Mission Impossible

Scripture: Matthew 14:22-33

The story goes that Peter, James and John experience a severe storm. Note: they are former fishermen so they should have seen many storms but even they were afraid. Then Jesus came, walking on water to assure them to relax and not be afraid.

It is amazing to know that God chooses the ordinary to accomplish the exceedingly impossible things for God. David Platt wrote that nothing is impossible for the people of God, who trust in the power of God to do the will of God.

How can we accomplish the impossible for God?

1. Obey his calling, Don't be afraid

When Peter saw Jesus, he asked Jesus to command him to come to Jesus on the water. Peter did not care if he can do it. He has seen Jesus doing miracles such as feeding the 5 thousand, but he desired to experience God himself...which he did.

Even tho' all the 12 disciples are there, only Peter walked on water. If we want to walk on water, we have to get out of the boat. As Helen Keller has said, life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.

2. Focus on Jesus, Don't doubt

Peter got distracted and realized that he was walking on water. He panicked as he realised his inadequacy. Though the goin may be tough, we need to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finsher of our faith, and not doubt.

Look around and be distressed

Look within and be depressed

Look at Jesus and be at rest

Corrie Ten Boom

The likely scenario is that Jesus held Peter's hand as they continue their way to the boat. The storm only ceased when Jesus and Peter got on the boat. We can be assured that God will take care of us and he will not let us go if we ask.

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management. As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy. Purely speaking, time management (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing. Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am. In truth, what ...

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad. Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all. Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is. The Journey to College By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...

Paving the Wei

Search This Blog