I shared the first entry with my lecturer, and well i got a comment that she hope i'll be able to touch on and explore on other issues in this writing journal too. Well... it kinda blow my bubble, but for now, i just want to be as honest as possible in the writings i reflect and talk about....
My Personal Life Changing Testimony
Looking back in the past I wasn’t actually that staunch about my Faith. Although I was born into a Christian Family, I just followed my parents to church and accepted Jesus Christ into my life when I was about 4 years old from the influence of my parents. But I won’t consider myself a true Christian as I never had that close personal relationship with Jesus Christ for the first 16 years of my life. In fact I didn’t really understand much about my Faith .One can say I was “Sunday” Christian actually.
My personality and character then was totally different from right now. I was very shy, had low self esteem, low confidence, not very sociable with people and I worry about almost everything, basically I was an extreme introvert. Although I would go to church every Sunday, I would just keep to myself and be very quiet in small group time. And I would just leave right, and that was how it was every Sunday. And I never talk to any of my small group members at all. That’s how quiet I was. I would make excuses not to go for youth camps or group outings. My life then was just about soccer, school and computer games. Just reflecting back, I realized that there was something missing in my life then. It wasn’t a total emptiness, but there was just that something.
At the end of 2005 after my O’Level examination, I decided to stop making excuses and sign up for my youth church camp in 2005. Just thinking about that decision now, just makes me smile to myself. It was a decision that provided a clear path for a personal break through in my life.
Reflecting back about that camp, I’m amazed how I can remember this whole event so vividly in my mind. I still remember on the second night, On 9 December about 9 plus pm, after the sermon from an invited pastor. Somehow I was convicted by that whole message, and after that the pastor asks the congregation who is willing to surrender their life totally to God to go to the front. I contemplated a lot at that point and I was very afraid. I was thinking to myself, no way am I going to give my life totally to God, I still have my studies, career and so many things I want to do. I was very pragmatic at that time about such things, and my thinking at that time was that the act of surrendering your whole life to God will mean that you will lose your own freedom and that you can’t go and do what ever you want to anymore. But after a long while of deep thinking, something in me just prompted me to go up to the front by faith and to be prayed for.
And while different leaders prayed for me, slowly but surely for the first time ever in my entire life I started to experience God in a very real tangible way. I have never experience him so personally and real in my entire 16 years of my life till that day. The presence of God at that auditorium was so real that such an inner peace and warm feeling filled my heart with a strong assurance of who God was.
And from that day onwards, I was a total change person. My life became so much more exciting, and all my deepest needs was fulfilled, my self esteem and confidence grew, and from a total introvert I started to become more extrovert.
When I surrendered my life totally to God, it actually filled that missing thing that I felt missing in the first 16 years of my life, I just felt so cleanse and forgiven, and a warm feeling just filled my whole body. After that day instead of me worrying about my life, everything just went better and everything in life just fell into place so nicely. Even my small group members were shocked to see the drastic change in me, as they were the ones who knew how I was like over the years before the camp. I remember one jokingly told me that she never knew I could even talk.
Right now there’s this inner joy in me that I can’t describe in words, and ever since I received and surrendered my entire life to Jesus Christ. That missing thing in my heart was filled and the best thing of all I am assured that I one day when I pass on, I have a place secured in heaven that God promise us if we believe that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour and his the one that forgive all our Sins on that cross.
Worldview
As I write this post, I have been racking my brains out thinking of other issues or something which I feel is important or interesting to write about. I don’t want to write something just for the sake of making a nice piece of writing, that sounds nice to the world to read about, but if it’s not of something from my heart and true feelings, I would rather not write it at all.
Even right now as I’m at a lost of what to write, I’m looking outside the window, trying to find inspiration from. And looking at the vast blue sky, the white fluffy clouds, the beautiful greenery of trees and bushes and the sights of birds flying in the sky really makes one ponder how they actually came about. And even at a macro level, from the vast ocean, to our planet Earth and than to the universe. It really amazes me how such complex intricate life system came about.
Such a topic has been debated and talked about for years. One example is Charles Darwin’s famous “big bang theory” and “evolution” etc. Like shared in my last entry, I’m a pragmatic person. To me there needs to be substantial facts and evidence before I truly want to believe in it. And remember “the big bang theory” is just a “theory”, looking into that theory, it has many scientific problems. The big bang erroneously assumes that the universe was not supernaturally created, but that it came about by natural processes billions of years ago. However, reality does not line up with this notion.
I know I’m going to link back to God again, but just being pragmatic about this issue, to me this theory has to much coincidences after coincidences and it has make it a little to far fetch to me. Right now, dwelling and expanding more into this topic I’m going to be open about this whole issue of our Worldview and not immediately link everything to God to solve this whole issue.
First of, I feel that there is no such thing of a “free-thinker”, everyone believes in something, and there is a cost to every belief. Everyone and every religion have a worldview, the way we view everything in life and the world.
Since science is always based on test and results, let me share some of my views to test out different worldviews on my next entry. Test one, is it logical? Test two, is it livable? And before I can come to a firm conclusion, I would like to evaluate some of the world’s major beliefs, mainly Atheism, Christianity, Buddhism and some of the deepest of life’s questions, what is God? What is real? What is good? What is hope? What is our purpose?
And instead of just focusing on my Christian faith, I hope to take this chance to fairly evaluate these major religions in the world as fairly and impartial as possible. I also hope to answer as much of the deepest of life’s questions I brought up in the next entry before I come out with a conclusion to my views and thoughts about this.
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