No man is poor who has had a godly mother. -Abraham Lincoln
Her children rise up and call her blessed. - Proverbs 31:28 (RSV)
My mum went home to be with the Lord on the morning of 28th October 2008 (Tuesday) at the Salvation Army Peacehaven nursing home. Mum suffered a massive stroke the previous Sunday, and the doctors told us that at age 85 she could not survive an operation, and that she did not have much time left. They were right. We were ready as a family to see her go, and together with our sister who flew in from Germany, and the grandchildren, we gathered and expressed our goodbyes with words, tears, gestures and prayer . We now thank the Lord that she slipped into glory peacefully and with dignity.
Mum was a special woman: beautiful outside and wonderful inside. She managed the home very well. She was neat and organized, and she kept the house, especially the kitchen, clean and neat. I also remember how we all wore the same coloured shirts and pants every Chinese New Year. She also enlisted everybody at home to do all the household chores and I guess with five kids, four of them boys, she needed management skills to survive. There was a regimen at home and we had homework time and play time that had to be adhered to. The carrot and stick worked well. She was an excellent cook and whipped up fantastic curries, ngoh hiong, chili crab, roasted meats and chicken stew, etc. Baking was her forte too and her signature pineapple tarts and butter cake was popular fare among relatives and neighbours as well. As children we delighted in her homemade kaya, coconut candies, tapioca kueh and jelly desserts. And she managed all this on a tight budget. (Put cursor over pic for captions and click on pic for enlarged pop ups).
Mum was industrious, resourceful, thrifty, and supremely sacrificial. She was a skilled seamstress and used to tailor-make dresses for her clients. This was a supplementary source of income for the family. She even did dressmaking classes in her home for some rich tai tais of the Shaw family. Later on her sewing skills were put to great use at St Andrew’s Cathedral where she embroidered and maintained the various stoles and linens used to dress the sancutary for the various Christian seasons. That was her ministry with the Thursday’s ladies fellowship. I remember how she even made curry powder and sold them in packets. She didn’t make much from this but she took pride in it and was meticulous about the quality and cleanliness of the spices and ingredients. On occasion I grudgingly helped her carry big packs of dried chili to the Indian grinders and mixers. She was also a good saver and maximizer of whatever she had and we always had enough for the basics, including tuition for Maths and Mandarin. Her life was generously poured out in the endless sacrifices she made for her family, even after they were married.
Mum had a pleasant temperament. She was characterized by quiet and calm, patience, longsuffering, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. She was moderate in her dressing and spending and with her discipline over us, giving us space as teenagers, and yet occasionally with firmness. I wince with embarassment when I recall how she once went to the community centre basketball court and in front of my friends, called me home for I was furiously playing ball day and night.
Her dad was an Anglican and she married my father, Andrew Chee, in St Andrew’s Cathedral but they were not churchgoers though they allowed us to attend Sunday School when we were young. When the marriage hit turbulence, she experienced a turn of piety and used to go to Novena on Saturdays to pray. Besides recourse to prayer she had wonderful relatives from both hers and fathers side who generously gave her support and practical help, and this helped her to persevere. Later on she joined the St Andrew’s Cathedral ladies fellowhip, which met on Thursdays, and this was the period where I was pleased to see her faith in Christ renewed and deepened with Bible studies, ministry and the warm fellowship there. She was also a regular in the early morning services and even after the onset of dementia, she still went to church regularly under the watchful eyes of Amy the domestic helper, and Lily her sister. Even when she couldn’t recognize us she would still say, “God bless you”, or remember songs like “Jesus loves me this I know”. Even after the geriartician said her memory has gone zero, her helper Amy saw her woke up in the middle of the night and prayed the whole “Lord’s Prayer” and on another night witnessed her looking out the window and praised God, “I love you, Jesus, I love you Jesus. Her faith in Christ, and her temperament made her Alzeimer dementia a sweet one. She would often brush her hands on our cheeks and greet us and strangers with a “You are so pretty”. With this kind of temperament, the great caregivers at Peacehaven’s Flamingo found it pleasant to care for her.
Mum left behind four sons, Colin, Julian, Victor, and myself; three daughters in law, Linda, Ai Lee, and Jenny my wife; and one daughter, Beryll (Joyce). And seven grandchildren: Olivia and Keith; Noah and Nathan; Joshua, Matthew and Elaine; all of whom were cared for by her during the early months of their life.
She also left behind siblings: Philip Law, Lily Law and Florence Law.
How do I feel? Hovering sadness; relieved that it was peaceful and dignified; and thankful to God for his providence, and the hope in Christ. Mixed feelings. I have been grieving over my loss of my mum to dementia over the last few years. She couldn’t recognize or remember anyone. Now I have lost her physically as well, but only until the resurrection of the dead. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes; blessed be His holy name. Do remember us in your prayer.
(If you wish to leave e-condolences or eulogies to the bereaved families, you may use the comment box of this post. Just click on “__ comments” below; fill in your name and email address; filling in your URL - personal website address is optional. Then write your stuff, and finally click on “Add Comment”. )
J.B. Jeyaretnam died of a heart attack at a Singapore hospital. To me he was a true Singapore patriot and hero. Read more from this BBC report:
Singapore opposition leader dies
Veteran Singapore politician JB Jeyaretnam has died of heart failure in a Singapore hospital, aged 82.
He was the first to break a government monopoly on power in Singapore when he won a seat in parliament in 1981.
He had been forced into bankruptcy over defamation cases won by the government but was planning a new run for office.
Dubbed the Grand Old Man of opposition politics, analysts said Mr Jeyaretnam was a thorn in the side of Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan-yew.
Born in 1926 in Jaffna, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Mr Jeyaretnam trained as a lawyer in Britain before making his home in Singapore.
Political injustices
He served as an MP from 1981 to 1986 and from 1997 to 2001.
His first victory, as standard bearer for the Workers’ Party, came when he defeated the People’s Action Party (PAP) of founding prime minister of independent Singapore Mr Lee.
He was returned to parliament in 1984 but in 1986 was found guilty of making a false declaration of his party’s accounts and fined a sum which made him liable to expulsion from the legislature.
He was disqualified from sitting in parliament until 1991, and disbarred from legal practice.
The Privy Council in Britain ruled in 1988 that he had been wrongly disbarred in “a grievous injustice”.
Mr Lee “appeared determined to drive him from political life” wrote Professor Michael Leifer in his Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia.
Not until 1997 did Mr Jeyaretnam try again; he re-entered parliament as a non-constituency member without voting rights.
Just over a year later he was again brought to court, on the charge of having defamed then prime minister Goh Chok-tong and ten other senior members of the PAP.
Although the court found in favour of the government it awarded damages at only one-tenth of the amount possible but on appeal, damages were increased and full costs imposed on Mr Jeyaretnam.
By May 2000, he was declared bankrupt for failing to keep up payments in another libel case.
He left the Workers’ Party in 2001, and was discharged from bankruptcy in 2007.
Re-election plans
This year he helped form the Reform Party to challenge the 40-year rule of Singapore by the PAP, saying Singapore had been “enslaved” by its rulers.
He said in April he planned to run in the next parliament election, due by 2011.
His death came just days before he was to appear in the High Court to seek an order that a by-election be held for a seat that is currently vacant, his family told AFP news agency.
GK Pamela, another of his relatives, said Mr Jeyaretnam hoped he would be propelled back into parliament.
“That was his wish,” she told AFP in tears. “Such a good man. Why did God take him?”
The opposition has long been marginalised in Singapore, where it complains of limited access to the pro-government mainstream media and restrictions on public assemblies.
The People’s Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since independence from Malaysia in 1965, holds 82 out of 84 elected seats in Parliament.
The Straits Times website described Mr Jeyaretnam as “pugnacious”, an “old warhorse” and “irrelevant”.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7643379.stm
I hold a different opinion from the Straits Times, and think he was passionate for the cause, an accomplished tenacious pioneer, a resilient voice in the wilderness, and a beacon of undying hope and courage.
May he rest from his labour and enjoy eternal bliss.
He is 21 and his name is “Choby”. He is a MK (missionaries’ kid).His father: Singapore Chinese; his mother: American. Home: several, wherever the dedicated missionary couple served. (I remember visiting them in Penang in their worse of times). Is “Choby” the Nicky Cruz of Malaysia? Listen to how God turned him around and how he answered God’s call.
In June, when I was on a missions trip to Chiangmai, Thailand, I interviewed a few pastors in a hotel. Timothy works in Fang, a town just a few hours north of Chiangmai. He was born in Singapore, studied and worked in Australia, married a Thai Chinese, and his vision is to reach the tribal peoples of northern Thailand. This is his simple story of how he answered God’s call.
The Sunday Times featured an interesting article on Lawrence Khong, probably a marketing promotional for his coming magic shows. It gave some insights into his colorful personality. I want to write something from a Christian perspective without making any value judgments on him or his ministry. Pastor Lawrence Khong is in my opinion one of the most outstanding indigenous Christian leaders of Singapore in the post-war period, if not in the last century. He is a strong natural leader anointed with gifts of faith and extraordinary leadership. I have never seen anyone with such great ability to cast visions, inspire people to believe and mobilize them to united action. He is now a leader of thousands but could certainly be one of hundreds of thousands. He is a rare gift to the body of Christ in Singapore and beyond.
I think it was the Cell Church revolution that thrust pastor Lawrence Khong into the spotlight and to the larger Body of Christ both in Singapore and the world. And the church loved what it saw and heard and felt. Many pastors and leaders were empowered during the FCBC annual cell conferences and this led to growth and changes of no small scale in many churches. FCBC had been more than generous in sharing its resources to all who needed help. The 1990s was a good season for churches that successfully applied the principle of the cell church.
He founded Touch Community Services, a non-profit welfare services with 18 centres in Singapore, helping over 100,000 needy and underprivileged through its programs since 1992. This would in my mind be one of his premier achievements: to work with the poor and needy is something close to the heart of the Lord and his apostles.
His ministry was of course no pleasure cruise as controversies inevitably follow on the heels of people who are on the cutting edge as he was. He left Grace Baptist Church in painful circumstances. He led the Love Singapore movement and it blossomed under his inspiring and rallying leadership. I could see that this man was a leader of hundreds of thousands even then, but the 2001 year of harvest sputtered, and the movement went through a tough time.
His controversial decision of shedding off the ‘old’ wineskin of FCBC cell church structure, held by many as the gold standard, though it was at a plateau in his church, and adopting the Group of 12 model was one that left many who followed him into the cell church revolution stranded and at a loss. The adoption of magic and movies as a means of introducing the message and values of the kingdom to a world obsessed with entertainment was a strategy that made sense. But the magic thingy stirred up a lot of dust and left many with logs in the eyes. Of course it was obvious the magic were illusions and tricks and not demonic. But all kinds of rumors and criticisms swirled around him.
It was during this difficult and controversial period that several hundred members left the church and moved to ……. other megachurches. Megachurches gain weight by the hundreds, and they shed pounds by the hundreds too, and they do musical chairs among themselves every once in a while. Lately FCBC announced that they have turned the corner, for hundreds have joined them since the losses. The ST article did not mention his able lieutenants, Pastors Melvyn and Eugene, and a score of others but these were the loyal and mighty men without whom things would not have turned out so well for him or FCBC.
The question is what legacy will he leave behind? He still has many years to go, forty perhaps if God is willing. What would he be remembered for? What would be the ultimate contribution of this sovereignly gifted leader to the kingdom? Would he be remembered as a colorful pastor of a megachurch (so what’s new?) or the leader of hundreds of thousands - a Christian statesman who had an enduring impact on the spiritual map of South East Asia, or even the new ascendant Asia.
Though multi-talented, the magic of Lawrence Khong lies singularly in his anointing of faith and leadership.
What were we feeling and thinking as we saw our eldest son graduate with a B.A. in history? Well we were thinking of the specialist who said he would be “gong gong” and another, the head of pediatrics, who constantly prepared us to send him to special school because of Josh’s “severe brain damage”. So you can imagine how grateful to God we were when he walked across the stage and received his diploma.
During the four years in NUS he had blossomed academically and spiritually and as a person. It seemed there were two other major impacts on his life besides the church. One would be his involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ, a Christian campus ministry that provided support as well as avenues of service so he could develop in Christ. The second was a popular and respected history professor, Lockhart, a devout Christian, who in my books would be a hero, because he had a deep sense of call in his profession as a lecturer and mentor to many, and he fulfilled it diligently and with excellence. He was salt and light out where it was badly needed: in the darkness and lostness of university life. Joshua was one of the blessed ones to have him as a mentor.
God gave us a promise to hold on to at his traumatic birth and its aftermath: “God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think.” (Eph 3:20). God is faithful!
He is no relative of mine though we bear the same surname. He founded and pastors New Destiny Fellowship International, one of the rare churches that has its main service on Saturdays. I did an interview with him, the first of a whole series I hope to do (ambitious, impetuous me) on people answering the callings of God into all kinds of work, but mainly into full time pastoral or missions work. The intention is to encourage people of all ages to answer the call of God to his many varied works.
It is refreshing and heartening to read that Kevin Rudd the recently elected Australian Prime Minister has made a historic apology to the Aborigines for injustices committed over 200 years of white colonization, thus removing “a great stain from the nation’s soul”. Kevin is a faithful follower of Christ and to see him bring the reconciling spirit of Christ into the arena of politics and government is just so encouraging. This is an act of courage in contrast to John Howard’s silence and refusal to issue an apology. I wonder what kind of spiritual ramifications this will have in aborigine evangelisation and the softening of the fabled Australian hardness of heart. The International Herald Tribune reported his speech:
“The Parliament is today here assembled to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia,” Rudd told Parliament.
This was “Government business, motion No. 1,” the first act of Rudd’s Labor government, which was sworn in Tuesday after a convincing electoral win over the 11-year administration of John Howard, who had for years refused to apologize for the misdeeds of past governments.
Rudd’s apology was particularly addressed to the so-called Stolen Generations, the tens of thousands of indigenous children who were removed, sometimes forcibly, from their families in a policy of assimilation that only ended in the 1970s.
In some states it was part of a policy to “breed out the color,” in the words of Cecil Cook, who held the title of chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in the 1930s.
“We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country,” Rudd said as hundreds of members of the Stolen Generations listened in the gallery, some with tears in their eyes. “For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
“To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.”
In my book this is courageous Christian leadership in the marketplace. I have to admit I like it that he has a B.A.(Arts) only, and that he majored in Chinese Studies and speaks fluent Mandarin.
Ex-private banker Lilian Tan took a step of faith and now serves as the National Director of Alpha Singapore. Peter Koh, one of the stalwarts of the Alpha team, introduced the new national leader to Pastor Thomas and I over lunch. She used to lead out the Workplace Alpha based at Telok Ayer Methodist Church. Over the last five years she had seen over 1000 people do the Alpha Course at that strategic city location, with many coming to know Christ, or touched by the Spirit, or moved further along in the process of seeking God. It’s wonderful to see marketplace people take faith steps like these even as the market for private bankers with experience has tightened.
May her move inspire us to invest in God’s kingdom in whatever way he leads us to!
I had lunch with pastor Thomas and Boyd Au, and Shirley Lee. Now Boyd Au once worshipped with us and then later moved to Trinity Christian Center. He is the founder of ENZER the listed electronics company. He shared with us how the Lord led him to sell the whole business to some investors and now he runs a social enterprise called 7 Fish. The vision is to do a viable fish soup and rice business in hawker centers and using part of the profits to provide meals for the poor and needy in co-operation with social agencies. A great idea, I think. He also does mentoring with several Christian bosses to help them turn around their businesses.
Shirley Lee, whom Boyd introduced to us, was in advertising and now runs several reflexology centers but her passion is to reach out to the prostitutes in Geylang. She prayer walks the streets and talks to the ladies of the night and try to help those who are trapped and want to be set free. This is certainly a ministry that needs to be on our prayer list.
Wonderful isn’t it-God’s people using their business skills (honed in the marketplace) for the glory of God.
hit turbulence, she experienced a turn of piety and used to go to Novena on Saturdays to pray. Besides recourse to prayer she had wonderful relatives from both hers and fathers side who generously gave her support and practical help, and this helped her to persevere. Later on she joined the St Andrew’s Cathedral ladies fellowhip, which met on Thursdays, and this was the period where I was pleased to see her faith in Christ renewed and deepened with Bible studies, ministry and the warm fellowship there. She was also a regular in the early morning services and even after the onset of dementia, she still went to church regularly under the watchful eyes of Amy the domestic helper, and Lily her sister. Even when she couldn’t recognize us she would still say, “God bless you”, or remember songs like “Jesus loves me this I know”. Even after the geriartician said her memory has gone zero, her helper Amy saw her woke up in the middle of the night and prayed the whole “Lord’s Prayer” and on another night witnessed her looking out the window and praised God, “I love you, Jesus, I love you Jesus. Her faith in Christ, and her temperament made her Alzeimer dementia a sweet one. She would often brush her hands on our cheeks and greet us and strangers with a “You are so pretty”. With this kind of temperament, the great caregivers at Peacehaven’s Flamingo found it pleasant to care for her.
J.B. Jeyaretnam died of a heart attack at a Singapore hospital. To me he was a true Singapore patriot and hero. Read more from this BBC report:
He had been forced into bankruptcy over defamation cases won by the government but was planning a new run for office.
The Sunday Times featured an interesting article on Lawrence Khong, probably a marketing promotional for his coming magic shows. It gave some insights into his colorful personality. I want to write something from a Christian perspective without making any value judgments on him or his ministry. Pastor Lawrence Khong is in my opinion one of the most outstanding indigenous Christian leaders of Singapore in the post-war period, if not in the last century. He is a strong natural leader anointed with gifts of faith and extraordinary leadership. I have never seen anyone with such great ability to cast visions, inspire people to believe and mobilize them to united action. He is now a leader of thousands but could certainly be one of hundreds of thousands. He is a rare gift to the body of Christ in Singapore and beyond.
how grateful to God we were when he walked across the stage and received his diploma.
professor, Lockhart, a devout Christian, who in my books would be a hero, because he had a deep sense of call in his profession as a lecturer and mentor to many, and he fulfilled it diligently and with excellence. He was salt and light out where it was badly needed: in the darkness and lostness of university life. Joshua was one of the blessed ones to have him as a mentor.
It is refreshing and heartening to read that Kevin Rudd the recently elected Australian Prime Minister has made a historic apology to the Aborigines for injustices committed over 200 years of white colonization, thus removing “a great stain from the nation’s soul”. Kevin is a faithful follower of Christ and to see him bring the reconciling spirit of Christ into the arena of politics and government is just so encouraging. This is an act of courage in contrast to John Howard’s silence and refusal to issue an apology. I wonder what kind of spiritual ramifications this will have in aborigine evangelisation and the softening of the fabled Australian hardness of heart. The International Herald Tribune reported his speech:
