Words from Asia Conference

"But the path of the just is like the shining sun,

that shines every brighter unto the perfect day."

(Prov 4:18)

1) As a righteous child of God, our life should go from glory to glory. If not, we're backsliding.

2) Reaching out to the youths by building RELATIONSHIPS
  - Be Present: I will be there for them in their down moments, be a listening ear
  - Be Patient: youths fluctuate, struggle with BGR and a host of other stuff. I gotta be patient with them :)

3) “Being Christians, life without miracles is no life at all. When you live by the Fourth Dimension, you can do the work of 100 men, and you will witness miracles.” - Dr. Yonggi Cho

"Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old.

Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." (Isa 43:18-19, quoted and prophesied by Phil Pringle)

4) God will be using City Harvest to do greater works - we should leave our past achievements behind and press on towards the new things that God has installed.

5) God deals with our low self-esteem by introducing to us a new self-concept
Our TRUE SELF = Image of God
- not afraid of rejection
- says what can be done, no what cannot be done
- nothing is impossible to him
- thinks positively
- self-determination: does not take "no" for an answer

Imago Dei

My, my, my... wow! Asia Conference was wonderful!

Due to much busyness and work, I was unable to update my Blog for a while. It carried on to Asia Conference, which was tiring! It was like.. report at 7am for usher ministry, serve until lunch break, do my work until evening, go back and serve for night session, reach home at 12am-1am, sleep for 3hrs, wake up at 5.30am, report at 6.40am for usher.... and it goes on.

Thank God that I made the prudent decision of serving only 3 days, and spending the last 2 days with my beloved W406! Longevity for the win! In either case, it was really fun serving God as an usher, together with Enyun, Ernest, Min Yee, Jing Yuan, Sunthari + group 11 and 12!

Thank God I was granted leave just a few days before Asia Conference.
Thank God for catered food! :D
Thank God for Tan Jin, who accompanied me to do my work on the first day, who helped me find a power socket (we went all the way to Foyer 1).
Thank God for Enyun, who gave morning calls. (Oh yah, I think I still owe her money for cab fare)
Thank God I could attend all sessions, except the "Cai Qin" one which we decided to skip to queue up earlier for Grand Finale ^^
Thank God for strength during the stressful and down moments.
Thank God for awesome preaching of the Word in every session!
Thank God for wisdom and anointing to serve as an Usher.
Thank God for turning things around, when things couldn't get worse.
Thank God for Pastor Kong's word about reaching the Youth and the spirit of love + unity after the preaching.
Thank God for getting into Hall 8 for the last 2 days, when I'm not serving.
Thank God I recovered my lost Bible and notebook.
Thank God for an awesome Asia Conference experience!

On the second day, I was posted to guard the back door of Hall 10 during the session with Dr. Bernard. I stood between the extreme cold of the air-conditioned auditorium and the scorching heat of the sun. Was a weird feeling, like a balance between Yin & Yang.

Guess who I met?

The C3 Band!

That's Joe Pringle on the right of me, and Ryan Smith besides him.

The lady singer joined in :)

Yay! Joe Pringle shook hands with me, and even asked my name haha. He was then complaining about walking to hall 8 under the sun. He said something like "But you guys are Singaporean! It's too hot for me!" lawls.

However I was getting agitated as Dr Bernard started preaching, and I was still guarding the door! I wanted to hear him preach! Nevertheless, I kept speaking to myself, to serve with a right attitude, as unto the Lord. It was hard to keep out those negative thoughts.

Finally when I was told to stand down from guarding the door, all the negativity sudden disappeared. :)

Thank God that I could get into Hall 8 for the last 2 days.
On the 4th day, my brothers and I arrived at 3.40pm while the rest of the CG met at 10am to queue. We may not be able to get into queue, much less to Hall 8. We tried to walk into the queue in Hall 10, by an Usher stopped us, and directed us to the front seats of Hall 10. However, we managed to get pass the Ushers, and walked all the way into the end of the queue.

I prayed with my bros for the service, and asked God that we can get into Hall 8, to experience and receive from Him in a more tangible way, and not so that we could get "better entertainment". I felt a sense of peace that we will get into Hall 8, without the need of cutting the queue.

So when Josiah said "Why the queue stopped moving? What if we can't get into Hall 8?",
I replied "We will get into Hall 8, don't worry."

In the end, not only did we managed to get in, but we could join W406!

On the last day, my bros, Chong Hui and I took the shuttle bus that my brother Isaac hired, and we reached Expo at around 8am. There was no Hall 10 for overflow, so we may not be able to attend the session at all. Thank God that Pastor Stephen let us in through the back door!

However the Ushers had a second line of defense - we needed to show our tag, and I believe they were looking out for the "Guest" tag. None of us had a "Guest" tag, we only had the normal ones. And I forgot to bring my tag. By God's grace, I pushed through with the crowd, past the frantic Ushers who were shouting "please show your tag!", and all of us made it to Hall 8! :D

Pastor Bernard's message in the Grand Finale was awesome! It really renewed my mind, about how I viewed myself. We were originally made in the image of God, and Christ restored us to that image when we received Him as our Saviour.

"Now if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new." (2 Cor 5:17)

Our new man is really the Imago Dei - the Image of God. And the Image of God has the attributes of God - holy determination, undaunted confidence, creative, full of wisdom and capacity, etc.

That Word really inspired faith in me - I can be a relentlessly determined person, because I am created in God's image!

5 days of John Avanzini = much sowing of seeds.
非常期待 the harvest!

Praise the Lord!

跨时代 The Next Phase

Hey people. Sup. NDP 2010 Website is officially launched!

My pals and I were working on it the night before the launch, and we stayed until 2.15am...

Missed Zone Meeting because of that! :(

Captain Allan, Aaron his secretary, and Marc the boss of Design Prodigy were with us also. It was tiring but fun experience, but I'd rather go for ZM to worship God and hear Weiren preach.

Anyway, I was hungry so I bought supper...

Mc D's!

Me outside Design Prodigy.

Bryan wanted his Double Cheeseburger to be without pickles or ketchup, but I forgot about it. Felt a little bad about it. Oh well... was tired anyway.

It was nice of Captain Allan to drive all of us home :)

I slept for like 2 hours and woke up at 6am to get ready for the Official Launch Event.

It was held at City Hall building (nope, not the MRT). I would have reached there on time, but I couldn't find the place, and was wandering around town area for like 30mins. I checked the map before going, and I knew it was near Padang and the Supreme Court, but I couldn't find the words "City Hall" on any building. I asked 3 different people, and they didn't know what is City Hall building. I went as far as Fullerton Hotel. Nice hotel. lol.

I called Bryan and he checked the online maps. Lo and behold, it was the building beside the Supreme Court, behind Adelphi. I had passed it by, because I thought it was the Supreme Court.

Bryan and I helped to set up the laptops, install different browsers and stuff like that. He did most of the work cause I came late haha. Clarence Nai from CHC-NYP-DET was there too. He was part of the organizing team.

That day, I saw a different side of NS, much to my surprise. When it came to big events, they were people of excellence. The power cables/adapters of the laptop made taut, with the wires being duct-taped to the floor to ensure that no one would trip over it. They were given to details. Cool.

NDP 2010!

Using Century Gothic font, as designed by Torrance. Yea I've been working a lot on the website to know stuff like this.

Breakfast was catered by Old Chang Kee :D

Thus, the event commenced, and our Chief of Armour, Col. Benedict Lim, gave a good speech. (Not trying so suck up here; I really felt it was good)

Torrance later took the pulpit- I mean stage to explain on the NDP 2010 logo design.

Just for those of you that don't know (which means everyone I guess), while working on the website, we were either at Design Prodigy in Chinatown, or FARM in Waterloo Street.  We worked under Torrance concerning the look and feel of the website.

The crowd.

Torrance from FARM.

Torrance posing for the camera.

We ended at around 12noon, had catered lunch, and we were dismissed at 1pm :D
I went to church office to deliver Qiming's baptism form, and went shopping at Suntec!

Guess what I bought?

Pre-ordered the Special Edition of Jay Chou's New Album!

The album, 跨时代 or The Era, is Jay Chou's 10th album, marking a step into the next decade (as the chinese name of the album suggests). The released date is pushed back to the 18th. This is the first Jay Chou album that I have bought XD

Now that most of the work for NDP Website is done, I'm moving on to work on the Game Project under Robin. Thank God for seeing me through the release of the website, and praying that the game will be a resounding success!

I know this was like 2 weeks ago but...

I'm officially accepted into the 2-Year Degree Programme!

Praise the LORD!

Busy!

Busyness in my life is like a roller coaster, or like the seasons. It's very slack for a period of time, and (suddenly) my plate is covered with tight deadlines. After days of battling the storm and Murphy's Law, everything will (suddenly) become very slack again.

And it so happens that I'm in that busy season now. Tight deadlines from Robin, and tighter ones from my NS Supervisors. Praying that I can go for Zone Meeting tomorrow, 'cause my supervisor needs us to finish some stuff by tomorrow, even if it means staying back late into the night.

Perhaps God is enlarging my capacity. Like how I was rather randomly selected to be assistant IC for Internal Traffic last week. Please pray for me, for God's strength and wisdom to handle all these! :)

Well all I can say is:

To serve is Christ, to slack is gain.

Of Food and Friends

The NS Laptop that I use in the office does not have a proper Graphic Card (it uses the crappy Intel Chipset). The project I was working on uses Shader Model 3.0, and surprise of surprises (sarcasm), it can't support SM3.

Thus I brought my laptop to work.

Using 2 Laptops!

Justin posted a link to Vurger on Facebook, and it looked pretty good. Thus, we went to Vurger for lunch :)

The Vurger Stall!

Lights were too bright.

My Cheese Vurger. Or what's left of it.

Yeah, I forgot to capture the pre-devoured photo of the Vurger.

My Cheese Vurger was pretty average. So was Bryan's Jumbo Vurger. Glenn and Nigel seemed to enjoy their Oregano and Fish Vurgers though.

Justin later told me "oh yah, I forgot to tell you, their beef Vurgers aren't nice, you should try their chicken and fish; especially the fish, its damn nice la!". Or something along that line. Anyway the Vurger was still good for its low price. Hope to go there again with other people - imma looking forward to try the Fish Vurger :)

The Verdict.

We were stuck at the place for a long while due the sudden heavy downpour.

Nigel and Bryan talking about iPhone and Nexus One.

Glenn.

I photographed my drink.

Was bored. Nah, I just felt like it.

Wetness.

但偏偏，雨渐渐， 大到我看你不见...

Glenn and I decided to explore the area rather than rot away on our seats. After passing by a grocery store, a barber, a clinic and a Bubble Tea shop, we found this stall:

Specialile in House Hoip Ang Stationert Products?

English Fail.

After a long wait, we decided to cab back.

Nua-zation.

On CTE.

Tunnel.

Self-shot.

Chinatown!

We got back super late, like at 4pm? Hahas.

Fabian's Wedding was on Labour Day! So happy for him! :D

I feel privileged to be invited for both the matrimony and the dinner!

Faith and Fabian!

Pastor Zhuang was the wedding minister, Bernard (from Drama) was the emcee, and his best man was Nathan, an ang mo from UK. Nathan surprisingly was Bernard's chinese interpretor! His Chinese is very fluent! Both of them were very funny together hahas.

Isaiah and I had lunch there before leaving for service. Food was pretty good :)

I think this was their wedding car.

Me trying out Hexing's waiter thing.

Suits the shirt eh? I think its called a vest or something...

Photo edit!

Argh the original photo is too low quality.

Service was great! The presence of God was exceptional strong! :D

After service, I went back to Holiday Inn Atrium for the dinner. Thank God that Ernest Ng (not Wong) and Jenny were at the same table; I hardly knew anyone else. I was the youngest dude on the table. Had a great time chatting with Ernest; it's been a while since we last saw each other. He was our CGL before our CG changed to W406 and Wendy Goh took over.

We chatted about his teaching job, my NS vocation, his cellgroup (co-leading with Jenny), our CG, my brothers, his house at Woodlands, and lots of random stuff.

Wine :D

The wedding food was good! Loved the steamed fish, the abalone with veggies, the noodles, etc. :D

Thank God for such an loving brother as Fabian! He's someone who goes the extra mile, and he's carries a peaceful and comforting presence wherever he goes. May God add to him much joy and prosperity to his marriage!

I can't find the other photos of the wedding, will upload another time.

Till then, ciao!