By 2012, both my daughters were schooling and were looking forward to the Christmas and New Year holidays together as a family. As a father, I could not bear to leave them. However, the Holy Spirit kept prompting me – that He had waited for six years, wasn’t this the time? I felt the calling from God to lead a group of youths to Urbana to experience Him. I decided to respond towards God’s call.
The feeling was awful as I bid farewell to my two daughters at the church while they clung onto my legs with tears in their eyes, but I firmly believed that the Lord Jesus Christ who had called me wanted me to learn this lesson of faith and sacrifice. ?He will provide and look after my family.? It was my prayer that this journey would be a blessing to the forty plus youths from the Cantonese and English congregation.
Through the 5-day conference, we experienced the wonderful works of God. Through the morning Bible study of the Gospel Luke, multi-cultural and multilingual praise and worship, sermons that pierced our hearts, life testimonies that moved us, the firsthand experience of helping those in need, evangelical talks and workshops – and those that led us to prayers and tears, dinners with over ten thousand participants, bookstalls, evangelical stalls etc., through all these, we saw God. Even the Starbucks often filled with youths was filled with the aroma of prayers.
Are we wasting our lives?
We were packing 32,000 medical kits to caregivers to AIDS patients in a country in Africa.
Being a leader and participant for the first time, my heart was a little flustered. Despite the support and help of our ministry support staff with our logistics arrangement in our transport and lodging needs, the role as a leader was impressed upon my heart. The Holy Spirit prompted me otherwise when I reached the conference venue. I was no longer just a leader. I was a participant. I was there to listen, to see, and to experience God.
An American overseas missionary doctor gave her life testimony at the conference one night. Her husband and she were both called towards overseas evangelical medical work during the Urbana Conference in the 1960s. ?They both served loyally providing the medical needs to the local people overseas. Several years ago, her husband and a group of co-workers lost their lives in a car accident ambushed by the locals. Many people asked her if she felt that her husband had wasted his life? As she answered at the conference, the overhead screens projected the photos of those who had lost their lives in the ambush. She pointed to each and every one of them by name and asked – Do you think this driver had wasted his life? Do you think this cook had wasted his life? Do you think this interpreter had wasted his life? And that this doctor had wasted his life? Lastly she asked, “Do you think my husband had wasted his life?” I believe that none of the 16,000 participants at Urbana felt that these people had wasted their lives. ?They had lived for our Lord Jesus Christ. The key in life lies not in its span, but rather in its purpose.
A passage of Scripture flashed through my mind as I listened to her testimony:
?Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul ......Mark 8:34 to 37
I reflected then if I was living every second and minute of my life for God, was I wasting my life? Although I had committed my life to Him as a full-time Pastor, but God reminded me, to follow Him every day, and not to waste the life Jesus Christ had redeemed through His sacrifice.
Brb: See you in three years
The experience at the Urbana Conference is simply too amazing and immense to be put down in words in an article. I believe that God not only changed me and the 16,000 participants at the conference, He has also changed the lives of the forty plus young adults from RHCCC. As I read their testimonies after our return, I know that God has begun His amazing work in their lives. I pray that each and every youth would continue to walk in the will of God. It is my prayer too that God would call me in leading the next group of youths to Urbana 2015 to face His calling.
