Henry Chiah (CG-Loh Keng Sing, KL)

I was born in a very healthy and wealthy non-Christian family. Since childhood until now, my parent pampered me until a stage that I don't have anything to worry. These have moulded me to become a free thinker person. For me only the problem person needs religion. My family practices Taoism; they pray to almost every other gods too, like Hinduism, Sai Baba, Koon Yam, Tai Seng Yeh, Tin Hau, Buddha; just to pray for our family health and safety. For me, I was just following their will and doing whatever my parent wants me to do without any sincerity and faith.

I am a very optimistic person and I always feel like there are no big difficulties happening in my life. Even when there are difficulties, I can manage them without any problem. I have a happy go lucky attitude among my friends.

In 1999 I get to know a girl (my current girl friend) during my varsity years. The longer I knew her, the more interested I become on her background. Her broken family stories, her family financial problem and a lot more sad stories among her family members. Everything was so dramatic to me. She was so insecure, timid, fearful and a worrisome girl to me. She used to go to church and hopping from one church to another church to look for a comfortable church to stick to. This is the way that I get to know about Christianity and the church. Again, I was just following her will and doing whatever she wants me to do and again without any sincerity and faith. All this while she did notice and question my sincerity and honesty to God. My answer was always like this "When the day come, I will give 100% faith on God. Don't worry, my faith are growing now." This had been happen for the last few years.

All the while, I acted like a devil, blame her for going to the church celebration, giving out tithe and offering and even brain wash her to become a free thinker like me. We debated and struggled on Christianity.

We spent most of our time "lepaking" at shopping centres. This is the way we release our working pressure. At first I though my girlfriend was successfully influenced by me, but the more we walked away from God, He actually runs toward us. We will some how or some time feel guilty about that because we are so blessed by God on our life. We are very successful in our career. We were promoted fast and my girl friend even achieved her target every year and granted 5 digit incentives. But our mind was very blank and we feel so tired of our life. That's why on and off we went to church celebrations to settle our guilty feeling. We always give a lot of excuses to ourselves not to be attached to a cell group as we don't want to commit to anyone. This has been happening for a few years until one day we decided to plan for our marriage. We always like to dreams about our future, our life, our house and even our children. We have a lot of fantastic imagination. Both of us feel guilty of ourselves for not even thinking about God. We started to quarrel and argue with each other. My initial plan for the wedding day is supposed to be this coming June, because of her insistence to have a proper christian wedding, I have to make up my mind not to fix the wedding date. I was so frustrated why we have to go through a big big round to be married. Just after that feeling, I don't know some how, just at the right time at the right place, I came across a book of Rick Warren "The Purpose Driven", which caught my attention. I told her if God really loves us, please He will reveal His will to us.(Actually all the while when we are in a dilemma we will spend time reading bible.)

That page that really shocked us and we feel very guilty about on how we are treating God. Page133; the title is "Why You Need A Church Family". We spend time and really focus on the paragraph until we make a decision to go back to God, know more of Him and serve Him. From that day onward, we join a Cell Group and attend celebration every week. We bought a study bible and a children bible and read it every day. We spend time to pray and talk to God. The more I know God, the more I feel guilty about my sin. I feel embarrassed and afraid to face God. This delayed me from signing up for BMEW. I felt I did not qualify to be a christian. Thank you pastor Chris for the BMEW section, it does help me a lot. If you can still remember during the new life class, I had ask you a question regarding "What is the feeling when we have faith and trust in God?" and your answer is "like traveling on an aircraft."