Do You Love Me?

BY SARACH

It’s been one week since confirmation camp. How am I still not over it?!

Here’s my testimony. Not as a participant, but as a service team member trying to handle far more than she can take.

I was in the facil team, and the music team. I also had to pray over during the healing session and it was hard. It was so hard to focus when my mind was everywhere, figuring out what I had to do and what was going to happen next. In short, the 4 days I spent in church was more or less stressful.

When I first met my fellow confirmands, or Seekers as we call them, in my group, I asked them for their expectations of the camp in one word. Most of them were positive, with “fun” and “spiritual”, but there was this one who said “boring”. Expected. But we’ll try.

The Seekers knew nothing about what was going to happen to them, and me being their facil, I was so excited for them because the itinerary was just amazing. So many opportunities, and nothing our church has ever done before. And to know that they will feel God’s tangible presence like how I did gave me hope.

“Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry” – St Padre Pio

I prayed hard, so hard that the Seekers will feel God and know of God’s love. I didn’t hope much, but I hoped that God would use me as an instrument for His greater glory. I worried too much during the camp, before the camp and in hindsight, that worry was just so unnecessary.

Through all these, there is only one thing I will always remember from the camp – the Seekers singing their hearts out, praising God in the songs we sang and lifting their hands up to Him. One whole year we’ve journeyed with them and we always sang one song before Sunday’s sessions. Yeah, there were mumbles, lips moving, but never full out singing let alone jumping and clapping and lifting of hands.

Watching them grow, all of them grow towards God is just so amazing and it warms my heart. I’m just so grateful to Him for using me again and again, despite my weaknesses and despite worrying too much. Because the change in them is real, the seed planted will grow, and that one step took will bring the Seekers closer.

As I’ve written in their warm fuzzies, this is just the start of the journey – a lifelong journey to venture into the wilderness towards Christ.

And I got to see it all.

“A girl in hijab can do everything other girls can!”

BY STEFITH

This week has been absolutely crazy (deadlines all over the place and more assignments coming in) but in the midst of the chaos I found time to head over to the cinema (okay actually it was a school-organised screening) to watch Banting.

Banting (Malay for ‘slam’) tells the story of Yasmin Muhammad (played by Iryan Mellyna Ishak), a twenty-four-year-old Malay-Muslim girl who loves wrestling. Raised in a strict household, where, as we say colloquially, “everything also ‘tidak boleh’ (cannot)”, Yasmin tries her best to obey her mother, but chafes under the restriction. She is especially put out by assumptions people make about her- especially the fact that she cannot do what other girls can just because of her hijab.

A whole new world opens up when she finds a pamphlet for an all-women’s professional wrestling gym, and she decides to secretly sign up as a wrestler behind her mother’s back. Supported by her grandfather (a tech-savvy man with a very active Facebook account), sister Nissa (who believes firmly in pursuing your dreams) and BFF Zaidy (an aspiring musician who always has her back), Yasmin trains hard and becomes the mysterious ‘Zarith Blade’- one of the hottest female wrestlers in town.

However, secrets don’t stay secret for long… and Yasmin soon finds herself fighting to convince her mother to allow her to pursue her dream to become a professional wrestler.

Banting is a bit like our local version of Bend It Like Beckham. As the first locally produced commercial Malay film since 1975, Banting is refreshingly modern and absolutely hilarious, combining the aspects of Malay-Muslim culture with modern eccentricities. Yasmin helps teach religion at the mosque and wears her tudung, but also works at a café and has wrestling posters all over her room. Zaidy dresses stylishly, plays the guitar in his band, and drives Yasmin nearly everywhere on his motorbike.

The dialogue is also distinctly Singaporean in our typical mashing-up of languages. While the film is predominantly in Malay, the characters also pepper their interactions with bits of English, reflecting how the languages are used and spoken day-to-day in Singapore.

While the adult characters seem a little two-dimensional (the strict, traditional mother, the kindly and supportive grandpa, the rebellious older sister- all typical character archetypes), the two main characters, Yasmin and Zaidy, have an incredible camaraderie that make you look over at your best friend and laugh, because their interactions are so real. The other female wrestlers are also really entertaining, and their ‘sisterhood’ gives Yasmin a place she feels she can really be herself.

It’s an extremely entertaining movie that has you splitting your sides- a coming-of-age, feel-good tale about pursuing your dreams and breaking the mould.

Banting is no longer showing in the cinemas, but when it comes to a smaller screen near you (and I think it eventually will), be sure to catch it. I guarantee, it’s worth the watch.

Come As You Are

BY SARACH

This goes out to all my church friends, and all those involved in the upcoming Confirmation Camps at your various churches, or trying to serve God within our busy lives. 

Confirmation is a huge thing – it is the moment when you are sealed with the Holy Spirit, and is one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. Being a part of a Confirmant’s journey makes us, service team members, a very important instrument for God to use.

And amidst all this, we still have our own school, work, and social life to look into. Our own very busy lives that need healing, that need attention as well. We all come with our burdens, our shame, our hurts, our brokenness. But yet, we all have that burning desire to serve God, to serve the church because of a calling to bring others closer to Him.

Maybe we’re wandering, not knowing what God wants of us. Or maybe we know what He wants, but just too afraid to take up the cross. Whatever it is, enter the camp remembering when you first encountered God. Remember that God will always be there for us no matter what happens (or does not happen) during the camp. A lot of us are stressed and worried, even I am too, but I have deep confidence and I want to put all my trust in the only one who can make the camp as successful as it is already planned.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” – Matt 11:28

I‘ll lay down my burdens, my shame, my hurts, my worries, my brokenness for those 4 days so that our Confirmants will experience God the way I had experienced Him, and know that our God is the real God.

Will you come with me?

Dreams are strange indeed

BY STEFITH

Admit it, dreams are strange.

Today I visited my grandma, and she shared a strange dream she had- she dreamed that she was catching filleted fish.

That’s a quaint dream, and I’m no stranger to having odd dreams myself.

Dreams are, according to every student’s favourite resource (here’s looking at you, Wikipedia) “successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.”

I’m sure we’ve all had dreams- I myself often have ones of funky experiences- and our dreams range from the mundane to the quaint.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were a perception of things that existed, but could not be manifested in waking life, and often sought advice and solutions from dreams. This was something that the Greeks learned from them, and indeed, various cultures across the ages have had different beliefs about dreams. The Native Americans have dream catchers, which are supposed to “catch” bad dreams and only let the good dreams slip through, and some Chinese believe that if you have a bad dream, you need to talk about it in order to “break” it.

I’ve also been told of a belief that dreams allow you to “cross over” into the body of an alternate version of you living in a parallel universe. As such, your dreams are actually real experiences- just experienced by a different version of you in a different world. If you think that multiverses are a thing, you may be inclined to agree with this- though that doesn’t explain dreams of floating chicken nuggets, unless there does exist a universe in which chicken nuggets float in the air.

One strange fact I’ve found so far is that some people remember their dreams in clear detail, whereas others wake up to find their dreams slipping away from them (I belong to the this group), and some don’t remember anything at all.

Dreams are elusive and intangible, but I find them truly fascinating- who knows, perhaps one day in the distant future, we’ll get to the bottom of them.

For now though, let me just tell you what my latest dream was: I dreamed that I worked in a tattoo/piercing parlour as a piercer, which I suspect probably means that whatever job I was working at that point in time was not exciting enough for me.

Dream on, friends.