Lenten Season…

February 21st, 2010 The author

The last Wednesday marked the beginning of lent in the Church’s liturgical calender ; a season where we prepare our hearts and minds for the passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior. Lent is typically marked by a season of penance, where recall our thoughts and minds of all the misdeeds we have done and we also prepare our hearts to celebrate God’s gift to us (his son and the Resurrection) by offering up sacrifices.

Sacrifices typically can come in all ways, mostly people opt to fast and abstain from meat or food. For me, what I’m doing for lent is quite simple ; I am going to plan to say the Rosary on my knees for the next 40 days.  This exercise will not only help build up my spiritual stamina, but it will also give me that much needed time of prayer. I am also planning to go for daily mass, at least once or twice a week.  This is actually the first time I am making a conscious effort to do something during lent. Usually, lent for me basically means more activity in Church - i.e Way of the Cross. 

So far it has been rewarding. The fact that I make it an effort to say the rosary on my knees helps me focus more on God, and less on earthly things. The pain I get from my legs help me in a small way offer up my sacrifice to Christ. Like I said, this is the first time I am perfoming any sort of mortification  (Don’t get hung up by  THAT word, even a simple fast or abstaining from sugar in your coffee is also considered mortification!) and it has been really good.

Anyway I just hope and pray I can continue this on until Easter

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My dog ate Part 2…and I am moving on

February 11th, 2010 The author

I like writing in parts.  Writing in parts relieves me because I can ramble one super long post and just cut it into small parts. However I do have one habit when it comes to doing this : I don’t finish my parts at times… this being one of the case.

I’m tempted to write about my November and December experiences…but I think I shall not. New stories for new posts I guess

Anyway January was so far quite an interesting month. I finally got to go to Sarawak, but this was no cuti-cuti Malaysia. Actually had some work to do there, but it was definitely a pleasant experience.  Didn’t get to see much of Bintulu, but from my little personal experience there, it’s definitely another chinaman town! Reminded me of Penang in that sense!

But I guess the highlight for January would be having my buddy from Canada actually come down and visit me.  It was actually a highly anticipated event for me, but I gotta admit, was a little tired toward the end. Maybe because with the whole travelling thing (I had just returned from Sarawak the previous week) and catching up with work during the weak…yeah i guess at the end of the 3rd day, I was just exhausted. But it was nevertheless still wonderful to see my friend after nearly 4 years!

Another major highlight would be my ministry retreat which we had at the end of January. It was really a wonderful and blessed retreat I should say. I guess the one thing I really learnt from the retreat was that God doesn’t need heroes. Too often we are so caught up with our ownselves and running things according to OUR own abilities, strategies and capabilities till we forget the Lord completely. And the irony is we’re doing it for Him! Anyway more thoughts on that on my new blog : http://thecatholiclife.wordpress.com. Yeap finally decided to start a seperate blog for my catholic writings.

Well that’s all for now… time for prayer and sleep.

Oh and a big shutout to my buddy who joined the Franciscan order earlier this week. You can read his chronicles here

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Post September 27th 2009 - Part I

January 17th, 2010 The author

September 27th 2009. That was my last entry

That’s a long time ago, roughly 100 days or more ago. Yes I am still very much alive and I’ve been tied up with work and..well other things.  In my absence, lots of things have happened,  and so, in order to do justice to my readers, and most importantly to myself, I thought I would highlight the events that have happened over the last 3-4 months

We begin in October 2009….

- My church group had organized a trip to KK, Sabah! Yeahhhh I finally had the chance to go to Sabah for the first time in my life! KK is a nice place, albeit the heat that one has to endure. Reminded me of my boyhood days in Penang, where the sun would just beat down on any pedestrian.

- Work resumed following my short vacation. I had 2 more training sessions to conduct. Thank God the training session for one of them was rescheduled to another date. At least the trainer had some breathing room! Both training sessions went well…. oh wait I think there were 3 training sessions that happened in October. 3 sessions is alot but I guess I managed to pull it off! For one of the training sessions I had to travel up to Kedah ; it was a good experience as I got to eat kampung food by the padi fields.

- October was also the time when I got the news that I would be heading the Sound in the Word Minsitry, a Ministry that is focused in providing content for my church youth group, Lifeline.  It was a welcoming change and something, though I didnt expect to get, was nevertheless a pleasent surprise. I could finally have a stronger say on the curriculum and content development of my youth group.

November 2009

- Work started pilling up. There was yet another training session for November 2009 and this would be the last one for YEAR.  So far all of my training sessions had gone smoothly except for one or two that I had done in Kerteh, oh well can’t blame me,  cuz it was the participants that didn’t show up for the session.  Thank god my project team had decided to revert all training sessions in KL hence forth. Yes, it did mean less travelling allowance for me, but it would also mean that I would not be held responsible should the trainees fail to show up… it was up to them after all!

- I also got involved in my first Company event, thanks to a friend in chruch who decided to rope me in. Though I groaned and at times got fed up with the work (I was in charge of communications so all the emails had to come from me), it was nevertheless an experience.  Luckily my supervisor had given me enough exposure in preparing communications materials for the project. Having that experience definitely allowed me to cope much better for this community day project activity.   It was also fun to coordinate and see backstage what are the components required to do a proper community day.  At the end of it, it was a job well done I should say

More in Part II on what happened in December and January

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