Being Missional 03: Unshakeable

BY REV DR FOREST KOH

With heartfelt gratitude, my first English book was published! This book contains life stories of how elderly come to faith and why they were baptised after the age of 60. What are the social and cultural barriers they must overcome to come to faith? What role can we play to connect them to Christ?  

Every elderly person has a story to tell, listening how their story turned into a faith story, and then into a missional story is an enriching journey. As I listened and as I wrote and shared, I was humbled to see how God transformed lives in our least expected ways. God is amazing. It is a rich journey to experience how God connects lives and builds relationships as we listen. Listening to their stories is another posture of being missional. My life was stretched to contain the uncontainable abundance of life when I was called to serve the elderly. How did it happen?

It begins with satay from Hougang.

When I was still a kid, my grandma would buy satay from Hougang for my siblings and me. She escaped to Singapore in the 1940s with my mother and my uncle from Teochew, China. As soon as she got here, she worked as a maid for a rich family. And that’s what she ended up doing for the rest of her life. Sometimes, when she has spare time on weekends, she would buy satay for us from Hougang. My family and I were living in Bukit Panjang, which was all the way on the other side of Singapore. The bus trip across the island took at least 2 hours. Even now when I smell satay, I think about the days when grandma brought satay all the way from the other side of the country.

Eventually, I grew up and had a family of my own. On weekends, I’d drive grandma over to my place and she would spend a day or two with us. I loved joking around with my grandma and I loved making her laugh. I’d pinch the loose skin on her arm into a little mound and say “Look, it’s a mountain! Just like you, unshakeable!” She’d always chuckle with me when I did that.

So maybe it all started then.

After graduating from the seminary, I was put in charge of the Teochew service at Singapore Life Church. Although I am Teochew, I had to re-learn a lot of things in order to preach effectively in Teochew. The elderly at my church were kind enough to coach me until my intonations were accurate. With a thick skin and a very limited vocabulary, I shared God’s word with the Teochew Senior fellowship. The elderly in the fellowship enjoyed correcting me on my Mandarin-sounding Teochew. We would always have a good laugh together as I tried to learn the correct pronunciation. Laughing with them, I think back to days when I would joke with grandma about the unshakeable mountain on her arm.

I was blessed with even more opportunities to learn from the elderly when I worked on my PhD thesis. My first English book is developed from my dissertation. There are many stories from my grandma and mother’s era. These are stories of survival, stories coming from a generation that weathered through one of the fastest transitions of a society into modernity.

Before my grandma passed, she decided to accept Christ. But she was set against being baptized. The conflict that was reflected in her eyes as she passed is seared in my mind. As I recorded these stories, I thought about the conflict between my mother and my grandmother. Will the grudges they hold against each other dissolve slowly as these grudges become stories that can be told and retold?

My mother must resolve this with God as my grandma has already passed. But there was still emotional baggage for her to unload which seem impossible in human eyes. But week after week as I read a verse of God’s word with her, I saw, though very slowly, renewal in her inner self. She read slowly but clearly that day, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” (Eph. 4:32) I saw her eyes blinking with hope.

My grandma’s infectious laughter resonates in my ears to this day when I bite down on a stick of satay. The unshakeable mountain on her arms, reminds me of the enduring love of my missional God, still working through our lives to connect people to the faith.

PS: You will receive a copy of my book, “Our Stories, His Story – Connecting Elderly to the Fatih” after our Combined Christmas Worship next week. See you at 7:30am!

[To be continued…]