A Heart For Souls As A Family

By Lionel Lum

Home is where it all starts. To love the Lord our God is the heart of Missions, and to persuade others (including our spouse and children) of our faith, God’s heart must be engrafted on ours – not a result of our own effort but by God’s grace.

My wife (Pearl) and I were brought together through the Cambodia medical mission trip more than 18 years ago. Then, it was hard to say we truly understood what missions meant beyond recognizing that doors were wide open for us to use our vocational skills to serve God. It may have been a tad dangerous for us to have been regarded as God’s instruments without realizing God’s heart for His people.

Mission trips took a backseat for a while when we became parents of two young daughters (now 10 and 12) and were going through specialist training in our job. Despite passing through a different season in life (which went like a whirlwind!), the fire to answer God’s calling to serve Him never fizzled out. On hindsight, God had studded along our path opportunities to do His work outside of a formal mission trip, in our daily lives. Through small steps of faith, with inspiration and encouragement from our spiritual family in GPC and abroad, God gave us a deeper understanding of His Heart for His people and His calling for us to become fishers of men.

But how does a family with four lives tugging in all directions in today’s world, move synergistically towards what God has planned for us? Joshua 24:15 rings true: “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”. While we have no inkling how the future will pan out, we know the Lord will give us the desires of our heart if we delight ourselves in the Lord (Psalm 37:4).

We desire for our family to be a house of blessing. This meant being invested in saving souls, being unafraid in sharing our imperfect lives saved by the grace and mercy of Christ, providing practical help to others, and allowing God to shine through serendipitously. These require time and a conscious effort to put kingdom values above societal pursuits. We pray that our daily lives will rub off on our daughters and convince them of the goodness and grace of God. Indeed, we saw them grow over the past few years to be more outward looking, delivering food to a needy neighbour such that we were able to share the gospel in the process, helping their friend catch up with school work after a bout of illness, and asking us hard but important questions on our faith.

Post COVID-19, there was no better time for our family (together with our daughters now) to come one full circle back to Cambodia to serve in the mission trip. It took a leap of faith for us parents to serve apart from our daughters in a foreign land and to leave them in the care of our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ as they served in the teaching ministry while we headed off to the medical ministry. But what warmed our hearts was how they could easily build special connections and relationships with the Khmer children despite the language barrier. I believe it is never too young to serve God!

As a family, we acknowledge that God has created us uniquely to complement and support each other. As we wait upon the Lord, we pray for:

·      Our hearts to pursue Christlike values and the courage to stand up for them in today’s world.

·      Spiritual gifts to be discovered and used by the Holy Spirit’s leading.

·      Opportunities to encourage and uplift souls in our daily lives.

·      Our family to dwell in the presence of the Lord and to continue loving God and His people.

·      God to reveal His good and perfect plan for our family and that we will be found faithful in doing His work.

·      God be glorified through our household.

May God give us wisdom and discernment to move where He directs the fishing nets. May God give us courage to step out of the boat, fix our eyes on Jesus and walk on water when we are called to. May God find us responding with “Here I am Lord” when He calls us – for we are not our own, and we were bought at a price.