Prayer List no.5 - In Quietness and Trust is your strength - 24/08/2017 (Christine)

I have been silence for a while - however I was not hiding away.
In fact I am staying still and gathering my strength....

The result of Adrian's bone scan given by the doctor 2 weeks ago was not promising.
In fact the cancer was found to be present in several areas other than just the rib - his mid spine, his right shoulder and pelvic bone.  I began to feel fearful again.
My knee gave up a few times while walking down the stairs - every time it was really painful - and today I could not even walk properly.  Sometimes I just feel like I could just shout out my fear and frustration to God.  Why Father why so much pain for us?
Yet during these few weeks we met up with so many of our beloved brothers and sisters (some came from far away) and there are so many encouraging words and testimonies from them - and I realise that these are from God.
Moreover Adrian seems to be in less pain....
And I remember this passage in Isaiah 30:15:

'In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength...'
....Father God please forgive me if I have been relying on my own strength,
    Help me to set my eyes totally on you
    I realise I only have water in my jars but yet somehow you will turn it into wine
    so that through serving this best wine, we and others will be blessed and healed...           

****So please continue to pray for God's protection for Adrian, especially his bones - the ones that had been damaged and stop the cancer spreading further to other bones - also that the target treatment will continue to be effective.
May God grant healing to him.

Thank you for all your love and support in Christ, once again, we are so grateful and blessed by God.

Financial Ruin (Adrian)

Hebrews 4:15-16 - 
This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses for he faced all of the same testings we do; yet he did not sin. 
So let us come bodly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.

To me, my illness is probably one of my biggest life challenge. 

Interestingly, if I am being completely honest, it is not the actual death that scare me the most. I know where I am going. I know my Father God is good. Therefore, I am perfectly fine. I do have peace.

It is the sensation of a possible financial ruin, the fear of unable to provide for the family that keeps me awake at night and scare me the most.




My childhood story

• My grand dad was an addicted gambler, my dad who passed away over 20 years ago never explained to me of his ordeal but I heard it from my mum. 
• She said my dad was being kidnapped in a gambling den when he was a little boy while my grand dad was gambling his life saving away. 
• My dad was being sold to place far away from home for over 10 years. He went through all kinds of hardships. 
• Eventually, he found his way home and reunited with his family. 
• My dad had a nickname called "Tall Guy" not because he was tall but because he was very short. He was 4ft 11 inches probably to do with his malnutrition through his teenage years. People used to tease him with the nickname.
• He was lucky to get married. My mum was 5ft tall. 
• My grand dad was unable to provide for the family. When my mum and dad were married, both side of their parents were living with us and they had a great burden to provide for a family of 10 including all their siblings. Life was hard. My parents worked 7 days a week. I remember, I used to sleep with my mum and dad and my younger brother in a double bed. It was very doable cause both of my mum and dad were short. I was sleeping below their feet.
• It is not hard to understand why the possibility of financial ruin was my family's deepest fear.
• When I come to the realisation of this, I come to Jesus and asked Him to break my generational sin and unhealthy soul ties of this fear sensation.

 
When I looked into the passage, Paul said Jesus understand our weakness because He had gone through the same test, just he did not sin.   
This leads me to ask one question, was Jesus ever fear of anything? 

• Of course yes because he was facing his suffering as a perfect man. 
• Jesus fear for his pain, his suffering and ultimately, the separation between Him and His Father from a perfect relationship while he bore the sin of mankind. 
• This is the reason why He said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 
• When He was in the garden of Gethsemane, He became deeply troubled and distressed. He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. 
• Jesus was physically, emotionally and spiritually broken.

The beauty

• Not only Jesus did not deny our emotional and spiritual vulnerability.
• Now Jesus is offering us a different way to deal with our distress, our deepest fear. 
• Jesus did not say, look at how I did it, so you must be able to do the same. This will be cruel cause we will never be perfect as Him. 
• Instead, He is asking us to come to Him, and ask for His grace when we need the most... 

He is carrying us through by his grace and mercy.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, Isaiah 53:4
He was in fact suffering with us

Of course the servants knew (Adrian)

John 2: 7 - 9
7 Jesus told the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” When the jars had been filled, 
8 he said, “Now dip some out, and take it to the master of ceremonies.” So the servants followed his instructions.
9 When the master of ceremonies tasted the water that was now wine, not knowing where it had come from (though, of course, the servants knew)
 

Of course the servants knew

Have you been a place where you know your serve is totally unfit for the purpose even you were serving from your best heart condition. The lacking can be circumstancial, relational challenges, lacking of ability, gifting & anointing .........

I am blessed by all the timely treatments plus the love and care that I have received by so many brothers and sisters.

However, various treatments trigger different kinds of side effects plus coping with my bone pain (thank God that this has come down quite a bit in the last week). 

• Every day is a different journey. 
• Sometime I have energy to carry on as normal, 
• Sometime I am totally exhausted.
• 2 days ago, I received an IV medication to help strengthening my bone. Yesterday, I am at home shivering with flu symptoms, one of the known side effect of the drug.

I am in a zone where time and ability has a different meaning to me. 

• I cannot plan anything with a time perspective, saying I am going to this in the next 3 years (I am not sure I have the time), 
• I cannot plan anything based on my physical fitness cause I have no idea how my body is going to react to the treatment and my daily condition.

Nevertheless, I do have a choice, 

• a choice to keep going while I still can regardless of whatever situation that I am in OR
• choose to wait until I feel that situation has improved which may or may not happen.
• I chose to keep going, continue with our serving in church and work in the last 3 months.

2 days ago, Christine shared a passage with me from her devotion, Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine. 

This more or less summed up where we are

        We know full well that the water that we pour into the jar
            is only fit for feet washing (our serve),
        We are merely like the servant in the story
            Each time, faithfully bringing out the water (our unworithness) under the master's instruction,
        We know full well that we can only look upon Jesus to
            bless our serve and trusting that at some point He will turn our feet washing water into wine.


The truth is if anything good is going to pour out from our serve, we know full well that this is Jesus' doing
   

NSC English - Our Journey - Part 1 (Adrian)

 “A CHURCH COMMITTED TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH IS A MESSY PLACE.” 

Author of “Emotionally Healthy Church” Peter Scazzero,

• An emotionally healthy church is a church that allows vulnerability to flow
• Authenticity is not just about being honest to one another.
• Authenticity needs to breath from a heart/place of vulnerability, our willingness to be vulnerable to one another

NSC English – Our Journey – Part 1

Lessons learned and DNAs in the past 7 years

Most people aware of our NSC English timeline, but very few asked us what we have learned in this journey. Valuable lessons have been learned and taught by God. I feel a great urge to share these lessons.

In Sep-2010, God called a few of us to start the English Service in New Soho Congregation answering to the need of a rising English speaking generation. This was in many ways like a new “Church Plant”. We were in a unique setting where the service was built up from scratch freeing from any unnecessary traditions. For a very long time, we were outside of the main ministries.

We began with a faithful core team of 6

• Peter Chow who is now with the Lord, Simon and Kristina Tsang are now serving in HillSong, Tim Lee is now working in Asia, Anne Shum is now faithfully serving in the NSC Chinese and SBF, I am the last one remaining in the NSC Eng writing this tale.

In the first 5 years,

• We changed venue and timing of the service 4 times.
• We operated under little external support and limited resources.
• Many times, we prayed to God begging for help,
• His reply to us was “My grace is enough for you.”
• God said to me, “The day you know how to build up a church/disciple from scratch, you will know how to build a church.”  
• It’s not very comforting, is it?  We knew the journey would be long and there were no shortcut.
• God has taught us valuable lessons through these hard times. Little that we know, these lessons have also become the core DNAs of the NSC English Service, our foundational building blocks. Something that we all hold dear.

There are 6 important lessons (Building Blocks)

1. Journey of Authenticity
2. Journey of Sheepherding
3. Journey of Father’s Love
4. Journey of Freedom by His Truth
5. Journey of Honouring and Submitting to one another
6. Journey of Heaven on Earth

JJourney of Authenticity

• As I said, we had very limited resources to begin with, preaching in particular. None of the core team were trained to preach in English and none of us were theologically trained at the time. We had no church worker.
• A big part of our initial focus were focusing on logistics rather than people, i.e. how to find a preacher for each Sunday Service.
• In our naive mind, we thought “English Ministry = English Sunday Service” (meaning an English Sunday Service with enough chairman, worship leaders, speakers and people serving in various roles). We thought as long as all the components within a Sunday Service were there, the picture was complete.
• It has taken us a few years to realise the most basic lesson. We learned that the foundation of any church ministry is “Love in Authenticity”. Things begin to flourish when this is at the heart and centre of everything we do.

• In our first year,
• Since finding enough preachers to fill each Sunday rota were the main focus at the time, we went through a period of relying on external speakers.
• Most of the speakers were from AllSouls and St Helens, their apprentice programme.
• Although, both churches were willing to send their apprentice to us, these speakers were inexperienced and none of them could regularly commit to our service.
• They were disconnected and failed to make any connection to the congregation to be effective.
• (average attendance were 15) 

• In our second year,
• We were forced to move the Sunday Service from 1:30pm to 4:00pm in order to secure additional support from CCiL English Staff.
• However, our core leaders were also serving in the youth group in the Sunday morning.  Sunday becomes an impossible long day from 8:30am to 7:00pm. All leaders were burnt out at the end of the 2^nd year. We knew we had to change again.
•  (average attendance were about 25)

• In our third year,
• We found a new location 10 mins walking distance away from NSC, a place called “Dragonhall”.
• We decided to move to this venue so both the youth group and the Sunday Service can take place in the Sunday morning. This made the Sunday arrangement more manageable.
• The drawback of this was losing all our supports from other English congregations. Everything had to be started from scratch all over again.
• Finding preachers became the immediate issue, the only option for us was to grow our speakers and leaders from within as we knew we could not rely on anyone external. We started training those who are willing to take up preaching slots. For a very long time, standard of the pulpit message was hard to maintain. People come and gone as they were not being fed spiritually
• (average attendance were 35)

• During the 3 years, apart from battling with all the logistic issues, all our leaders’ vulnerability were visble for all to see. I have gone through a period of a very depressed stage, feeling that I have let down my fellow workers.
• Nevertheless, we were deliberately being honest and transparent about our struggles to everyone. Our leaders model authenticity at all levels. After all, we are on the same boat together.
• There were no department in the English ministry as there were so few of us.
• We operated in a flat structure, basically everyone was in the core team. Every meeting includes all serving members.

• In our fourth year,
• We started introducing a sharing slot in every Sunday.
• Each week, a different member will come forth to take a sharing slot. There were no restriction of what they could share.
• The Spirit was moving among us, most of the sharing were genuine and authentic. 
• People started to share their struggles openly. 
• The community grew closer together and members started to feel at home. 
• The place became a safe place for the vulnerables. 
• We were still struggling most of the time, ministry was messy but this has become a spiritual home for those who chose to stay. 
• To our surprise, members started to look forward to the sharing slot each week. This become one of the main reason why people were finding comfort to stay.
• By the end of the fifth year, attendance grew to a regular 45.

- End of Part 1 - 

Prayer List no.4 - Light from a Stained Glass Window - 01/08/2017 (Christine)

There are moments while I feel like sitting in a dark room on my own....

• The responsibility as a sole carer with protective mechanism to ensure Adrian has the best chance to fight his illness...
• The devastation and helplessness seeing your loved one in constant pain and tiredness...
• The huge sense of fear in facing a reality of becoming a widow in a foreseeable future...
• Sometimes even in quiet time with God I am only able to see a tiny window with light shining through - 
• And I struggle daily to guard my soul, my heart, my mind and my faith to fight this spiritual battle...

The digging of the SOC foundation began last week and the floor was broken up.  Apart from Adrian's broken rib,  I also noticed that various things around me started breaking - first some dishes, then some cupboard doors, toilet flush, car mirror and yesterday one of my TOOTH!!!  I felt exhausted to fight on...

•  However looking back at the past 2 week -  our whole church in various occasions knelt before the Lord to repent and ask for His forgiveness....
• Many brothers and sisters fast to pray for us everyday...
• A sister whom I never met before prophesied that those with broken bones will have their lives transformed by God...

And a brother gave me Psalm 91 as an encouragement - 

•  “Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.  He will call on me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble,
  I will deliver him and honour him.  With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”

And there I am - this morning - while praying to God - I saw the broken pieces of myself in a totally different perspective...

In fact I saw the face of Jesus beaming with light through a stained glass window -  all the glass may be in broken pieces - but the light is reflected into different directions - and the vision is so BEAUTIFUL and GLORIOUS!!!  And I cannot stop praising God!

Through our brokenness God is granting renewal.

• The DETOX sermon series starts this Sunday and the healing hands of God is already touching all who come at His feet...

****So please pray for God's protection for Adrian, especially his bones - and God's healing on any of his bones that had been damaged and stop the cancer spreading to other bones and other parts of his body - we should know the result of the bone scan next (08/08/2017).

PS. Thank you once again for all you love and prayers - especially the lovely dinners cooked with your labour of love - and all the kind words of encouragements.