Of Easter Past (Part I)

JD’s in the animal hospital under critical care, after a pre-existing condition was aggravated by her trying to jump into a taxi to go dig holes on the beach. The following (and subsequent backlogged) posts were in various stages of completion before this…

I worry a lot about doing a church a disservice* by telling people I go to church. But well… thousands of us attending IslandECC, it’s just possible some of us aren’t perfect. That was a JOKE ok, NONE of us are perfect….. 🙂

This would otherwise not have been necessary. (That’s the Easter craft from HN’s Kids Club class…

…and some of the word challenges below (the smaller print one is Rockstar’s))… HN loves cutting and colouring but she also likes to play the Word Search app on my phone (something about crossing out alphabets being very satisfying) and she hadn’t seen the Easter word search at the next table before settling at and refusing to leave the cutting and colouring table when it was time to go, so I took a copy home for her

Ok I better elaborate on my earlier comment about worrying I do my church a disservice by blogging about it – it’s not the “You’re A Christian???” reaction that I’m worried about, it’s been on my blog from the very beginning that I’m a Christian. 3 bank mergers spanning a bit over a decade in my former life before I quit, every dealing room I went to I had a stack of Bible verse cards on my dealing room desk. (Fine, call me One Of Those People. But I didn’t go chasing colleagues around with them (now there’s a scary image 😀 ) and you should also know the rest – that I had a relatively staunch Taoist/ Buddhist upbringing (pretty sure my Mum was terrified when I first told her I had become a Christian) and, as Malaysia is often so diverse as to confuse so many people I meet here in Hong Kong, my best friend from Secondary School was Muslim.)

Back to the Bible verse cards though. In my first banking job in Singapore, when I was an eager beaver who couldn’t run fast enough from the Accounting/auditing degree my parents had nudged me to take at Nanyang Technological University, I experienced my first merger. “Merger” might be putting it mildly – out of the 80+ dealing room staff, some of whom had been working there for decades in this relatively small Singaporean family bank who had mostly been minding their own business structuring their own instruments under regulatory and academic supervision to take care of an already established client base, the acquiring institution eventually kept maybe 12 of us, predominantly on the structured products/ derivatives side.

During this, I met Janet. Late 30s, pretty, with a bob haircut she dyed very black, she was the senior trader on the Rates desk. From where I sat, I could hear her daily conversation with brokers, sales staff, junior traders. Early each morning Janet would apply a bright lipstick (I on the other hand wore no makeup to work until my Mum suggested it after I chopped my long hair off into a short pixie), cheerfully wished the people on the other side of her dealerboard “Good Morning” – that is not to say she didn’t also tell them to shut their mouths when they tried to get away with lousy rates – and then appeared to barely move from her post ’til lunchtime.

Janet was one of the “old(er) timers.” While I never heard anything unfavourable said about the quality of her work, her role and team were completely overlapped by the acquiring institution’s and she must have known she would be done for when the merge was completed. She had once told me that in her late teens/20s a tumour at the base of her brain stem had nearly obliterated her eyesight, and treatment had left her unable to have children. The job she had held for so long and was about to lose must have been a big part of her day-to-day. She prayed quietly, put her lipstick on, and wished people a good day every morning anyway.

Even though I didn’t believe and had no wish to in those days, I had no doubt that she did. With every fibre of her being, and it showed. 

The last thing I had wanted was to go with Janet to church. I had practically run from that same church several years prior, after being pulled up to the stage by a well-meaning but overly enthusiastic fellow student at university who wanted me to try speaking in tongues.

I still don’t speak in tongues. But experiences like that, together with my “very un-Christian” upbringing, taught me how very different people are, and the OCD in me makes me even more worried something I say will cause someone to stumble. There are people who have had bad experiences, and then there are people who have studied very, very carefully** to arrive at what they believe in. I didn’t study. The night I followed Janet to her church after the umpteenth time she asked me, I knew more about other faiths than I did about this one. I didn’t even like her church. But something happened to me that night I was sitting in back, trying so hard to melt into the background, and I never looked back after. I went to classes (Alphas, spiritual gifts, Bible studies, baptism) after. And it was also incredibly humbling that it would happen for me in that church. Sometimes I went back there after, sometimes I went elsewhere.. Not too long after that we came to Hong Kong. I was baptised at IslandECC, and both kids were dedicated to the Lord there as well.

This is the awesome rock-concert-esque Kids Club FX Easter service, inadequately illustrated by my hurriedly taken blurry pics:

Kids Club Giveaway (it’s all free, but you do need to register how many kids you’re bringing beforehand so they can budget the number of giveaways and other supplies)

**On another occasion they showed the American Football movie Facing The Giants, where a coach takes his lacklustre team to the top via the power of prayer to overcome their fear of failure before each game, and we loved it so much (Rockstar enjoyed it, I really liked what I had caught when I came to pick him up) we went to buy the movie off Amazon.com ….

… and it was a long time later when I then learned how heavily they vet, discuss, check “Dove ratings” (what even is a dove rating, never knew they existed!) on what they show.

So please don’t judge the Message by the limitations of this messenger dabbling on her personal blog. (Am I Christian though? Yes.)

He is Risen, Praise the Lord

Last thing I heard re Janet was maybe 8 years ago, that she had delivered a healthy baby girl not too long ago. She must’ve been about 45 years old by then. The trader who told me that, our former colleague whom I had run into, shrugged. “Well I guess everything finally decided to start working again.” Then he carried on his way. Lunch was almost over and the markets would be starting back up..