It was only last Saturday that the church pioneers, leaders and staff gathered at the Cedar Room in the Garden Hotel - at the very basement room where it all began for about 30 people who called themselves Agape Baptist Church some 20 years ago.
It was awesome to be connected to the past, to all that God had promised then and see it being fulfilled all these years. It was even more awesome to catch the pulse of destiny in the Cedar Room and realize that the little tributary that began as a stream in the desert then is now growing into a mighty river.
But the awe with the past and its relevance to the future did not just end with last Saturday. It got carried into the entire week. At the Staff Retreat in Penang, I got the staff team to explore the food and people on Cintra Street. Forty years back, my grandma would bring me there for her favourite red bean tong sui boiled with dried orange peel. This past week, I walked right back to the same shop kept the same way it was 40 years ago to eat the same red bean soup tasting just the same as it was so long ago. The taste, the place, the people - I was reconnected once again to the past.
Then my wife and I came to spend the weekend in Alor Setar. I was back at the same kampung I grew up in; met the same neighbours and sat in the same house chatting with my adoptive mother. Nothing much has changed except for the fact that everyone of us has grown older. Again, I got in touch with my past.
I took my wife to eat rojak at the push cart stall that stood in front of my secondary school. It felt I was back eating the same rojak sauce I was accustomed to growing up. We had lunch at the famed Mee Abu - the best mee goreng and passembor ever, still in the same place, still the very same taste.
The past - God was in it. He was there shaping the future.
I came away this week with one huge lesson about the past: when you leave your history, you leave your future for God uses the past to shape your future.
