Thursday afternoon teatime blog entry...

Mission team meeting today went well, praise the Lord. There seemed to be more team spirit than we've ever had in the past few weeks! :P LOLx. Everyone was present and there was much desire in our hearts to prepare ourselves well for God's work amongst His people next week. This will be probably the last time we meet up before we go to Sabah next week.

My progress in the preparations for leading the workshop next Saturday is slow but steady. Thank God for ideas, strength, purpose and focus! There were times this week when the thought of myself standing in front of a crowd, speaking and sharing with them about worship etc seemed extremely daunting! I certainly need more confidence on my own convictions:P and more boldness. As for the devotion and ministry to the girls on Sunday morning, I've got some of the things I want to share down cold, in black and white... the rest are floating around somewhere in the processes and matrix of my cerebrum, me being fickle-minded, undecided and hesitant at this point! *Chuckles* I pray for discernment and wisdom.
Those above are the main things I will have to do for the first 3-4 days... In the second half of our trip, there's more worship-leading, translation work (I still have slight fears that I would change the contents of the sermons preached - when I translate them from English to Bahasa Malaysia up-front! Inilah peluang keemasan menonjolkan 'kefasihan' bahasa aku, haha - YEAH RIGHT :S - note the open and close inverted commas - I so, so, so need God's help in that! - Oh I always knew that there a good reason why God gave me a mother who SO emphasized the importance of us excelling in Bahasa Malaysia back in school :P) and some visitations to home-bound folks. Yikes. I'm not fully prepared for these as of yet... but do pray that I will be, next week! :P

Will be out shopping tonight for some stuff I will need to bring to Sabah next week - yippies. Vanessa brought me to a local drugstore yesterday morning to test how much my memory of medical knowledge has failed (i.e. to melengkapi our team's 'first aid+emergency kit' with all kinds of medications). Hehe. Thankfully, there were still signs of intact memory after more than a year and a whole term in a seminary. We will see what happens next year!:P I am starting to struggle to remember the names of some of the muscles in our hands! *Gulp*

I think memory is a beautiful and wonderful thing. I cry watching movies in which a character would have to lose his or her memory - whether it's due to dementia, amnesia, Alzheimer's, etc. (You can probably tell that I wasn't a big fan of Winter Sonata). I told someone (can't remember who - Ben I think) that one of the worst things that could happen to me is to lose my memory! Sure, not all memories are pleasant (life ain't a bed of roses!) but if one were to permanently lose his or her ability to remember everything, it would be tragic! I can't bear the idea of not knowing where I came from, not knowing the purpose of my existence, not knowing my family and the people I've known all my life, and not knowing (all over again) the salvation Jesus Christ came to give. I tremble when I imagine myself staring at my identity card and having to think, 'Oh, so.... my surname is Moo. What a strange one! And I was born in Kuala Lumpur. Gosh, I wonder who my father and mother are.'

Yeah, imagination ran abit wild...

I think memory is one of the greatest things that defines a person's life. You are who you are in the present because of all the things you've gone through in the past. We think and act the way we do, because of the certain experiences we've gone through and archives of memory that shaped us. We hold on to the principles we've caught, given much thought to and adopted as our own as the years went past. Of course, when we came to know the Lord, we were transformed by the renewing of the mind... but a man was never born a man but a baby...

Except Adam and Eve!

We have testimonies to share today, because we remember the faithful, merciful and gracious things God's done in our lives!

Ok, enough musing...gotta get back to the work.