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We’ve arrived back from two weeks away in William’s birth town of Kuching, Malaysia. It was an excellent time to really take a breath, get to know the extended family on the Chong side of the tree, and have our spiritual batteries recharged, so to speak. Several observations about Kuching, and Malaysia: It’s hot! Temperatures ranged from [...] When you read this, Cheryl and I, along with our sisters and another friend, will be in the air and en-route to my birthplace of Kuching, Malaysia, where we’ll be for the next two weeks. It’ll be a great opportunity for Cheryl especially, to meet the folks that populate my dad’s side of the family tree [...] Thought I would just briefly share a song that has filled my mind all day for the last week or so. Text is copied and pasted from Sovereign Grace Ministries. As William said to me – what a powerful refrain. Those of you who knew me a little younger than I am today will [...] One of the questions Cheryl and I worked through soon after our marriage was the issue of changing her name. We talked and prayed it through for a couple of days during our honeymoon, before she eventually decided to adopt my family name and become a “Chong”. Thankfully In New Zealand it’s pretty convenient to [...] This morning I woke up freshly irritated by a couple of sins I’d already committed in the first few seconds of consciousness. As God would have it, this occurred around 4:00 am. So, I had at least two hours before dawn, to stew on my/others’ shortcomings, which eventually boiled into those of the [...] Our church is currently going through a series on the theology of suffering (and, of course, the sovereignty of God). These lyrics from the sovereign grace CD Come Weary Saints, by Mark Altrogge, come to mind.
Perhaps most poignant to me in suffering is a church sister, one of my closer friends, whom I think I mentioned before. Her very young daughter has a life-threatening heart condition, and the medical experts on her case a couple of weeks ago have finally said there is nothing more they can do. Can you watch your child die? Can you bury your own child, who is so vibrant and unique? What did she do to deserve this? God, why are we suffering? While He creates calamity (Isaiah 45:7) and rains on both the righteous and unrighteous (Matt 5:45), our holy, just, merciful, patient, infinitely loving God does not author sin and suffering. We recall that He also allowed His own Son, whom He loved, to die. He was sinless and therefore least deserving of suffering, but Christ received the greatest suffering of all. So why injustice? Why must my child die? Because of God’s purposes, which are higher than ours. In His loving, perfect, compassionate wisdom, He allowed it. Oh, God, you are a wonderful, glorious, mysterious God. One day all tears will be wiped away, imperfect made perfect, death reversed, and You will be glorified as much as You finally deserve. Til then, we seek Your glory with every stumbling breath we breathe, our continual sins covered by Your blood, and even in the depths of our suffering, we know that You are still God, and You are still good. [...] John Piper, preaching pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN, announced his upcoming sabbatical from all public commitments and explains why: “Noël [John's wife] and I are rock solid in our commitment to each other, and there is no whiff of unfaithfulness on either side. But, as I told the elders, “rock solid” is not [...] It’s been a month since we returned from our honeymoon in the South Island, and people have frequently asked us how it went. By now much of it is jumbled in our heads, but we’d like to share some of the enduring memories. Incidentally, if we were an Old Testament-era Jewish couple, you might not have [...] |
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