Prayer Post #3

Wow all of a sudden I have a million things to do! This means I also have lots lots of praying to do, and would appreciate it if you keep me in prayer too.

1. First event coming up is the jogathon organised by my cell group. We are a TINY cell group so there are a MILLION things to do, some of which I haven’t really figured out, but yeah it’s gonna be on Saturday and after that we have this whole volleyball hanging out thing that Pastor Rachel wants us all to be part of. Pray that everything will run smoothly, and that we will be able to raise enough funds to help the elderly at Redhill!

2. HSS canvassing on Monday and Wednesday nights! Just…I don’t want to lose my sanity. And I need to pray that I will have enough energy to pull me through the week.

3. Because I also have a very exciting meeting on Tuesday!! Recently my friend Tien Li asked if I would be interested to be part of this exciting event that she was organising with a couple of friends. Let’s just say it has something to do with Malaysia, and one of the burdens of my heart. So yeah, I am mega excited about it!

The story of how I met Tien Li is one of those, “OMGA, how did you do this God?” stories but I’ll try to keep it brief: we have a million mutual friends through Scripture Union camps and school, etc, I might even have stumbled upon her blog a few times before I realised who she was. So one day, one of my Nanyang Scholars seniors tells me about this girl from Malaysia who was an Econs major and switched to English Lit and I was REALLY CURIOUS to know who this person was, although I didn’t really make an effort to find out [at that time, I didn't know the "picture gallery" existed, see what you've done to my innocence Ying! :p] and then it happened that one day I stumbled upon her blog again and was looking at her old entries and realised…that she was from Malaysia and had switched majors from Econs to Lit! So I sent her a message asking her if she was the person that guy was telling me about and after talking for a while…turns out she has been sitting almost RIGHT BEHIND ME every single week for 104 lectures!! HOW COME WE NEVER TALKED TO EACH OTHER BEFORE?

Anyway, I was surprised when she asked me to be part of this event because we’re really not all that close, I’ve only talked to her a few times, went out with her once and hung out in her room once. The thing is, she’s really active in Christian Fellowship and she got me to join a few sessions of it, but I didn’t really like the way they operate and I felt bad that they had to meet later because I had a super late lecture so I stopped attending. And when she first asked me about it, I imagined that it was something she and her CF kakis have been planning, coz she mentioned something about a committee and everything. I thought maybe she wanted some extra help, so I said okay and asked her to give me more information!

She didn’t reply for a long time and then suddenly she emailed “everyone” involved about the meeting and … I realised that this was not just going to be an NTU event, but NTU-NUS-some private colleges and there are only about a handful of us as part of this “committee”!

So, wow, let me just breathe and say, “God, really??”

I don’t even know why she asked me when she must know thousands of other Malaysian Christians from NTU [we're the only two people from NTU from her committee] but wow God, what a great great HUMBLING opportunity this is. Thank You for letting me be a part of it!

4. In addition to all these, of course, Daniel has started his HARDCORE bible study with us and we have to write essays! Not just any kind of random essay but the kind that my brother-in-law writes for his MASTERS DEGREE IN SEMINARY! *faint* We have to do a whole long list of things [including checking for historical context, lexical analysis, and so on and so forth. Sorry, I'm such a bad student Daniel!] and it’s a bit overwhelming yet exciting at the same time.

I am very glad I dropped that World Cinema module otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do all these stuff.

5. Starting next week, we will also be praying in church every Tuesday night. And knowing how these things go [i.e. today's meeting was supposed to be from 7.30-8pm and it started at 8pm and ended at 11pm], it will take up THE ENTIRE NIGHT. Another reason to be thankful that I dropped World Cinema: I’ll get to rest a bit more on Wednesdays.

6. So yeah, as is now obvious, I need a lot of discipline and strength and energy and VERY GOOD REST. Also, good time management [assignments are gonna be out soon! And I've been in TOTAL DENIAL about the youth magazine because I haven't had ANY time to do anything yet, but now that I've got a few things out of the way, I think I must go read the email Ps Rachel sent me..I think my first deadline is in a few days time ], wisdom and a super brain.

7. I also want to pray for Mercy, who is now in Hong Kong preparing for her life as a missionary in China! Just want to pray that God will be with her wherever she goes and keeps her safe and that she’ll bless everyone around her with her infectious passion for God.

8. Lastly, Barack Obama, as he assumes one of the most powerful positions in the world. Pray that he will seek God’s will in all the decisions that he makes.

Prayer Post #2

1. I am struggling to keep up with my financial commitments. Sometimes when I barely have enough to live on I want to be selfish and stop sponsoring my kid because I cannot really afford to. And then I think about how much this small amount of money is helping him survive each day, and how every little thing that he gets through it is an expression of God’s love and care for him, and I get angry at myself for spending more than S$3 per meal, sigh. Why is everything so expensive? I dare not even buy my textbooks!

Please pray that my money will come in soon!

2. As always, I need discipline. Even though I SEEM to have more free time this semester, there is just so much to read, especially for Shakespeare and Drama. At least ONE play a week is no joke at all. And now Hoca wants to give us quizzes every single week. In other words, I need to be serious with my work. And this crazy research project that I took on is just crazy, it’s going to ruin my Chinese New Year holidays and my birthday unfortunately. But that’s the price I have to pay for being stupid. I will never take it up again.

3. I also need peaceful rest. Classes end so late this semester all I can think of when I get home is sleep. This also explains why I never seem to find time to do any of my readings. And I’ve been having a very hard time getting sleep lately because my roommate has been snoring very loudly and her alarm keeps waking me up at strange hours and disrupting my sleep.

I am so tired I no longer have time to talk to people. I am so tired I no longer have the DESIRE to talk to people. I just want to sit alone in silence. It also makes me feel easily irritable when I come home and find that no one has bothered to throw the rubbish out or buy new toilet paper or wash their own dishes.

4. I have this struggle with my flesh – a struggle I don’t quite understand. Let’s just say I’ve been putting an extraordinary amount of pressure on myself to repeat what I achieved last semester – a feat I did not even think was possible for an arts student, much less a Lit one, and even more astoundingly so for someone who thought she was having her worst semester academically and only got one real A for her assignments. I KNOW that in the larger scheme of things it DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL, because a) I’m not interested in grad school, and b) I will probably be doing something entirely different when I graduate and c) I’m just stressing myself out unnecessarily when it is beyond my control.

But the strange thing is that I really don’t care about my grades, because I know that God will pull me through. It is when I DO succeed in getting grades that are beyond my expectations and natural ability, I start THINKING I can do more and become obsessed with doing more. So I keep pressing myself to achieve perfection, with my heart telling me I don’t need it and that even my parents don’t demand that much of me, but my head wanting to give myself this ridiculous challenge, just wanting perhaps to satisfy my pride or ego and prove to no one but myself that I can do it.

But I get terrified of myself when I am “good” or seen as good because I don’t want to start thinking that I did this on my own, and start puffing myself up with unhealthy lies about myself. I want to be able to still remember to always get down on my knees before every assignment or exam and just say, “I commit this into Your hands” and also “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

I fear that I may no longer be able to cope with failure, and that failure for me is really success for someone else. And this is ridiculous especially in light of the amount of effort I actually put into my work, and how apathetic I feel sometimes, so there is this huge struggle within me that is eating me up.

5. I need to learn to graciously accept the good things God wants to give me, and stop feeling guilty because I think someone else deserved it better.

6. Regarding that crazy project, I will have to pray and pray that I get a brilliant idea soon. Please pray for me as well! My professor keeps saying my ideas are interesting BUT too ambitious/restrictive/etc and he calls everything interesting and he’s too polite to catch you out when he knows you’ve read a book but you say you haven’t so yeah, I don’t know. This time I need a good idea fast because the poster is due on the 30th of January and there are so many stages to go through, I hope he’ll like my idea enough to approve it by next Wednesday and then I hope to miraculously finish my poster by Thursday to get it approved by him, and then I ALSO hope to settle it with the office and get approval from THEM [apparently this is the hardest, they always find fault with everything] on that Thursday itself so I will not have to worry about it during CNY since I will only be back in Singapore two days before the deadline and IF the office doesn’t approve it…

7. To be perfectly honest, even though my sister says it’s my dream and why wouldn’t God give me my dream, I do not think God wants me to go on exchange. I do not feel peaceful about it, and I just don’t see it happening. Also, I went for all the most competitive universities, so my chances of getting in are very low. Please pray that if it is not God’s will for me to go, that He will close all the doors and not let me think of what-if’s. I do not want to dream and dream some more, only to be disappointed later.

8. Lastly, lets continue to pray for the situation in Gaza.

How can I pray for you this week?