Intimacy with Abba
By Chan Lim
My testimony for Pastoral Care School (PCS) begins several months prior – when God got my attention through back pain brought on by what turned out to be multiple disc tears and herniation. Still on my gradual road to complete recovery, I praise Jesus today as my Healer and Sanctifier.
In my pain the Lord told me one early morning, that everything we experience in this life, including pains and pleasures, joys and sorrows, was a tool He lovingly used to draw us near to Him. Jesus parted the clouds and told me personally, with as much love and mercy and compassion as I have ever experienced, that His back, too, had hurt as He carried His cross. All so that I could approach the Father in glory, no longer behind a veil. Read more →
Living by Design
by Ted Kang
God, in His wisdom, marked time with seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years so that we could remember and reflect upon the stories that make up life. Driving through 2,400 miles of desert and mountains in Arizona and New Mexico over the holidays, I had plenty of opportunities to look back and recount the significant events and changes of the past decade. Welcoming my fourth daughter at the turn of the decade, taking on the assignment of leading the church in this season, losing 30lbs of weight to become healthy again, going back to school for another degree are just a few of the personal milestones over the past 10 years. As a church, we launched a preschool and a Chinese school out of our Vision 2020, planted a new church in Mountain View, helped plant the one and only Arabic church in San Jose, and are preparing for the launch of another church plant in the near future. What is not very obvious to us is the fact that these things didn’t simply “happen” to us. Rather, they were the outcome of a thoughtful, intentional and resolute effort driven by our faith in God’s promises and a vision of the future. And for each of these things to be birthed, we all had to make some significant changes in our priorities and commitments. Read more →
Make myself known
By Abigail Young
Prior to this summer’s LIFE Conference I had heard many things from my friends who had attended the last LIFE Conference in Kansas City back in 2016… namely, that it was basically a Christian rave and that it was a place to party with fellow Alliance youth from around the world. Going into LIFE I was beginning to get exhausted from working as a youth intern at church and, due to this, I was prepared to go crazy with a bunch of teenagers on top of meeting God and having some lit worship. Of course, based on this description of my mindset and expectations for LIFE, my focus was on enjoying myself instead of having God as my top priority during the conference. Praise the Lord that despite this, He still showed up and moved in my personal life and broke down the walls that I had been unconsciously building up since I was still a baby. Read more →