same director, or the same man, since.

Looking back now, I feel nothing but gratitude for the ten years before the silence, for the silence itself, and for these fifty-plus episodes of a story I never imagined being part of.

I am convinced that the same God who moved through Apostle Arsenio T. Ferriol in 1991, who carried this program through three decades of changing seasons, is not finished. He still chooses ordinary, unqualified, sometimes bleeding people, and asks them, “Are you the best director here?” not because we are, but because He intends to make us capable of the yes we give Him.

I do not know everything the future holds for this program, or for the small part I play in it-how many more studios will be built, how many more schedules will collapse and be rebuilt, how many more nights will demand more than I think I have left to give. But I know this: I want to still be found here, faithful, whenever that future arrives-not because I have finally become enough on my own, but because the God who has never left this program will not suddenly leave now. Apostle Jonathan taught us there is no time to bleed for a mission this urgent. This experience taught me that even bleeding people can still be used, if they let God tend to wounds instead of hiding them.

So I hold both truths in one hand, the way this first whole production year has taught me: there is urgency, and there is honesty the call to give everything, and the wisdom to admit when we have nothing left to give without help. Oras ng Katotohanan with Apostle Jonathan S. Ferriol will go on, by God’s grace, long after my time behind the camera is done. And whatever years I still have left, I intend to spend them the same way I began-small, unqualified, and entirely dependent on the same grace that first let me say  yes.