crazy week...

it has actually been a crazy week... by that mostly i mean its been really busy (hence the lack of updates) so I've actually scheduled time into my day today to write on here as I've found that just waiting for a spare moment isn't working for me...

I suppose i'd better pick up where i left off, and I apologise to those of you who may have found these posts to be a little bit long, but this is going to be another long one as I have more than a weeks worth of stuff to tell.... the reason for the length is as I want to share experiences with you, and not just tell you the things I've done... here we go...



At last Tuesday's English Class we had a blessing in disguise... when time for class arrived... only one guy had confirmed he was coming... so Todd and I discussed the idea of showing him the alpha video "who is Jesus?" rather than going ahead with the planned class... we prayed and decided to go for it... the guy, Kai (far right above picture), has been a good friend of ours for a couple of weeks now and we see him fairly often, he's also very clever so he didn't seem to have too much trouble understanding the video, although he did struggle with Christian jargon words such as "blasphemy" and "baptism"... we also had quite a long discussion about sin... it seems that for Chinese people, something is only considered to be a sin when it is really bad, such as murder or other things like that... so it prooves to be quite difficult to understand the biblical concept of sin: God's standards are set a lot higher, and as a result we all have sinned, but thankfully God gives us a chance to be given a fresh start and a clean record, through believing in His Son, Jesus... as you can see, having Jesus as part of your life does not seem to be a necessity if you don't feel that you have sinned... so it seems that it is really important to talk about the other positive effects of knowing Jesus...

It was a good chat and we met up for lunch with Kai and a couple fo his friends the next day and have seen him again since then, so it appears that we've not scared him off...



Thursday was a really crazy day, it was the date of chuen hoe's konvokesyen (graduation) and so we went onto campus to greet him after the ceremony, it was really good fun and he was really proud and happy, we took lots of photos and also took part in the UM tradition of picking him up (six of us) and throwing him, as high as we could manage, into the air and somehow managing to catch him on his way back down... it was a really special occaision and an honour to be able to be involved in it...



We had alpha on thursday and once again our faith was tested as no-one confirmed that they would be attending... we went through those uncomfortable motions of deciding whether we needed to cancel the evening to do something more productive with our time, or whether we would go and setup and make food etc. in faith that God would bring some people along... thankfully we did the latter as 4 girls came, we also persuaded Kelvin to join us... we broke down into a girls group and a guys group and todd, kelvin and I had a really great chat about what its like to be in a daily relationship with Jesus... I'm aware that the girls spent their time talking mostly about the video translation as they found it difficult to understand the english, they said they would like to come next week...

On thursday evening after alpha I had a go on Kelvin's moped... which was really exciting, after a short brief on how to start and control the thing i set off into the night... well... I actually over-revved the first time and accidentally pulled a wheely and set off on one wheel, only for a second though, before the front wheel came safely down and i drove slowly and in a rather stuttery fashion around the block twice before getting off as Abby had arrived...

Abby is a medical student at Leicester University, and is also from Malaysia, she has a government grant to study in England, I've known her for approximately two years so it was really nice to see a friendly and familiar face... we (abby, myself, kelvin, todd and some of abby's friends) ate mamak (indian food i think, or maybe malay food) and chatted for a long time... it was really really nice to see her... also one of her friends interrupted our conversation midway through and asked me what i thought our purpose in life was, and after praying a short and silent prayer I explained that I believed our purpose was to have a relationship with the God who created us and that this can only be done through knowing Jesus... we talked about other ambitions such as making a lot of money or being famous and hopefully he could tell I was sincere in saying that knowing Jesus personally is what satisfies us, rather than more material ambitions... we also talked about what it meant to invest in what life there might be after death...

As i was having this conversation the singapore team arrived in malaysia for the weekend... but i have to go to campus now so I'll write another long post about our second, and most successful trip to the cameron highlands (including lots of photos) when I get back this afternoon...

we did other stuff throughout last week... but right now I can't quite remember all of it, if I do I'll add it it...