So many things have happened since my last post, and this whole year. It's really flown by like a bullet train. But instead of trying to play catch-up in posting, I'm just going to post about what has been going on most recently - Ympact's 2015 youth camp, titled Inside Out! Yes, for 4 days and 3 nights I actually slept on the floor in church, got covered in mud, and ran around like old times!
Day 1 began with TOFU - The Orientation For U, organised by the 15 year olds every year for the incoming sec 1s. It began with station games within the church building in the morning, and then we headed to Pasir Ris Beach for lunch and more. It was heartening to see the current 15 year olds working together, organizing an event together for the first time. That day, the weather was pretty much bipolar, raining and stopping multiple times. As my camp group reached our third station, it suddenly started to really pour, and we took shelter under a pavilion together with the stationmasters, some TOFU team members and some Camp Comm members. The rain and wind poured madly, even masking the sight of Pulau Ubin across the sea.
In this day, my Systems Engineer brain kept acting up, silently thinking of how the flow, design and instructions could have been done much better and how they probably didn't have an OCD-type person checking these factors. But halfway through, it struck me that they were only 15, and probably never done such events before. And really, this was a great opportunity to learn so many things! Not just about event planning, but to learn to trust God that His work can still be done even when things don't follow our human plans. In addition, it wasn't difficult to see that their TOFU team was having a blast by themselves, bonding as a batch. It brought back memories of my own TOFU planning experience in 2008, as well as the two camps I had been in Camp Comm for.
So as the rain poured, we continued to play "2 Truths, 1 Lie" and then "2 Lies, 1 Truth," then eventually "I Have Never" and "I Have". It was really hilarious and that helped everyone break the ice. I smiled, thanking God that the youths were still able to bond and have fun despite the station games being cut short. Thereafter, I the rain actually stopped and we were able to play the mass game! For this, I sat it out for legit reasons. Anyway, the rain made the terrain really terribly muddy and part of the telematch involved rollin' in the deep. Despite the mud, they really bonded over it. Isn't that what dirt does?
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| The TOFU Mass Game |
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| Bonding in Mud (: |
The highlight of the second day was the mass games at Time Park. Once again, it rained here and there, making us wait a lot, but we managed to play all the games in the end. In mud, once again! Here's where we really got to bond as a group, both while waiting for the rain to end and while playing the games themselves!
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| Jon and Kyle's Humorous Explanation |
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Group 10, aka Team Pi
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Day 3's highlight was the trip to Pulau Ubin. It wasn't as crazy as the Ubin trip we had in R.A.W. Camp in 2008, but nevertheless fun! In 2008, I remember walking around so much on the island to complete an amazing race game.
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| On board the ferry with Sam Wong's group! |
[To add more soon about Ubin (:]
Now, let's talk more about the serious stuff!
This camp's theme is on Discipleship, and the speaker for the camp was Rev Christopher Chan from Chapel of the Resurrection. That's Joshua Cheong's church's youth pastor! I must say that he does speak very well. Not surprising seeing that he was a pureblood ACSian.
So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God - John 6:67-68
The speaker opened each session by quoting the camp theme verse. On the first night, he opened with asking the youths "if things don't go your way, would you still follow God?" and "if God's teachings don't fit into your idea of God, would you still follow Him?". That really follows from the context of theme verse where many of Jesus' followers besides the Twelve deserted him after saying that a particular teaching was a 'hard teaching'. We see here that Simon Peter saw that Jesus had "the words of eternal life" and thus stayed. Ps Chris then started to explore the idea of 'eternal life' and what it was really about. It can't really be that we live forever, status quo as we are now. No matter how nice our lives are, there's some things you wouldn't want to face forever. Essentially, eternal life is explained in John 17:3, which states "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent". The word 'know' actually refers to an intimate relationship, like how 'Adam knew Eve' in Genesis. Well then, the only logical follow up was to reflect on why one studied (or worked) so hard in the present and whether that got in the way of having a relationship with God. Well, this is easy to state but we all do know what a struggle it is to follow God's ways rather than our own desires.
The second session on the second night focused on the cost of discipleship, essentially being explained in Luke 9:23 and Matthew 16:24 - to deny oneself and take up one's cross. Denying the self means surrendering the idea that "I am king over my own life" to letting God's words take charge. With that, the idea of a "living sacrifice" from Romans 12:1 was explored, showing that we are the sacrifice that doesn't die. It's really a crazy idea, if you think about it. You're constantly putting yourself on the altar for life as worship is to be done through our lives and how we act, not just the moments where you think you are saying praises to God. What struck me was that God's grace trains us for obedience, and isn't just a present for us. We see that grace without transformation in our characters is wasted, but when we are touched by this grace and decide to walk in God's ways, that totally changes.
And then all that led up to the last session, about community and the body of Christ. He opened the session with describing how the attitude in the modern church has become very individualistic, with people coming from the perspective about whether things fit them or not, and that their individual walk with God is all that matters. Well, we do know that many aspects of our discipleship is individual, but some are meant to be communal as our lives are best lived shared. John 17:20-23 showed how Jesus prayed for His disciples to have unity like how the Father and Son had it. This would then become an expression of Jesus being the son of God and eventually enabling the disciples to reach out, especially when others begin to notice something intriguing - that there's 101 things that we could all fight and disagree over, including the way we do things, our characters, status and all, but the body can still stand united. With that, he talked about the importance of building this unity.
That night, I felt a conviction to talk about spiritual friendships with my camp group. I honestly thought I had almost no spiritual friends. But that night I realized that we all do have spiritual friendships (in Christ) with one another, and it's just how superficial or how deep it goes, much like how you would classify normal friendships. Friendships are usually built around something. If two people like to play soccer, they could bond over playing that and talking about all things soccer. Same for activities like dancing, art, music, ... There's just something that acts as the medium for friendships to grow. Now, what about spiritual friendships? That would be friendships centered on Christ. When you think about the church community, think about why two people here could even be friends in the first place. It's really because of God, isn't it? And so on for every permutation and combination of connections here. What makes these relationships so special then? I believe that there's more than just a normal friendship because we would care for each other's soul, their walk with God and all. Of course, these would all be on different levels. We would probably have deeper friendships with some, where we would really support each other in more personal problems and all. There would be some where we wouldn't share much to that level, but know that we can trust each other for some sort of support. Thus, there should be more to a friendship here than the usual ones we have with our schoolmates and colleagues.
I thank God for this community and for showing me why it is worth staying. I almost walked away when I was 15, but then various opportunities to know my peers better, and the care that some older leaders bothered to show kept me here. I mean, when you're 15, you're pretty much skeptical about religion and like, "whatever" to most things, right? I think I was considered a good kid in the world's definition of morality but concurrently didn't really care much about God. I think I never really got any super deep spiritual friends here, but I do have many friends that I can count on. It's only when I went to SUTD and had a second Christian community there, that I realized what I had been missing out on. But it's still not too late, and I believe that many others feel the same way here too.
On the last day, Jon Goh actually shared about something very similar and why he's still here despite most of his 1994 batch having left already.
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| Our Community |
The YMPACT community, and the wider church community is truly precious. We actually define ourselves by many labels, many groups and organizations we belong to. It's easy to see what these are just looking at all the t-shirts we wear - school shirts, CCA shirts, house shirts, marathon shirts. We want to be known as a certain arrtibute that defines a certain group. It is also true that many friendships are formed over a certain objective, such as trying to perform for SYF together as an ensemble, or perhaps to finish a project together. It's great when friendships are made this way. But not all last, sadly.
As Jonathan Goh shared his testimony as to why he's still in this community despite his batchmates having all left one by one, and how he would want to wear the badge of Christ over any other. I too, have had very similar experiences and do belive that God is working in our community to deepen friendships made in Him and to inspire us to fight for the faith of our fellow brothers and sisters. After all, we are not on this journey alone. We are on a journey of faith together! (:
