Church.

Ever since I’ve become a Christian I’ve got people asking me “why do I choose to become a Christian”, or “who influenced you to become a Christian”, or worse still, “is it because there’s a girl you like that goes to church so you started going too”. Strange questions, indeed. But then again I can’t blame them – I’ve lived so much of my life as a non-believer, it does take quite a lot of believing for them to believe that I’m a believer now. I could do with some clarifications, but I don’t think God ever needs me to clarify. He knows best the answers for all those questions, and that’s all that matters.

Anyway today was the first working day after the speech contest, and apart from a bit of post-contest administration to do, I had a relatively easy day. During the course of the day I spent a bit of time figuring out what I really want to do, and it seems that I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I think I want to devote my life working for young people. I want to help them grow and learn to become better human beings, impart into them life skills so as to prepare them for a richer life in the future. I don’t think I’m ever good in things like business or engineering, but I enjoy working with young people. I find that while the experience of working with young people can be frustrating at times, it’s also the most rewarding.

Perhaps I know I can never quite be a businessman or computer scientist, but I do believe the knowledge that I’ve learnt in these areas will come in handy in my work in the future too. I don’t think I must work in a university, but I think I’ll be happy as long as I get to work with young people. Come to think about it, it’s actually quite true – even during the period when I was teaching in IVE and got irritated by the students, I actually quite enjoyed conducting lessons for them. To be able to build a close relationship with the students was something that I really love, and until this day I still have fond memories of my time in IVE. So I guess that’s what I’m going to do.

I will not aim to see my name or story published in newspapers or websites, I don’t need people to recognize that I am successful because whether or not I am successful is not judged by me or other people. It’s His opinion that matters the most, and since this is the path that He has chosen for me, I’m sure it will be the right path for me. I know there might be difficulties along the way that might make me feel that the path I’ve chosen could be wrong, but I’m confident that His will is going to see me through. So help me God.

Speech Contest (is over)!

Finally after almost 5 months of hard work, the Intervarsity Speech Contest is finally over and it was a delightful moment when we can finally say “It’s a wrap”!

The event was very smooth with only some minor hiccups – nothing too major cropped up, we only overran by about 20 minutes, basically everything proceeded pretty well. The only down side was that the weather wasn’t really good, and it was raining quite a fair bit. I think because of that the turnout suffered a bit. That said, we still had 596 ticket-holding audience came in, and about another 40-odd guests. It was great to see the floor of the AC Hall full again!

The best thing that happened in the contest was of course BU winning the overall championship! It was a very very tight contest, but ultimately our judges ruled in BU’s favour – to the delight of everyone associated with the University!

I think all the hard work that has gone into the contest has been rewarded for all of us, not just because BU has won the overall championship, but more importantly, we upkept the performance of last year and organized a great contest this time round. Of course the efforts of my dear colleagues and all the lovely student helpers were important, and without them the contest definitely wouldn’t have been as smooth-sailing. But most importantly, I think I must thank God for watching over the contest and gave His blessings to everyone associated with the contest – my colleagues, the student helpers, the guests, the participants, the audience. It’s His marvel that we had a very good event, and I must thank the greatest organizer of the event – God!

To Lord be the Glory!

Speech Contest.

Right now I’m sitting in my office, taking a quick breather from the preparations of the speech contest. It’s quite safe to say that my office is in quite a mess:

I also went out to my corridor just now, and this is how my campus looks like at 11.30pm!

Now all I need is Lord to help me through with this preparation, and to bless the event tomorrow.

Lab.

Just like the few Saturdays before today, I am sitting inside the FYP lab, working on my paper and my final year project. The problem with these school work is that you should never take a prolonged rest away from the workstation because once you do so, you find that it’s very difficult to try to work on them again when you return. So that’s what I am facing right now – I can’t seem to be able to continue working on it. But anyway I have already thought about what I want to achieve in today’s work, and since I’ve more or less done that, I think I’m fine (alright perhaps I’m giving excuses to myself again).

Went to my second ever Sunday service at Shatin Baptist Church earlier and to be honest, I was looking forward to the service since last week. Had a fruitful time listening to the message from Pastor Chu, and I think I enjoyed the service very much. Now I think I’ll need to continue establishing my faith. While Shatin (where the church is) and Lam Tin (where I live) seem quite far on the map, it didn’t really take me long to travel between the two places – I got out from home at about 8.20 this morning and by 9 I was in Shatin already. Guess that gives me more motivation to keep going!

The speech contest is going to happen on Friday and as things stand, the distribution of the tickets is fairly satisfactory. Of course I can never be too satisfied at that alone because the number of tickets given out may not necessarily mean that same number of audience would turn up, but I guess I’ll be over the moon if 70% of that number were to turn up on Friday! In the meanwhile I’ll continue to pray to Lord for him to watch over me and all my colleagues who are organizing the competition, and also to the participants who are going to compete for the top prizes. May Lord let them know that the meaning of the contest is not for competition, but for them to get to build friendships, as well as to learn from one another. Winning the $3000 top prize sure is great, but if they could use the opportunity to be able to learn more about speaking in front of a (big) crowd, then it’s worth all the while for us to be organziing the contest.

A slightly more selfish thought though – hopefully the winners of both streams will be from HKBU and we’ll finally walk away with the overall championship! It would be nice to be able to finally see our University’s name on the trophy!

TV.

Lately I’ve been watching quite a bit of TV – every night I’ll try to make it home on time to catch the TV drama “學警狙擊”. The storyline of the drama is quite full of twists and unexpected events (though usually it’s easy to guess these twists and unexpected events for long-time viewers of TVB dramas), and most of the actors and actresses are very good in portraying the characters in the drama. One of such actor that caught my eye is Michael Tse 謝天華, who played the role of “Laughing哥”, a police undercover in the triads.

It has to be said, Michael Tse is actually among my list of favourite actors. He’s good in whatever role that he plays (though most of the time he’s either cast as a triad member or a heartless man who goes round breaking the hearts of the women who love him), and in this series, I think he was really outstanding. Even as a supporting cast, he was great in portraying the life of Laughing, who was caught between the bright side and the dark side. Although the character was made to be killed in last night’s episode (with another 7 episodes to go), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that he is the character that garnered the most impression among the viewers. There’s even a few groups on Facebook that are built in his name – that shows you how impressed people were about his acting.

One thing though that set me thinking was more on the TV rather than him. The amount of fanfare around him because of his acting is really something that is fairly astonishing. That shows you how powerful the TV box can be in terms of influencing people. Many have claimed that TV has changed the lives of many people, and I cannot agree more. Some parents have argued against TV, saying that their kids do not want to study hard because they want to watch TV all the time (something that even my own Mum said while I was a kid), and it is a negative influence. But then again, if used in a right way, it can be a very influential tool for positive messages (of course, sometimes you need to have positive people first before you can talk about TV being a useful tool). But I think it is a tool that can have a very positive impact. Even God has used TV as a tool for His messages to be spread around the world, and I hope people will continue to use TV as such a tool, for His grace to reach everyone. May God give us the power and intelligence to use this tool well to serve Him.

Read.

[Updated from LiveJournal and simulcasted on Facebook]

I used to write reading as one of my hobbies. The truth was that while I enjoy reading, I don’t really do it enough to warrant it as a hobby. Usually when people describe their hobbies it would be things that they enjoy doing and do it all the time. For me, perhaps it’s more accurate to describe reading as one of my interests, among many other interests of course.

Usually when I read, the main purpose is to kill time. Especially when I’m riding on the train, time usually seems to go faster when I’m reading. I still remember I managed to finish the entire series of 倚天屠龍記 on the MTR! Among all the books that I read, I actually enjoy reading autobiographies the most. It’s always interesting to read about people’s lives, how they lived in the past and what kind of difficulties or challenges that they have to go through. I still remember the autobiography that impressed me the most was Hillary Clinton’s one – it was 800+ pages thick and I think it took me close to three months to finish reading it (for your information, as much as my Chinese is not as good my English – which is actually not that good too anyway – I still read Chinese faster than English). But a lot of the things that she covered in the book are still very vivid in my mind. What struck me the most about the book was, rather predictably, Bill Clinton’s affair with “that woman”. For a woman to accept her husband betraying her is already hard to take, and it was always going to be even harder when her husband was the President of the United States. Yet her courage and grace from the whole incident, and how she chose to forgive her husband to ensure that the family did not split up, was truly remarkable. It was even more remarkable to consider that, especially nowadays we are in the age when more and more people seem to not treat marriage as seriously as before. Of course there are always going to be couples who really live happily ever after, but then it seems that there are more and more people getting divorced after getting married that it almost feels like people get married because they want to get divorced – which is something that I can’t really accept anyway (OK I think I was supposed to be talking about reading).

The last couple of days I’ve started picking up some religious books to read to try to discover the wisdom and blessings that Lord has in store for me and true enough, I am beginning to feel His wonders and it just seems to me that He’s got everything prepared and all I have to do is follow. It’s amazing really and I thank God for that. Hopefully I will have the determination to keep reading and perhaps from the words that I read I can understand more about life. That said, I think I still enjoy reading some light-hearted, non-religious books – like 彎彎’s latest book “要不要去我家”, which was delivered to me yesterday afternoon from Taiwan. And since it was more of a comic rather than a novel, I finished reading it in about half an hour – so whoever wants to read the book can borrow from me!

Mind.

Praise be to the Lord.

Just two weeks ago I felt that I’ve hit the bottom of my life so far since returning to Hong Kong, but right now I’m sensing that there’s a joy within me that makes me hopeful and determine to do things well. I felt that there’s this huge force within me that will spur me on to do well in His glory and I hope this will be the start of a new me.

Praise be to the Lord.

Lab.

I’m again sitting in the FYP Lab (and the aircon is so freaking cold, which is strange), and I’ve just completed the first draft of my seminar report – will probably come back tomorrow to finish it up, and also continue working on the FYP.

Somehow I just seem like the kind of people that can only study or work in school – you put me at home and I’ll promptly do everything else except studying. How I managed to get the good grades in the previous semesters without spending majority of my time studying in the university library is absolutely beyond me.

Will be heading down to Tsim Sha Tsui to watch United vs Liverpool with fellow Reds. The last time I watch United vs Liverpool I was in Tokyo which was a very good experience bar the scoreline, and I still remember this Scouser in the pub which went absolutely bonkers when Liverpool took the lead in the second half. As I mentioned in my post that day, the match was best forgotten, but I definitely enjoyed the experience of watching a football match in a pub in Japan! I hope this time round United gets their revenge and put the final nail in the Liverpool’s coffin of Premiership Champions dreams. A repeat of the 3-0 last season would be brilliant, but I’ll take a 1-0 United win with the ball shanking off a Liverpool defender’s backside and creep into the net. Well, I have every reason to be optimistic because I’m wearing the Portuguese kit with Cristiano Ronaldo’s name printed on it – the last time I wore this shirt to watch a United match with fellow Reds United won the Champions League, so I guess that’s good omen!

Reunion.

I went to my primary school classmates’ reunion gathering on Wednesday and it has to be said, that day has to be the best day of my year so far. It was great for me to be able to see all those friends of yesteryears – some of whom I have not seen for almost 18 years – and the best thing was everyone was so happy to see one another that there didn’t seem to have any need to do any ice-breaking. We had some very good chats about the times we spent together in school, the funny things that we did, etc etc, and it was a really great night. Even though everyone’s lives after leaving primary school was all very different, but I just think that on that evening, there was really nothing different between now and then – everyone was enjoying himself or herself as we would as primary school kids.

It’s quite fair to say that even though I have only spent 2 years of my lives studying with them, those 2 years were the best years of my life after the 4 and a half in NUS. I have never forgotten the friends I made then, and I just hope that this friendship will stay for as long as we all live. Even though sometimes I do wonder how our friendships would be like if I have never left for Singapore, but seeing how we enjoy our friendships now, it really doesn’t matter. The only thing that I would regret, if at all, was that I didn’t take enough pictures with them when I was younger!

20 years of friendship can’t be wrong.

Home.

It’s been a long time since I last updated my little journal from home. Seems like the past couple of months I have developed this knack of updating my journal in office. I still remember the days when I refuse to go to sleep unless I’ve written something here, but it seems like with me getting older, the need to sleep early for next day’s work has made it difficult to really stay awake until 4 in the morning just to get an edition of the journal squeezed in. Oh well, life changes after all.

For those of you who’ve taken an interest in my note on FB, I thank you for your concern. The past couple of weeks have really been a testing period for me as I have to endure quite a tremendous level of stress and frustration. The strange thing is I still actually like my job, just that I’m not sure how much longer I could hold out for. It’s not the workload that stresses me out – in fact I’m enjoying the amount of work that I’m doing and the effort that I’m putting into the Speech Contest – just that it’s the emotional strain that’s giving me some troubles. Dealing with students is always a fun thing and something that I think I enjoy doing, but it’s the other things that make life more difficult than I think it is. Of course no job in this world is ever free of frustrations, so perhaps it’s either I to learn to deal with it, or I learn to deal with it. The good thing is I know I have some friends who will always give me the moral support that I need. Sometimes it’s through testing periods that you realise who your real friends are.

I don’t know if living alone is actually such a good idea, especially when I’m such a moaner. To have no one to moan to at home can be quite frustrating. I guess it’s times like these when I really hope to have someone by my side, to listen to me moan and perhaps just give me some encouragements of some sort – OK maybe primarily just to listen to me moan. I think I’m one of those people who could moan the whole day if I have the whole day.