Dilemma Resolved

Thursday, 17th July 2008

Sometime earlier this year, I shared about how my wife's elder brother, who had accepted Jesus Christ as a youth, had come back to the Lord after listening to a sermon by one of the pastors whom I had dismissed as ineffective. He joined my cell group and even signed up for baptism classes.

While this was great news, it did cause a dilemma for me. On the one hand, I had already been contemplating for several months making the move to New Creation Church. Yet, on the other hand, my brother-in-law and his family had embarked on a new spiritual journey and the last thing I wanted to do was stumble them by only being in church when Ps Reuben was preaching.

Well, I praise and thank God that in spite of my human frailties, He prevails and the dilemma has been resolved in a most wonderful and unexpected manner! Read on...

My brother-in-law travels occasionally and ended up missing the baptism classes. The church office told him that because he did not attend those classes, he could not get baptised. Meanwhile, he continued to attend church regularly and even started to bring along his wife and wife's sister to the services.

Then on 5 July 2008, he called me on my handphone and we spoke for nearly an hour. I apologised to him that I had not had the time to "follow-up" on him because I had just changed jobs, my son had just had a transplant and I had been implicated in a vandalism case. He told me that he read my blog about wanting to take a sabbatical, and rather than this stumbling him, he appreciated my honesty and the struggles that I was going through. In fact, what seems to have stumbled him was that a sheep was left unprotected and even offered to the wolves.

The next day (Sunday 6 July 2008), I received an sms from him at about 2pm telling me that he had just brought his entire family for the 11.30am service in New Creation Church! I caught up with him over the weekend and he told me he and his family will be settling there! He had gone to find out more about the children's ministry and it so happened that the one in charge of registration was his ex-neighbour's teenage kid. He also bumped into another of his ex-neighbours when he was in the overflow room on the 3rd floor. He took these as indications to confirm to him that God wanted his family to worship at the Rock!

As I reflected on the above, I could not help but chuckle. God sure has a sense of humour. He had used me as His vessel to bring my brother-in-law back to Him, and was now using my brother-in-law as His vessel to bring me and my family to New Creation Church!

And thus, God had resolved the dilemma His way, and I just cannot wait to sow into One-North legitimately, because I know that He will cause a bountiful harvest to take place that will cause our barns to overflow. Amen?