“Carry The Cross” – Goh Family Updates for Oct 2018

As I’m writing this, both of us are already in our 6th week of lessons here in DTS.

This month, we celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary at a very scenic cafe called the Ginger Farm over the weekend. Surrounding the cafe are vast rice fields and animal farms, and we had a very good lunch there as well. We are very thankful that God sustained us through this 1 year, moulding and growing us to love God and love each other. Looking back, we are both very thankful for how the Lord has led both of us into marriage, as well as into missions. He is a good God that first calls us His beloved children, then gives us a commission, and make provision for it.

Since the last time we wrote, we have covered lessons on the topics of “Hearing God’s Voice”, “Biblical Worldview”, “Spiritual Warfare”, and currently we are in the midst of learning on the topic of “Cost of Discipleship”.

Our average day looks like this: 4 hours of classes in the morning, work duty after lunch, One-on-one sessions with our designated leaders, sometimes we have afternoon classes, dinner, and occasionally we would have games night. It’s pretty busy, but we can still steal some time to relax and get away from all the busy-ness and interactions.

Even though we have been Christians for quite awhile, grew up in “charismatic” environments and are used to the concept of hearing God’s voice, we still learnt new things and gained new experiences in this area. In one particular activity, we were blindfolded and asked to pray for the person in front of us. It was challenging to trust God to speak to us even though we don’t even know who we were praying for! And we were blown away when we realised that what we received from God was a timely word for whoever we were praying for. In the same way, we ourselves also received blessings that were timely for us. We could also journey with those who are not so familiar with hearing God’s voice in a dynamic way and it was a privilege for us to witness how everyone could grow together to tune into our Father’s voice. Hearing God’s voice is really a continuous journey of learning and re-learning how His voice sounds like and doing what He tells us to do!

During these few weeks of intense learning, practising, experiencing, and spending quality time with God, we have felt challenged in many ways, especially in the area of the cost of discipleship. In essence, as His disciple, God wants all of our heart, all of our love and adoration. We spent much time with God in allowing Him to reveal the sin areas of our heart, our idols, the things that we have made to become our replacement of God. Daily, we pick up the cross, and make a decision to die to ourselves, and follow Him. This has been the week where God does His heart surgery, replacing our heart of stone with His heart of flesh.

Also, we are thankful that we can have the opportunity to do life with our classmates. They are all from such different cultures, different walks of life, different age, different personalities, and if it wasn’t for DTS, I could hardly imagine any other reasons why we would all be living together in such proximity. But God is very good, and He disciples us through the community, even in our giving or receiving, God reaches into our hearts to show us His love and His character. It is exciting to see our community coming together organically to pray for one of our classmates who is going through a challenging season of her life. It is also powerful to be part of conversations that share about the condition of our hearts, and to allow each other to listen, and challenge us, in our walk with God.

We also had an opportunity to head down to Mae Jo University in Northern Chiang Mai, to reach out to the students on campus. We had a fun time playing scavenger hunt with students that we befriended, and it was refreshing to be back on campus engaging students, enjoying the process of listening to them and loving them. One of the students that we encountered made quite a deep impression on us. He joined us in our games and we had the opportunity to talk to him along the way. Even though the time we had to talk was limited, we found out that his older brother went through a sex change surgery, and now he’s a transvestite. He also identified himself as gay, and he openly shared about his sexual orientation, as well as his brother’s sex change journey. We were both intrigued but also saddened by the brokenness in his story. We were also surprised at how open and nonchalant he is in his sharing about his sexual orientation. We’re glad that we could love him and be his listening ear, even through the short time we had with him.

We’ll be having 6 more weeks of lessons, followed by 2 months of outreach phase. We are only halfway through our lessons and we are already missing home, family, friends, church, and Singapore food! Please continue to pray for us both in this equipping and launching journey 🙂

1. Pray for us that we would be open and ready to absorb and respond to God in the next few weeks of lectures.
2. Pray for us that God would give us wisdom as we fellowship, serve, and grow together with our classmates.
3. Pray for us that The Lord will give us clarity in His call for us as a couple.
4. Pray for us that we would be sensitive to God’s leading and voice.