Christmas and New Year Message

By Jack Chui

I have received many gifts and well wishes from various people for Christmas/NY and I have struggled to return gifts in kind. As such, I feel obliged to write something as I had started last Christmas as a sharing of myself as gift to my friends and family. This will be a fairly lengthy post as I'm part of several ministries which I'll be writing to so if you don't have time, just skip to the relevant section.

1. STAY
2. Friends of Refugees
3. Emmaus Cell Group
4. Other / Personal

It might be more appropriate to write such personal sharings via email as I did last year but this ministry blog is a good vehicle to promote the young adults STAY ministry. Very few people would actually read this post even if I link it to them and even if it is available to anyone in the world to see for only the ones that care will read... just the way blogs work...

STAY

I once asked a friend a while back how her spiritual life was going and she surprised me by saying that she wanted to be more broken, because if she was more broken, then God can do His work to make her whole again. Its so masochistic but I understand more of her words through working in STAY.

I had started the year with admittedly little care for STAY but I was focused on building the Friends of Refugees outreach ministry which was the purpose of my role as Outreach Leader in STAY. My support for other STAY activities was at a face only and slowly the ministry fell in numbers. It was difficult to see any fruits for the labour. Halfway during the year I felt it was time to abandon the ministry as a lost cause but then I asked if this was what God wanted me to do. More than once, this new quote was presented to me:

“God has not called me to be successful; He has called me to be faithful." - Mother Teresa

We are a broken ministry/people but we were not abandoned by God and taking inspiration from that, I set down more of my pride to be successful (or at least not a failure) to fight for STAY until God waves the big red stop sign - if and when.

I wanted to see more of God's work in my life and that can be best done by doing the difficult if not impossible. Young adults / Youth ministry in the Catholic church is a tough business given how few of these groups exist around us and how little we seemed to progress over the 3+ years since STAY began. It will have to be by God's doing to really build STAY. This year I saw how God is faithful and does not disappoint.

Over a few months this year, God brought back another leader in Jean. We have started this blog to allow the group's gifts in writing to be used. We run cell group every week on Sunday at midday instead of twice a month. A few more people are coming to STAY and more regularly and while still small in number, they seem to be the right people which God wants us to build relationship with. God really is still here!!!

So this sharing is to give glory to God for His great blessings and work in STAY through our brokenness, through the leaders and through each member that makes STAY what it is and will become. Thank you for your support over the year, whether through attending and helping out at church or just praying for us. Please continue to pray for us and the leaders that God will continue to make STAY 'whole' - that God will use STAY to reach young people where He needs us to.

I don't know where STAY is meant to go in terms of direction but I'm sure God has great and ambitious plans for us. I hope to continue to write in this blog more regularly so to reach out more young people than just the ones who can attend in person at our cell group on Sunday - especially to minister to those who have been to STAY before - and who knows who else it can reach.

Friends of Refugees

What started as the outreach ministry of STAY is now known as as Friends of Refugees because it has volunteers which extend far beyond STAY and my beloved St. Augustine's church. Looking back, it is truly amazing how this ministry has transformed and grown to what it is today - mostly because this outreach did not really exist at the same time last year.

God seemed to provide the people for the ministry as and when it needed it. I sometimes run around a bit like a headless chicken worrying about getting everyone ready there and on time but God seems to make things just seem to work out.

What's more, many of the people that volunteered through the year were people that I had not known before at the start of the year so people just came from everywhere. Through the year, God showed me that while the relationships I tend to have with people are quite shallow, that He can make it wide instead to reach out and draw the people required for this ministry. God showed me that through others and the wide network, He can accomplish more than just through me working on my own. To be honest, I am far from the best helper and carer for the refugees in detention, but somehow, God has drawn so many others that can minister to the refugees far better than I can.

We now visit the detention centre twice a month instead of once. We had to do this as the number of 'friends' kept increasing and the detention centre staff found it difficult to safely visit the detainees. We have now started to visit the refugees that have come out of detention and we're seeing opportunities to be of aid to them as they start with nothing in our community.

I wish to thank all of you that have in any way volunteered throughout the year, to grow the outreach and make us capable of so much. thank you also for your encouragement, of myself, the other leaders and Father Peter who continues to drive this outreach. It is a real great honour to be Father Peter's "hands and feet" to help him minister to these much 'forgotten' people. Father Peter seems to have great plans for the group in 2013 and I'm looking forward to the challenge so I can witness more of God's work through us. Please continue to pray for the refugees and their families - that they be treated justly and fairly as we are treated as free individuals. Thank you for your prayers for this ministry - the blessings and provisions we have received in Friends of Refugees are a wonderful fruit of those prayers.

I was hoping to share some of my recent experiences of the outreach to the refugees but this section will get too long and a brief version would not do it justice. I will look to share these in other posts.

Emmaus Cell Group

This group is like a backbone for my spiritual life because they have always seemed to be there for me like as if God uses this group to speak to me when I can't listen to God. This year has been no exception.

Like the other ministries, this group has been greatly blessed most directly in numbers as we're now 2 cell groups because we're too big to be in one. As much as we'd like the whole church to be part of a cell group, I think God has only provided a few to join us and stay with us because they are the right people for the group.

This ministry, unlike the others I am part of is at a very mature stage in my opinion and the stability (which is welcome) provides a different challenge for me. With the ups of the blessings there are also the downs. Pride has emerged as my 'root cause' weakness and it has shown where I have mistaken the success of the group as the result of the quality of my leadership. My sincere thanks for correcting me, for voicing your opinions to help me grow as a leader. I do not take it badly in that I'm no good, but it is encouraging because you speak in love and care for me of which I'm honoured and grateful to receive.

I pray that this group will continue to grow from strength to strength, that new leaders can rise and minister to other groups as we already minister to the church as a group already. I love how as a group, we can build deep relationships with each other although I may not be part of them, because the group is so so much greater than me.

Thank you for being there for me, for coming every Tuesday evening, for making time every Tuesday evening to share yourselves with each other and for letting God minister to me and the others in the group through you.

Something I have to discern is whether I should continue leading this group. When I first started leading this group 3 years ago, I had a belief that I was doing this temporarily and that I was holding this place until the 'true' leader would come and lead the group. I have learned much and carried that over to the other ministries which are bearing much fruit. Please continue to pray for me and the future of Emmaus Cell Group.

Other / Personal

Just writing the above took a while and as such it wasn't the easiest to write. I guess it shows how much ministry I'm involved in and how little quality time I might be able to devote to each. Yet God has been very gracious to me to give me the energy to be able to take on such things and use the little I give to each ministry to do His work. I seem to be in the right place, time and situation to be able to do so much - I live close to church, work (just about everything), live alone and so have more time to give to others outside my family and am greatly blessed at work, health and in my faith. Its like God has put me where He wants me. There will come a time when I won't be able to do so much or such activities so I think I should do them while I can.

I ended last year saying I would focus on 3 things - love, wisdom and courage. I am happy to say that I've improved on all 3 fronts - and they are big leaps by my standards (perhaps because I came from a low base...). I have learned to love myself more, to value myself as a very unique design of God and so try to help others value their own uniqueness and beauty in God. I have come to realise in wisdom that I have very little control of the people and things that happen around me and that God has ultimate control and so can do anything. I'm courageously more bolder in doing more things, especially crazy things for me like sharing so personally in a blog, visiting refugees homes and singing at church! It was a year of slow growth for me and thankfully in the right direction.

Those 3 things are by no means accomplished but a new year brings an opportunity to develop other deficiencies. The first is Prayer. I would say that I am praying less now that I was at the start of the year. A lot of it is situational which tends to relegate God to the fix it person or the emergency department. One might think that for all the ministry I do and the time I spend at church that I would be praying more - I'm afraid not... Yet still, God is gracious in still providing even when I don't pray. His grace is enough, but I know I could do so much more if I had a stronger prayer life. I must have a whole army praying for me and the ministries I'm part of for such blessing to be bestowed on me.

The second would be Relationship. I've described how I have wide but shallow relationships - its not such a bad thing, but in a way it is also a reflection of my relationship with God. I tend to leave the deeper stuff to other people in my wide network but this does not really help when I need to develop a relationship with my girlfriend. 

The last because there is always 3 =) is Care. Through the year, I've friends who travelled through much brokenness, grief, heartache, loss, illness and yet I've struggled to lend them my support let alone pray for them. I seem to care with my brain but less so with my heart but that could be the way God has designed me. Its just tougher that way.

I wish to thank each of you for your friendship, love, support and prayers. There is some strength that comes from them which allows me to keep fighting in the ministries I'm leading and so I'll continue to need your prayers. I don't mean this to be a selfish pleading for prayers, but something that will help keep me going. I pray that each of you can see the fruits of your prayers for me and even be the fruits themselves. Thank you God for all your blessings!

Wishing you and your families a most blessed Christmas and joyful New Year. Wherever you are and whoever you're with do take care and I wish you all God's blessings in the year to come.

The Meaning of Advent

By Jean Cheng

A beautiful article I'd like to share with you about the meaning of Advent. =)


Advent - A Time to Learn How to Wait
2007-12-09
By Ron Roheiser

Carlo Carretto, the renowned spiritual writer, spent many years living alone as a hermit in the Sahara desert. He wrote a number of books from that place of solitude, including one entitled, Letters from the Desert. In that book, he has a message for those of us who live busy lives in the world. "What is God trying to say to us in our busy lives?" He suggests this: "Be patient! Learn to wait - for each other, for love, for happiness, for God!"

Learn to wait! That's not something we do easily and many of our problems flow from that. We often don't wait properly for things.

Annie Dillard shares this story about proper waiting: She had been watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and was fascinated by the process until she grew impatient with how long it was taking and, to speed things up, took a candle and heated the cocoon, albeit very gently.

The experiment worked, but it was a mistake in the long run. The butterfly emerged more quickly; however, because adding heat violated something within the natural process, the butterfly was born with wings too weak to fly. Haste and prematurity had stunted and deformed a natural process. Some things can't be rushed.

Dillard understood immediately what had gone wrong. A certain chastity had been violated. Impatience had triggered an irreverence that had interfered with and damaged the natural order of things. In essence, the Christmas gift had been opened too early; the bride had been slept with before the wedding; a process that needed an allotted period of time had been short-circuited. There hadn't been enough advent.

Advent means waiting. Among other things, it celebrates the idea that the messiah must be born from a virgin. Why? Is sex something unworthy of God? If Jesus had been born in a natural way, would that somehow have given him less dignity? This is a dark underside in some spiritualities, but Jesus' birth from a virgin has nothing to do with that.

Scripture and Christian tradition emphasize that Jesus was born of a virgin to underscore the fact that he had no human father and also to teach an important truth, namely, that in order for something sublime to be born there must, first, be a proper chastity, a proper time of waiting, a season of advent. Why?

The answer lies in properly understanding chastity. Chastity is not, first of all, something to do with sex. Chastity has to do with how we experience reality in general, all experience. To be chaste is to have proper reverence - towards God, towards each other, towards nature, towards ourselves, towards reality in general, and towards sex.

Lack of chastity is irreverence, in any area of life, sex included. And reverence is a lot about proper waiting. We can see this by looking at its opposite: To lack chastity, to be irreverent, is to be impatient, selfish, callous, immature, undisciplined, or boorish in any way so that our actions deprive someone else of his or her full uniqueness, dignity, and preciousness. And we do this every time we short-circuit waiting.

Thus, it is understandable why the prime analogate for chastity is proper reverence in the area of sex. Sex, because it so deeply affects the soul, speaks most loudly about chastity or lack of it. Sex is only chaste when it is not short-circuited by impatience, selfishness, or lack of respect. Sadly, because sex is so powerful, these things are often short-circuited. We violate chastity in sex whenever there is prematurity, unfair pressure, subtle manipulation, crass force, taking without giving, posturing an intimacy we don't mean, lack of respect for previous commitments, disregard for the wider relationships of family and community, or failure to respect long-range happiness and health. Annie Dillard's metaphor basically captures it: There is a fault in our chastity when we put a candle to the cocoon so as to unnaturally rush the process.

Chastity is about proper waiting and waiting is about patience in carrying the tensions and frustrations we suffer as we live the unfinished symphony that constitutes our lives.

There are some wonderful refrains in apocalyptic literature around the importance of waiting. Before the messiah can be conceived, gestated, and given birth to, there must always be a proper time of waiting, a necessary advent, a certain quota of suffering, which alone can create the proper virginal space within which the messiah can be born: "God is never in a hurry!" "Every tear brings the messiah closer!" "It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth!"

All of these phrases say the same thing: What's sublime depends upon there first having been some sublimation; a feast can only happen after there has first been some fasting; love can only be a gift if the gift is fully respected; and (as Carretto so poignantly puts it) we must learn to wait - for God, for love, for the bride, and for Christmas.