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Have you ever wondered if God really exists? Or if indeed he did, why doesn’t he speak to me or give me visions? Well, I did, I still don’t get visions or hear voices but  I’d like to share this little story about how God “showed up” in my life…

I was a cradle Catholic and I went through the whole “Catholic” system we have here in SG. I went through 10 years of mission school, the whole Catechism regime and was even in the Church choir for about 3 years in my late teens.

But as I grew up, I began to question why we had to go through so much rituals and I also began to question why people had to suffer and why can’t God just save us from our misery.

I stopped abstaining from meat on Fridays when I enlisted in the army and eventually I stopped going to Church on Sundays. For many years I didn’t even attend Christmas mass! The funny thing was I always knew God was there, I was just too lazy to do anything about it.
I concentrated on my career and even though I started out in the Asian financial crisis, it was generally an uphill trajectory surviving the dot com crash and I kept building my material life getting my own place and car etc.

The turning point came when I met my wife. She was the daughter of a Christian missionary pastor and I knew that if I were to have her in my life, at some point I’ll be dragged back to Church whether I liked it or not. But since I never really hated God or anything, I figured it’ll be due time I came back to Church, besides the Christian churches were not so ritualistic, which was one of the things that bugged me previously.

After marriage, we started looking around for a Church to go to together, we checked out the New Creation Church, which I found too simplistic. We went to a Presbytarian  Church and eventually we settled into an international Baptist Church because the pastor was eloquent, the message was logical and the service presentation had great music and was sleek enough.

On a parallel track in those same years, my mum suffered a heart attack. She was devout her whole life but was never active in Church. She was near retirement and eventually had to stop work because we didn’t want her to get stressed and suffer a second attack. Doctors also generally give you a statistical 5-7 years more to live after your first attack, so there wasn’t a point in working till you’re dead.

Once she got out of the rat race, she began to be called by God, she signed up for the Life In Spirit Seminar (LISS) with much apprehension and after a few postponements but finished the course. One day after the course while she was thinking about how she was supposed to do God’s work, he called out “Intercessor!” 3 times in her head. She looked around, and there was nobody there. From then on, she got closer to God and throughout our Sunday lunches as a family, she spoke and taught us a lot about God and what we’re put on earth for.

She was glad that I was finally back to attending Church even though it wasn’t Catholic, but she continued to pray for us. Eventually, God left me messages via my mum that he wanted me back in the one true Church, and I made up my mind and came back. I remember climbing up the stairs at the Novena to make this “big” confession to come back home and a lady approached me and thrusted the NET brochure at me. So that’s how I ended up in NET.

For me, NET gave me the opportunity to “experience” God personally because at the praying over sessions  during a weekend retreat, the sudden uncontrollable bout of tearing, was my first physical experience with God. To me, that was my epiphany. It was solid evidence that there is a higher being and it broke the cynicism in me once and for all.

And the other lovely thing about this whole conversion process is that, my mum’s guidance has brought about a change in my wife too, and she is now attending the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) to be converted to a Catholic this October (2008).

So if you’re wondering how come God hasn’t shown up in your life or if there really is a God, trust me, he does everything in His time and he has a plan for everyone of us, you just need to open up yourself and accept His will and get involved in Church. Don’t give up. He will reveal himself to you in ways never imagined.