“Not Rainbows and Butterflies”

It is true that marriage clearly isn’t always about rainbows 🌈 and butterflies 🦋,

Some of our marriage days require harder works than ever.

We are thankful we marry the one we love, but “love” especially origins within our own self is fickle.

SELF is often prioritised, especially when we are faced with difference in expectations.

However, tension-causing differences can become blessings in disguise where we learn to complement one another. After all God did not mass produce us, including our husband/wife. I need to learn to respect and value the differences in characters between I and my husband, instead of complaining against it (need a changed and renewed perspective by His Spirit!).

One also says, “I can be selfish and married, but I cannot be selfish and HAPPILY married”.

How true is this!

Marriage is one way God interrupts our preoccupation with ourselves.

As we grow as a couple, I need to learn to focus on meeting my husband’s needs (believe me, although I love him, sometimes this is still unnatural for me to do). But I mustn’t give up!

Because when I focus on getting my needs met, I end up swimming upstream, against the current.

And swimming against the current, as you can imagine, is VERY EXHAUSTING over time!

I learn that there are two keys to changing the current: #HUMILITY and #PRAYER.

When we stay humble and stay hungry, there’s nothing God cannot do in us and through us! That certainly applies to marriage. When I walk in Christ-like humility and have a desire for oneness, I gain wisdom and experience — instead of repeating my same selfish patterns.

Ephesians 4:2 reminds us,

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

Humility is the key to unity.

And prayer is the key to humility.

It’s recognition that I cannot do this in my own strength, with my own wisdom.

I like the NKJV translation for the above verse, “..with long suffering, bearing one another in love”. LONG. SUFFERING. It takes time, it takes process, it’s not an instant!

If you want a beautiful garden you have to work on it! Plant the seeds, cultivate the soils, fertilize, pulling out the weeds (what gardening teaches me practically).

You certainly cannot just “sit and relax” and expecting the soil to grow flowers by itself 😉

Last but not least,

PRAYER is as important to marriage as anything we’ll ever do. 👉🏻I’ll never be a perfect spouse, but I can be a praying spouse 👈🏻

There are moments in marriage when prayer is all we have left, but that doesn’t mean it should be a last resort.

And “funnily” (and I sometimes say “annoyingly” haha) enough, when I pray and surrender my marriage into God’s hands, PRAYER changes ME most instead of my husband!

Isn’t that just wonderful the way God works in our sanctification process!

If you’re a married couple (or soon 😉), let’s not aim to have a “smooth sailing marriage” (because there is none!), but to have a marriage that glorifying Christ, a place where husband and wife are committed to worship Christ THROUGH marriage.

There will be tensions, but as each of us committed to obey God’s wills, not self, we will enjoy the sweetness of the marriage for many many years to come ❤️

God bless you friends 👫

“From Emptiness to Life Filled With Hope”

I found one of my earliest journal #deardiary I wrote when I was 12 years old during my recent, quick visit, to Jakarta.

Although I have known that my adolescence years weren’t my “best years”, it still surprised me to read the suicidal thoughts I wrote on the pages. Plus this pressure to please people as if their happiness depend on me, and also negative emotions of “loneliness” and “emptiness”.

I’d never imagined a 12yo me would have these profound, dark, and complicated thoughts. My depressed thoughts were my “normal days” alongside with my stories about my crush on boys.

But by the grace of God I am what I am now.

If some people ever told me that I’m such a “positive person”, that is because of JESUS who has rescued and delivered me from my old self (2 Cor 5:17).

I don’t tell myself over and over “you are worth it, believe in yourself”; because my worth only comes from He who loves me unconditionally even though I am a sinner.

I also have my daily battles, I certainly don’t have a belief in (and cannot rely on) my own deeds to save me from sins and worldliness.

So if I want to share with you #testimony of my #successstory, it would not be in the form “I was poor then God has blessed my life with $$$ or xxx”.

THIS is instead my story; story of deliverance, story of hope.

Story of how “I was blind but now I see, I was lost and He found me”.

Story of how He’s shifted my focus and revealed the true purpose of life (Galatians 2:20),

Story of redemption of how He has demonstrated His love by dying at the cross for my sins when I was still a sinner (Romans 5:8),

Story of how Jesus, through His once-for-all sacrifice, has become my Mediator and healed the broken relationships between myself and God (Hence, my relationships with people too. I am no longer a people-pleaser #Godpleaser).

Oh, and by the way, through my cousin’s advice, I have thrown away the journals instead of bringing them back here for the sake of its sentimentality (the other two I wrote when I was 14 yo, with the same depressed notes).

I know even by doing so, God has still not finished working in my heart. This is one of my “unseen battles”. And yet praise the Lord, I believe “in all these things I am more than conquerors through Jesus who loved me, for I am convinced that NOTHING will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:37-39).

Not death, not depression, not hopelessness, not emptiness.

There is always a way out – not found in yourself, not in the world, but in Him alone – the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).

I Thank God When I Remember You

Ps. Andrew Newbold’s question from the last Sunday’s service brought my mind travelled to the past, “who (in the past) do you want to thank for now, for sowing the seeds (word of God) in your life?”

I immediately remembered a friend from junior high, who often spoke about Jesus. Despite going to Christian schools since kinder years, to have someone talked to me about Jesus outside religion curriculum was awkward. Her enthusiasm in sharing about God triggered my curiosity, I went to the school library started borrowing books about “heaven and hell” and “spiritual war”.

I began to know that these things were “real”, but I didn’t really act on these newly found knowledge. Other than keeping a small book of “my sins”, which I regularly updated everytime I came home from school. I wrote and asked God’s forgiveness, but continue to be powerless the next day, and remained clueless about the real Christianity.

At high school my twin best friends gave me a Bible! An English translation one!

I found more pleasure in reading the English bible than the Indonesian one (at that time English books were rare to find). It was full with my colourful highlights. I started to know about some of God’s promises, some verses have become my “go to” in tough times. Nonetheless, I found the Bible was simply a “good literature to read”.

One day in year 2004, one significant question that forever changed my life came out of nowhere: “WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF MY LIFE?”. I replayed Stacey Orrico’s song “There’s Gotta Be More to Life” frequently (little did I know that she was a Christian singer).

After I broke up with my long time boyfriend in that same year, it seemed like I wanted to start over. I started went out often with my girlfriends to clubs, and yet I knew this wasn’t what I was looking for. Worldly pleasure, fun, and fame weren’t THE answer.

On a summer holiday before otw back to Melbourne, my devoted Christian cousin told me about Rick Warren’s book “Purpose Driven Life”. I bought one from Singapore’s Kinokuniya, and hey, this book title was descriptive enough! I expected to find THE answer, and God has used this book to immensely bless me!

I wasn’t a church goer, other than occasionally came to Good Friday and Christmas services (persuaded by their “good promotion”).

But after that holiday, in 2005, I started visiting BIC following an acquaintance.

After few times coming to the church, I felt this “new, deep desire for God” that I hadn’t experienced from countless altar calls I have stepped forward at other churches previously.

A lovely girl has been so kind and faithful enough, accompanied me at church services as I was a newly comer, later invited me to her weekly Friday fellowship (MCA 2), sat next to me during my baptism preparation classes, guided me to learn more about Jesus from the Bible, shared laughter and tears for many many years later…..

As I write this I can truly feel how much God loves me; He pursued me relentlessly and used many persons, book, song, the Bible, and I believe unknown intercessor/s had also prayed for my lost soul back then!

Despite my ignorance, rebellion, rejection, indifference against Him at the past, nothing — NOTHING — stopped Him from pursuing me!

At that right time, right season, my veil had been opened! I began to find that Christianity is not about religion (a set of rules to follow in order to gain something/to enter “heaven”), it’s about having a personal relationship with the God I worship.

I am deeply grateful for these people who had been willingly used as His tool to reach out to me. I think they even might have forgotten about these things I mentioned about them, but I remember.

To those sowers and fisher of men out there, don’t give up. Don’t give up on the people God put as burden in your hearts to pray and care for.

Keep being available and faithful whenever our Lord wants to use us to reach out. Every single act of preaching the Gospel and acting kindness on behalf of Christ will never go in vain. Nothing is “useless” or “wasted”.

What these persons did to me have an eternal impact to my life!

No matter how small, when the Holy Spirit moves you to act, obey Him and do it.

I pray may the power of Holy Spirit continue to stir up our hearts as we serve Him.

Let the love of Christ compel us to love in the same way 🙏🏻