I completed my fiftieth around the sun yesterday. What a ride. I can't believe I'm 50 years-old today. I don’t feel fifty and I don’t think I act fifty, but facts don’t lie. I do believe that age is relative. I honestly believe that by the mercies of the Lord, I'll die young at a ripe old age.
I am committed to keep growing and learning and taking risk and doing new things as the Lord calls me into them. I am committed to keep my heart young, continually cleansed of all poison so that I die young at a ripe old age still declaring all is well when the soul is well.
I feel good physically. And I think I'm getting more curious as I age. I'm interested in more things now than when I was 30. One of my greatest fears has always been staying the same! I always need to be growing and stretching to take hold of the life God has given me.
I just thought I'd take some time to write a prayer of thanksgiving to the merciful God who has been so kind and gracious to me. How do you capture the blessings of fifty years in a single prayer? I'm grateful that I was born where I was born and when I was born. I'm grateful for my family. My grandma brought me up. She was a fierce disciplinarian who put in me the fear of authority and a sense of right and wrong. Yet she was a bundle of love, my early source of security and stability. She gave me deep roots in family values and traditions and taught me through her example never to say die.
I am grateful for my brothers who came to know the Lord Jesus before I did and took me to church with them where I found the Lord in my early teens. I am thankful for them setting such a stellar example in educational excellence that forced me to do well in school.
I am grateful for my mom who used her culinary skills to unite her household. She rallied us together as a family to the kitchen table with her excellent cooking and fed us with her sacrificial love. She taught me that if you want your family to stay together, place good food on the table every day.
I am grateful for my dad, who in one moment of confession two weeks before he passed away, when I was 13, set me free from anger and bitterness for a lifetime.
I am grateful for Ms Lillie Rogers who deepen my foundations in the faith. She mentored me in my early twenties and taught me the values of accountability and integrity. She constantly pointed me to Christ and led me to renounce the flesh in favour of the Christ-life. She also modelled for me a life of prayer.
I was in the US in 1981 when I felt the call to ministry. It was my Damascus Road minus the lightning, horse, and voice. But I heard the inaudible yet unmistakable voice of God loud and clear. It was not ten years later that I answered the call but again, Ms Lillie Rogers was instrumental in clarifying and affirming that call for me.
Life is full of surprises. I would have never put Singapore on the radar screen. But God brought me to this wonderful nation and now that I placed my roots here I can't imagine living any place else.
I met Christina in 1979 here in Singapore and started courting her in 1982. We married in 1984. And she is the best decision I have made with my life. Lillie Rogers would tell me, the woman you marry will either break you or make you. Christina more than “makes” me. With her unassuming gentle ways and quiet spirit, she has completely reconstructed me to be more Christ-like.
My most fulfilling adventure in life has been in parenting my two children, Thea and Reuben. When we were courting, I would tell Christina the dreams I have for that one boy and one girl God would give us. Even before we were married, we were decided on their names and the reason for those names. And I would tell Christina that we need to be counter-cultural if we want to be truly biblical in our parenting.
I love my children. But I am careful not to love them more than I love the Lord or my wife. So there have been many times when I had to stand with the Lord against what they were doing and every time I did that, God would bring them around. It’s not very different from Abraham putting his Isaac on the altar in obedience to the Lord, only to see God return to him his son.
I love my church, Agape. God has given me twenty wonderful years of ministry and it has been one amazing journey. There were seasons where I felt I was lost in a dark tunnel with no sight of the light ahead but God mercifully brought me through. The Agape journey has been a journey of discovering the unchanging faithfulness of the Lord and celebrating the wonderful faithfulness of so many people in that journey.
I have been blessed pastoring one church in twenty years and seeing it grow from the ground up. I can honestly say that I wouldn't want to be any place else doing anything else with anyone else. It has not been always easy. But I don't want easy. I want to leverage my life and make it count for the kingdom. I want to keep experiencing the torrential mercies of the Lord because I am in His kingdom business.
I have an interesting sensing as I turn this corner of my life. I think the word is convergence. I feel like everything to this point has prepared me for what's next. I feel like I have the potential to be a much better leader and teacher and mentor because of everything I've experienced in the first twenty years of ministry. In fact, it's only now that I feel I have a clear understanding on doing church. It’s like everything about growing a church finally became so crystal clear. Amazing! I feel like God is positioning me for the future with everything He has prepared me with these past twenty years of ministry.
Part of life's inherent excitement is not knowing where you will end up. I just pray that I'd grow in my humility, purity, and intensity. I genuinely want to give God everything I've got because what I’ve got is from Him anyway.
I'm so grateful for my family - my wife and my kids. I feel so blessed to have them as a husband and father. I want to love them more and return the blessing they have been to me. The longer I live the more I realize that the quality of those relationships determines the quality of life. If my next twenty, thirty years are to be deeply meaningful, then I must keep growing my family life and that with the inclusion of my children’s spouses in the coming years. Christina and I have also begun dreaming about our grandchildren. We want to mentor them because the quality of our lives is so dependent on the fact that the next generation shares in the very same values and principles that have become our life.
I'm grateful for my staff team. I love doing life and doing ministry with them. I love going to the office because I just love being with them. Who you do ministry with determines how much you enjoy ministry. We are a pretty eclectic and unique group. And that is part of what makes it so much fun.
I'm grateful for my leadership team. These men and women have come through so much, I see a depth in them. This birthday, one leader started an email thread of blessing for me and everyday this past week my mailbox was filled with blessing messages. When people know how to celebrate and bless another, there must surely be a depth to their soul. And I love doing church with these leaders.
The 50th year is the Year of Jubilee. My personal prayer is that this will be the year of my personal liberty where I will find great and profound freedom in my walk with God, in prayer, in the Word of God, in my family as a father and a husband, in my leadership, in my mentoring, in my ministries and living the LIFE God has mercifully blessed me with.
I feel like I could write all day and only scratch the surface, but it does my soul good to keep these things in my consciousness. I'm beginning this day with a profound sense of gratitude to God for being my God and making me who I am.
Lord, thanks for all of the above and the millions of small and large blessings that have escaped me. You have remained true to Your promise to me that You show Yourself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to YOU! I believe that in eternity You'll reveal all the ways that You blessed me that I was totally unaware of. I can't wait. Until then...I'll just keep taking laps around the sun and live my life anchored on Your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ! Amen!
