I walked into University with God. Up till then Christianity to me was about my relationship with God, about walking with Him and learning about His heart and will. Young Jae had much to learn yet.
Entering the SJ fellowship was one of the more precious things that have happened in my life. It was at SJ that God showed me how important community in Christ is, and where I learnt how to love the Bride of Christ.
(I have written another post all about that experience.) Long story short would be that God showed me how by grace he led me to pray for the siblings I judged in high school, and in college, we all grew to understand the value of taking our walks with God seriously, and the value of loving one another and spurring each other on towards God. God blessed me richly by showing me not just the power of prayer, but His transformative power over all our lives, not to mention His graciousness to me even in my blindness and limited understanding to allow me to be able to pray!
Some of those individuals I did not understand well back then are most treasured siblings in Christ today who encourage me to much, and whom I love dearly. This transformation in them and myself is one of the realities that makes God's presence so undeniable to me.
This is not to say that I did not face challenging stumbles through my years of college. I did fail many times, but God sustained me by grace and mercy despite my rebellious, weak, and deceptive heart.
God further blessed me with personal impressions, and affirmation in what I determine to do, before my fourth, and final year of college. Before fourth year, we were to self-reflect about who we are, and I acknowledged myself as pessimistic, volatile, bitter, hypocritical, emotional, fearful, selfish. And yet, I saw in myself joy, constancy, hope, peace, and care. And I saw that all that was flawed in me was my flesh, and anything good was given by God. And God impressed upon me that yes I was complicated, but I was His masterpiece. He was with me in Spirit.
Graduating and moving to the working stage of life has been very good as I finally am able to commit to the many activities that I longed to commit to such as fully engaging in bible study, fellowship (which I did not do in my fourth year), Sunday school, discipleship, etc, etc. And goodness has God been good and taught me much! I hope to be more faithful and constant, as I am still prone to distractions of this world.
I yearn, I LONG! To be ready to do my mission, and look at everything I go through as preparation for what He will have me do for His Kingdom, as I felt I was to do before I went into my post-secondary education.
I know I am closer, yet still far, and not yet ready. But I hope for that season. I am full of joy in what He teaches me, and in the fellowship I have the opportunity of experiencing with other believers who also love God, another blessing that I have longed for since my childhood. I receive encouragement, give encouragement and walk alongside other siblings in Christ-- God has been very very very gracious to me.
I praise Him for all He has done for this simple fool, and I hope to continue to honour Him with my life!
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
A Testament: Teenaged and Solitary
I feel the need to insert at this point that I was baptized when I was about ten or eleven years of age. Again, God showed His grace in my life as He further bound me to Himself through my bumbling decisions. Full water immersion on the beaches of the sunny island where we lived. It was a warm and pleasant day and I can still remember the feeling of rushing back up into the open air from under the salty waves, drying off in my white t-shirt after and drawing pictures in the sand. My then Sunday school teacher/counsellor/"ahmah" Pris, gave each of us-- CHY, MII, CAA, and JUE, a little keychain with a plastic blue cross.
The next phase of my life could be divided into three parts. Hope (SCGS), Wesley (SCGS), and VCAC (EH).
For most of my elementary years, I went to Hope Church. The had a nice kids program, I was relatively involved in worship and skits, and had fun with the older girl's group, but by grade 6 I found the sermons given at Kids to be lacking in interest, and began to long for more stimulating material.
It was a relief in some ways then when I entered secondary one and began attending the Youth Ministry services at Hope. Their youth congregation was rather large, and they had two services to accommodate the hundreds of teens that attended Saturday services. At Sec 1, I was prepared to take in the now more challenging sermons and content, but far underprepared to handle the social and practical aspects of being in the teens ministry. Teens camp was intimidating and overwhelming, and I was indeed rather a child in most aspects. Either way, it mattered less at the end of the day, as we moved to Wesley methodist, my mother's first church in her youth, as I entered Sec 2.
Wesley methodist had a far smaller and less charismatic youth congregation. The individuals in my small group, while nice, remained in their own clique, and as usual, I had a hard time with the social and relational aspects of Church. Despite these, I was growing, as my introverted and reserved self took to taking circular walks around a specific landing of my high school, and during those walks, meditating and praying. And so I passed almost every weekday during the lunch break in prayer and walked with the Spirit in solitude. God's presence to me was most certain then.
I felt disconnected from the general less inspiring peers around me, save a few friends who I joined on Fridays for a prayer meeting. Its sort of what happens when you discover at the age of eleven or twelve that there is more to life than just school/work and family, when you learn that you are part of the Bride of Christ (though you don't fully comprehend what that will do to your life), all the daily conversations and grades becoming more and more meaningless against the greater scope of people suffering and life that is to come.
In this way, by the time I was a teenager I became skeptical and wary of shallowness. And I saw it all around me. People living to no purpose, even among Christian friends God was a vending machine to them, they hoped always and only for life to become easier and better-- to get good grades, to get into that program... I felt so so distant from everyone that I judged. I found it hard to find a kindred spirit who wanted to just talk about scripture, or God, and His Bride.
A big change during my teenage years was the move from SG to CA.
The main change to my walk with God was that up till that point, my spiritual mentor had always been my father. My father retained his company in SG, and the rest of our family went. It was then that I determined that I had to really actively choose my faith as my own, and meet God myself, learn about Him myself.
There were other challenges within this period of time, but those perhaps are too detailed and require more lengthy digressions. Simply put, I experienced the cultural shock in school and partly at Church, and still retained the judgemental nature of my flesh, continuing to find it difficult to find a kindred spirit.
There were a few souls who stood out to me as willing to talk about God. However, these friendships were either never fully developed, or not further developed till our college years. (The seeds were then planted though.)
Nonetheless, teenaged years had its extreme highs and lows. I stayed away from ministry because I wanted to be convicted to serve in a specific area according to God's calling, and not because there was a need.
I experienced a drastic challenge to my faith in Grade 11, where I reaffirmed what Christ's sacrifice meant-- this was where my self-esteem shifted to being rooted in Christ's price of what I was worth, and no one else's.
And in Grade 12 when I experienced betrayal in my friendships, I walked with Christ as he allowed me to learn what the betrayal he went through was like. I walked into university with few things certain, but they were all I needed: That whatever I did would lead to my Kingdom Vocation. The goal is to build God's kingdom, and I will learn skills that will lead to that, even if right now it is Fashion Design.
Tbc...
The next phase of my life could be divided into three parts. Hope (SCGS), Wesley (SCGS), and VCAC (EH).
For most of my elementary years, I went to Hope Church. The had a nice kids program, I was relatively involved in worship and skits, and had fun with the older girl's group, but by grade 6 I found the sermons given at Kids to be lacking in interest, and began to long for more stimulating material.
It was a relief in some ways then when I entered secondary one and began attending the Youth Ministry services at Hope. Their youth congregation was rather large, and they had two services to accommodate the hundreds of teens that attended Saturday services. At Sec 1, I was prepared to take in the now more challenging sermons and content, but far underprepared to handle the social and practical aspects of being in the teens ministry. Teens camp was intimidating and overwhelming, and I was indeed rather a child in most aspects. Either way, it mattered less at the end of the day, as we moved to Wesley methodist, my mother's first church in her youth, as I entered Sec 2.
Wesley methodist had a far smaller and less charismatic youth congregation. The individuals in my small group, while nice, remained in their own clique, and as usual, I had a hard time with the social and relational aspects of Church. Despite these, I was growing, as my introverted and reserved self took to taking circular walks around a specific landing of my high school, and during those walks, meditating and praying. And so I passed almost every weekday during the lunch break in prayer and walked with the Spirit in solitude. God's presence to me was most certain then.
I felt disconnected from the general less inspiring peers around me, save a few friends who I joined on Fridays for a prayer meeting. Its sort of what happens when you discover at the age of eleven or twelve that there is more to life than just school/work and family, when you learn that you are part of the Bride of Christ (though you don't fully comprehend what that will do to your life), all the daily conversations and grades becoming more and more meaningless against the greater scope of people suffering and life that is to come.
In this way, by the time I was a teenager I became skeptical and wary of shallowness. And I saw it all around me. People living to no purpose, even among Christian friends God was a vending machine to them, they hoped always and only for life to become easier and better-- to get good grades, to get into that program... I felt so so distant from everyone that I judged. I found it hard to find a kindred spirit who wanted to just talk about scripture, or God, and His Bride.
A big change during my teenage years was the move from SG to CA.
The main change to my walk with God was that up till that point, my spiritual mentor had always been my father. My father retained his company in SG, and the rest of our family went. It was then that I determined that I had to really actively choose my faith as my own, and meet God myself, learn about Him myself.
There were other challenges within this period of time, but those perhaps are too detailed and require more lengthy digressions. Simply put, I experienced the cultural shock in school and partly at Church, and still retained the judgemental nature of my flesh, continuing to find it difficult to find a kindred spirit.
There were a few souls who stood out to me as willing to talk about God. However, these friendships were either never fully developed, or not further developed till our college years. (The seeds were then planted though.)
Nonetheless, teenaged years had its extreme highs and lows. I stayed away from ministry because I wanted to be convicted to serve in a specific area according to God's calling, and not because there was a need.
I experienced a drastic challenge to my faith in Grade 11, where I reaffirmed what Christ's sacrifice meant-- this was where my self-esteem shifted to being rooted in Christ's price of what I was worth, and no one else's.
And in Grade 12 when I experienced betrayal in my friendships, I walked with Christ as he allowed me to learn what the betrayal he went through was like. I walked into university with few things certain, but they were all I needed: That whatever I did would lead to my Kingdom Vocation. The goal is to build God's kingdom, and I will learn skills that will lead to that, even if right now it is Fashion Design.
Tbc...
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