New Africa

In contrast to previous years, I've made a few good friends doing their 1-year MSc Course(Chemical Engineering) this year. As usual, this is the period when all MSc students say goodbye to each other, after completing their hectic and stressful 12-month programme. Everyone has their own dream to achieve, career to pursue, destination to reach and mission to complete. We probably won't meet each other anymore for the rest of our life, judging from the fact that each of us has very different background.

Today, I spend most of my time having farewell lunch and tea with my good Nigerian friend. To be frank, it's really an honour to meet him, at the same time it's sad to see him leave and he's returning to his own country on Sunday.

Charles is not only a devoted Christian, he's also a very ambitious, righteous, passionate, intelligent and humble person. Well, I'm losing my words to describe his good characterisitics. : ) . In short, Nigeria needs a lot of this young people or leader to reform the country. Corrupted and greedy leader is not going to bring a country out of poverty, chaos and disorder. Personally I think this principle applies to any nation and any place in the world.

Talking to Charles is always inspiring, if not least, his passion, love and commitment to God does stimulate and still convince me that Christian faith is worth uplifting.

I'm looking to meet him again in May 2007 back in London, when he will attend his graduation ceremony. Meanwhile, I wish him well and all the best in his career in Total - a stepping stone towards his dream to solve the energy crisis in Nigeria. :p

Good luck and God bless mate !!

3 Weeks To Go

I have 3 friends from Malaysia emailed me that they will be visiting London for business trip and wanna meet up with me on mid of October. I have been in this place for 3 years plus and I never heard from them, really have no idea why everyone pops up all of a sudden, especially on this occasion when I'm about to leave, weird !!!

At the same time, different groups of friends are inviting me for farewell dinner within the next couple of weeks. I'm really hoping to see them, although some of them I meet very frequently. I guess I will have a pretty busy schedule in few weeks time, despite arranging and preparing all the stuff before and after I leave London.

I've decided to step in the Norwich Trip, which has been changed to 14th and 15th September. I still think everything happens for a reason, I will just need to spend some time preparing some Sunday School material. Will try my very best to cope with all these before I leave. I'm getting more and more excited now........

Closer

I'm recently reading a book related to youth ministry during my bedtime reading. This book is called "How to be a Student Leader", written by Doug Fields from the Simply Youth Ministry. Doug has been involving in youth ministry over 15 years and has written over 20 books on related youth issue and ministry.

Personally, I found this book useful to me as it reminds me of many principles of being a student leader. The starting highlights of the book is to define what's so called a student "leader", whom I strongly agree with him, in which a "leader" is nothing but only a "servant" in fact. "A student leader serves until the end", he quoted.

In short, his wordings in the book are simple, easy to understand, but the ideas are helpful and meaningful. What strikes me the most after I read the book was he mentioned that one of the most important elements in a youth ministry is "the inner relationship of leaders with God". The only difference between leading a community or a company and leading a God's ministry -- it's not the leader who's leading the fellowship, but the presence of God. Indeed, I have to agree with Doug that the degree of spiritual relationship with God of a leader will affect the entire fellowship.

Perhaps there won't be any progress of our ministry when from time to time we spend endless time and efforts serving in church, while we have neglected spending our individual time communicating with God, to listen carefully and follow obediently. This really reminds me of the importance of prayer and reading the bible.

I should have realised the missing of this important element when I found myself losing steam when serving recently. I thought it's the pre-leaving symptoms to Holland, but I supposed I'm wrong !!!

It's time for me to return and stay closer.....

Sacrifices or Be Good to Ourselves

Sometimes it's really hard for my girlfriend and I to decide on something we both really want to do, with good purposes and intention, but the drawbacks are several stressful or sleepless nights in return.

We talked about this several times and really gave it some serious thoughts.

Recently we are committed to the Norwich Junior Youth Sunday School on a bimonthly basis until summer 2007. We are working on this outreach with 4 brothers and sisters , each of us share the same burden, passion, committment and even sacrifices towards this group of young people. Our first official trip to Norwich will be on 21st and 22nd October (Saturday and Sunday). Both of us think we should not miss this trip, seeing that we already have not much chance to meet or communicate with this group of people. From a practical point of view, it's not easy at all to even get close to this group of youth when we meet such occasionally, let alone to influence them spiritually. Moreover, my little experience on junior youth ministry reminds me that we need numerous time, manpower and energy to blend with them, no matter it's on fun activity or bible teaching.

I will be working in Holland on the 1st of November. My original plan was to spend about 10 days to get myself settle (plenty of DIY and shopping needs to be done, plus some time to get used to the new environment). In short, both my girlfriend and I will be in real busy and occupied during that period. We have to spend our time very wisely when I arrive on 19th October. We are struggling now whether to join the outreach and arrive Holland on 23rd October, that leaves us less than 10 days to do everything that we are planning to do.

I understand to a certain extent it's not up to us to decide, coz our heart should follow what God wants us to do. But at this stage, to be frank, we are in a very dilemma situation. My heart is feeling more towards "be good to ourselves" than "present our bodies as a living sacrifices".

Dear God, please speak to us, like you always do. I'm just lost on this issue. Amen.

Hai yaya

Hai yaya, I am exactly like the picture shown here. Super tired and exhausted. Still in the office now doing my work, and most likely have to come back on weekends to continue :-(...

At times, I really do feel my work is meaningless...I better spend my time sleeping or resting or something else. But no matter how I complain, here I am still doing the work. It is like a never ending meaningless circle. I do question my work at times, do I really belong here?...I can be really paranoid about this because till now I am still not sure what I really want to do. Being good at what I do doesn't help, I don't feel the satisfaction or need ...I do hope God will guide me and show me the way. I want to be sure in my heart this is what You want and not my selfless means.

~totoro~

My IQ

Wahahahha...I've done an IQ test from the BBC website, called Test The Nation, a pretty popular test in the UK recently. Guess what, I was predicted that my IQ is only 85, whahahha, still I'm considered normal, coz 2/3 of the nation scores between 85-115. See the scoreboard here. I'm at the lower end I know !!! But I'm glad that I belong to the majority.

I can't believe I'm so dumb. I have always aware that I have pretty low EQ, now only I realise that my IQ is as "good" as EQ. Overall I think this test is considered all arounded, in terms of logic, puzzle solving, perceptive, observation and memory. I only manage to guess most of the questions to be frank, and I haven't got enough time for almost half of the questions. Perhaps I wasn't ready to be examined that way. Well, I'm not trying to give excuse, I'm simply dumb !!!

One of my Sunday School students scores 142, which is equivalent to top 1% of the nation. Quite impressive I have to say. Having said that sometimes I'm reserved with this kind of IQ, not against the entity of the IQ test but the actual effects of the outcome. It could be really misleading when one starts to absolutise the IQ ability and try to get merits out of it, even worse, discrimination could easily happened. I'm not saying having a high IQ is a bad thing, I just hope that people will start to realise the close relationship between wisdom and IQ (intelligence quotient).

Unless everyone gets back to the bible, else the ultimate purpose to identify the correlation between IQ and wisdom would be defeated.

Proverbs 9:10 - The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
箴 言 9:10 - 敬 畏 耶 和 華 是 智 慧 的 開 端 ； 認 識 至 聖 者 便 是 聰 明 .

What are you waiting for if you only have high IQ?

Ridiculous

This is the most ridiculous and horrendous news that happened in Kuala Lumpur. I know this is not a big news, but I just can't help it. I just think it's absolutely hilarious.