A Mother’s Day Reflection​

by | May 12, 2024 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

A Mother’s Day Reflection​

The other night, I was praying in my bedroom before turning in, when I started to think about what I had been doing for my husband and son lately. I felt ashamed when I realized that I have not even been praying regularly, let alone praying for their needs.​​

Suddenly, I started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of prayer needs just for my husband and son alone. For Ronald – to have a constant supply of stable and fulfilling work, that he would grow in intimacy with God, that he would continue to be faithful to God’s call upon his life, that his body would be healthy and strong. For Josiah – to grow well, not just physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, that he would develop academically and in his interpersonal relationships with family members, friends and teachers, that he would grow to love the Lord, understand the Gospel and come to true faith in Jesus, that he would live a life of obedience to Christ… the more I thought, the more overwhelmed I became. The list of prayer needs for just the two of them alone seemed endless.​

After this, swiftly, came thoughts of condemnation – you’ve not even been praying regularly, and when you do, you only pray for yourself. You don’t even pray for your husband and son. You don’t shoulder enough of the caregiving load. You’re a selfish, lazy person, a bad wife and mother.

In the span of a few minutes, the devil saw an opportunity to whisper words of condemnation and self-loathing into my heart. Thank God that in that moment, the Holy Spirit moved in me to counter the condemnation with truth – yes, by my own strength, I fail to be a good wife and mother, as any other human would by their own power. But I am covered and empowered by the grace of Jesus that redeems all the fallen aspects of my humanity, my marriage and my motherhood.​

Ephesians 2:4-6 says “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved”. Without Christ, any attempt I make at being a ‘good mother’ would fail miserably, sabotaged by my own inherent self-centredness. But I have hope that even in the midst of my sinfulness, as well as daily interactions and efforts to live in a Christlike manner at home and outside, Jesus redeemed my soul.​​

I speak to all in Christ, but in particular, to parents and especially mothers. When thoughts of condemnation threaten to discourage our hearts and make us throw up our hands in resignation, when even our very best efforts to parent our children well seem to end up in abject failure, when we feel helpless that we will never be able to change things in our family or our own lives, know this – the life we live while still in this mortal flesh is not by our own ability alone, but by faith in the Son of God who is perfect and is able to turn every one of our failures into a beautiful, redemptive story for His Kingdom (Gal 2:20). Jesus has taken the burden of being our perfect Saviour because He knows we are unable to fulfil that role ourselves. A heart and life yielded to Christ empower us to keep allowing Him to work through us. May we all take heart and have hope in this. Happy Mother’s Day.​

By Sister Ethel Yap​

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Evangelism starts with prayer 

by | Jun 16, 2023 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

“Pray first before you eat!”, my mother-in-law chided my son, Josiah, before he tucked into his dinner at my in-laws’ home. There were years in my husband’s life when such sentences uttered from his mother’s own lips would be unthinkable.

In Ronald’s younger years, his mother was severely opposed to him attending church, due to her own past emotional baggage when one of her brothers converted to Christianity, prompting conflict within their family at the time. It would take many years before my mother-in-law would be open to Ronald not only attending church services weekly, but also stepping into a church service herself. The needle of my in-laws’ discomfort with Christianity has gradually shifted over the years.

From being severely opposed, to quietly accepting, to now, asking us to pray to God whenever they encounter personal issues or extended family members have fallen ill, my in-laws have certainly come a long way in their pre-believing journey. They even encourage our son to give thanks before his meals, as they are aware that this is our habit. Strangely enough however, it has also led to our complacency.

There is a sort of comfortable status quo that we abide by whenever we spend time with Ronald’s family. Whenever we come together for a family meal, my parents and brothers-in-law will start eating first while Ronald and I will give thanks together with Josiah. We will then proceed to make regular conversation, much of it now centering on Josiah’s development. Once in a while,  when an evangelistic  Christian event such as Easter or Christmas begins to draw near, we will invite them to

attend our church service, and perhaps when they mention an issue that they are struggling with, such as ill health or a family conflict, we will tell them that we will keep the situation in prayer. But the conversations rarely, if ever, delve deeper than that.

To put it simply, from a daughter-in-law’s perspective, I don’t quite know what else to do or say. How do I talk about the urgency of salvation from sin when we continue to live remarkably mundane lives where nothing much happens? How do I randomly bring Jesus and the Gospel up in conversation when all my in-laws want to talk about is how well Josiah is eating and how much he weighs?

In recent times however, I have been reminded that evangelism starts with prayer. If I am not even regularly keeping my in-laws in my prayers, then of course the task of evangelizing to them will seem impossibly huge, and I will perpetually be paralysed in fear, unable to speak to them about anything beyond this life.

I am appreciative of the One For Jesus movement, where we make it a point to pray for our OFJ, or in Ronald’s and my case, 4 OFJs. I commit to keeping Ronald’s family in prayer, that the Holy Spirit will soften their hearts and prompt them to consider deeply what lies beyond this earthly life and that they would desire to know the Way, Truth and Life. I commit to praying for Ronald and I too, that we would not fall back into comfortable complacency, and that we would have sensitive hearts  to the Spirit’s guidance, that when He opens up the opportunity to have deeper conversations with the family, that we would be obedient to Him in those moments. I commit to praying for my in-laws to receive salvation that comes through Jesus Christ alone very soon.

Would you pray alongside us too?

By sister Ethel Yap

The Highest Degree of Love

by | Jul 30, 2022 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

In Peter Scazzero’s devotional book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, he shares from some of Bernard of Clairvaux’s most famous writings. In his great work entitled Loving God, Bernard describes four degrees  of love:

Loving ourselves for our own sake

Loving God for His gifts and blessings

Loving God for Himself alone

Loving ourselves for the sake of God

The highest degree of love, for Bernard, was simply that we love ourselves as God loves us – in the same degree, in the same manner, and with the very same love. Not in a self-centered manner, but loving the essential image and likeness of God in us, losing ourselves completely in His grace through Jesus Christ.

I confess that I usually get stuck at the second degree of love. For as many years as I’ve been a follower of Christ, I just can’t seem to grow beyond loving and relating to God for His gifts and blessings, apart from the seasons of life where I have walked through great personal suffering.

Most recently, it was a long and dark season of enduring postpartum anxiety, depression and severe insomnia that prompted me to cry out to God repeatedly. In that valley, I felt like God had allowed me to be stripped of my health and sanity. I no longer had the gifts and blessings of regular sleep, a peaceful mind and a joyful disposition. It was hard to recognize myself in the mirror. I could no longer love myself for

my own sake, in fact, I despised myself and at times felt completely worthless. It was in these moments that I began to barely scratch the surface of the third degree of love – loving God for Himself alone.

What did it look like to still cling to God and believe that He loved me unconditionally, even when I felt like everything in my life (on the surface at least) that I could prove His love with had been taken away from me? It dawned on me then, that my entire life leading up to this valley season had been relatively smooth-sailing. Of course, in seasons of abundance, it was easy to proclaim God’s goodness, to point to the ‘evidence’, as it were, of God’s faithfulness in my life.

But what happens when there’s nothing physical or material that you can point to and say, look at this as proof of God’s goodness? What happens when the only thing you can proclaim is that Christ has taken your place on the Cross, to suffer and die in your  place, so that you may have eternal redemption in the Father’s presence, and that “in all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials” (1 Peter 1:6)? Would we then be able to truly love God for Himself alone, and not what He can give us?

And when we have finally matured to that point, perhaps we would then be able to see ourselves fully and completely through God’s eyes, and not our own. Perhaps we would see Jesus in ourselves and be able to fully submit ourselves to His will for our lives, not pandering to the pressures of the world, nor crushing ourselves under unresolvable guilt and self-loathing. Perhaps we would be able to live in complete obedience to God, being a faithful image-bearer of His in the world.

That would be something truly worthwhile to grow towards.

By sister Ethel Yap

God’s Grace for Mothers

by | May 9, 2021 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

Blessed Mother’s Day to all mothers and everyone who steps into the place of a mother! Today, I wish to share about how I have personally experienced the presence and goodness of God through the challenges of motherhood thus far. 

The first 3 months of becoming a mother were some of the darkest and most desperate days of my life. Although I had read up on adjusting to life with a newborn and postpartum depression and anxiety while pregnant, nothing really prepared me for being hurtled head-first into the stark new reality of life as a mother. Within four days of Josiah’s life, I found myself back in the hospital with a suspected postpartum heart condition, thereafter being discharged upon discovering that the symptoms I was experiencing were the result of severe postpartum anxiety. I struggled greatly with the anxiety that left me terribly sleepless and feeling constantly on edge for the next few months. I was perpetually exhausted and unable to experience the joy I was supposed to be feeling upon the birth of my much longed-for child. Breastfeeding was also an immense struggle, often leaving me feeling trapped, lonely and worthless. I felt like an empty shell of myself, and gradually sunk into despair and hopelessness. There were many moments when I wondered, have I made the biggest mistake of my life? If having a child was supposed to be one of life’s greatest joys, why was I feeling so despondent? Why was it so hard to relate to my baby with warmth and love? I wondered if I would ever return to a joyful and peaceful state again. 

Lost in the darkness, the only option I had was to cling to God. Every day, I cried out to Him in prayer and begged Him to give me healing from my anxiety and sleeplessness and to fill my heart with hope and peace that only He could give. I decided to use the long hours stuck in the breastfeeding chair to pray and read passages of Scripture for comfort. 

I frequently read Psalm 145:15-16.  “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.” I felt that God was reassuring me that He would provide not just for the sustenance of my child but also for my sanity. I also drew great strength from 2 Corinthians 12: 9-10. Previously, I had trumpeted the phrase “God’s grace is sufficient” as an easy response to any perceived hardship without actually experiencing much real difficulty at all. It was only when I found myself emptied of all human strength with no other solutions at hand that I actually had a real opportunity to discover just how sufficient God’s grace for me is. The reality of these verses had finally come true in the darkness of my postpartum anxiety and depression. 

As thinking about the future would leave me despairing, I learned to rely on God to sustain me simply through each individual moment. As the moments, then the hours, then days passed one after another, I looked back and realised that God was present in each one of them and sustaining me through them all. I journaled down every small thing I could think of to be thankful for – even something as simple as successfully putting Josiah down for a nap. Doing this helped me to see that the smallest moments can also be miracles, and true joy can be found in the simplest things.

God also graciously provided love and strength from the community of Christ who upheld me in constant prayer, in particular, many mothers from YCKC who reached out with empathy and encouragement. God also provided an excellent confinement nanny who was nurturing and capable, alongside my family who were also a great source of support and strength. In Ronald, God wonderfully provided the most hands-on father who got into the thick of caregiving with me from the get-go.  

God gently revealed that He had chosen me, out of all the women in the world, to be Josiah’s mother, and therefore He would give me all that I needed to be the best mother to my baby. As time passed, Ronald and I learned how to better care for Josiah, growing to be more familiar with his cues and behaviour, and after making some important adjustments to our feeding methods, life with Josiah began to stabilize. I felt that God gave me new eyes to truly see Josiah for who he is, and I began to grow in my love and delight in him more every day.  

I want to encourage every new parent who might be struggling in the same ways I did – God’s grace is TRULY sufficient for us! It may be terrifying to fall completely into His hands without any other kind of human ‘guarantee’, but with every comfort that is disrupted by parenthood, God’s grace goes deeper and wider to not just hold us, but transform us more into His likeness. 

By sister Ethel Yap

Live Intentionally

by | Jul 19, 2020 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

We may not realise it, but we actually practice intentionality in our everyday lives. Some examples include:

  • In the recent General Elections, many of us (myself included) intentionally sought out information on the candidates and party manifestos in order to make an informed vote.
  • When a couple finds out they are expecting a baby, they start intentionally to ask around for hand-me-down clothes, buy items like a baby cot and car seat, and the expectant mother starts taking vitamin supplements and stops drinking alcohol to ensure the baby grows well in the womb.
  • When children have to sit for major exams like the PSLE, N or O Levels, parents are very intentional about buying assessment books, sending their kids for tuition, clearing space and buying a new desk and for their child to have a conducive environment for studying.
  • When Chinese New Year is around the corner, families intentionally spring clean the home, buy new clothes for visitation, stock up on goodies and mandarin oranges, and go to the bank to draw new notes for red packets.

Intentionality can even be seen in something as simple as intentionally setting your alarm clock to wake you up at a time that would ensure that you are not late for school or work. We infuse intentionality into practically everything we do on a daily basis.

Yet, we need to ask ourselves an important question: do we put as much time and effort to intentionally build our relationship with Jesus as we do with all these other aspects of daily life?

Here are some practical and rather sobering questions we might want to ask ourselves:

  • Do we set aside even a quarter of the time we spend scrolling through social media every day to intentionally spend daily quiet time with God? (iPhone users can check your screen time report to get a reality check on how much time you are spending on your phone, and specifically on social networking apps.)
  • If you are a parent, for every block of time your child spends in a tuition or enrichment class, are they being encouraged to spend even half of that time growing their faith in Christ through reading their Bibles and praying?
  • For those who invest a good amount of time in developing and maintaining their physical fitness, are we being intentional about setting aside as much time to train up our spiritual muscles through vital spiritual disciplines?

Do we put intentionality into everything we do in life EXCEPT for deepening our intimacy with Jesus and the Body of Christ? This is a difficult question for myself to answer as well.

James 4:8 exhorts us to draw near to God, and He will draw near to us. James encourages believers to take ownership of their relationship with God and put in time and effort to develop an intimate relationship with Jesus. This similar principle can also be seen in Jeremiah 29: 12-13,

“Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

Notice how the Lord Himself gives the Israelite people the directive to take the initiative to call upon Him, pray to Him and seek Him? If that doesn’t make it clear that we need to be intentional about taking the time and making the effort to pursue a deep relationship with God, I don’t know what does!

Let these passages of Scripture help realign our perspective back onto Christ, that we may make the adjustments in our daily lives to ensure that we are intentionally working on the one true thing that will last into eternity – our relationship with Jesus.

By Sister Ethel Yap (YCKC Bulletin 19 July 2020)

GET REAL …

by | May 19, 2019 | Ethel Yap, • Timely Word •

Dear reader, I want you to imagine a desolate, desert landscape that is dotted with tall, lonesome towers as far as the eye can see. In each tower there is locked a single person inside – miserable, afraid, and completely and terribly alone. That is what I imagine when I think of many of the respondents to an anonymous confessions collections I conducted last year, as part of a launch event for a new song I released, entitled “Like”. “Like” is about how social media addiction leads to isolation, loneliness and in severe cases, mental illness. As part of the launch event, I collected anonymous confessions from voluntary participants aged 10 and above, asking them to share honestly about how engaging heavily with social media made them feel.

Here are some excerpts:

“Social media is so fake. Everyone posts happy pictures but how can people’s lives always be happy? It’s so unreal!”

“Insecure, less than, inferior, jealous.”

“It shortens the distance between those far apart, but furthers the distance between those nearby. It’s also much easier to communicate superficially on social media than to communicate on a deeper level face to face.”

 From the “Like” Confessions, I learned that many participants felt resentful of other people’s perfect lives presented on social media, yet they themselves felt the need to only present perfection on their own accounts, perpetuating the cycle of inauthenticity. Not surprisingly, this cycle made them feel more depressed, inauthentic and lonely. When we are not true to ourselves and our communities, we form walls and barriers, locking ourselves inside towers of loneliness.

This is a far cry from the freedom Jesus promises in Him (John 8:36). Freedom experienced in Christ comes from, amongst other things, being able to be fully open with our weaknesses and knowing that we will still be loved unconditionally in spite of them. Very often we choose to sequester ourselves because we feel ashamed of our wrongdoings and imperfections, and this self-flagellating shame comes into head-on conflict with an inability to understand how or why Jesus, or anyone in the family of God, would love us. We simply can’t wrap our minds around it, and the resulting self-loathing pushes us deeper into our isolation cells. To a degree, accepting that Jesus DOES INDEED love us in spite of our deepest sins takes a leap of faith.

To believe that an uncompromising holy God would love incurable sinners would be to admit that the impossible can indeed be possible. Once we have leapt across this seemingly illogical chasm, we can begin to show the same love, forgiveness and understanding towards our fellow sinners, even those who have wronged us, in the same manner that we have received from Christ.

A line from a song I like goes “no need to be showy, no need to be spotlessly clean, just be the best that I can’t find within me”. This to me reflects what authentic community could look like – a community of sinners, none better or worse than the other, “spurring one another on toward love and good deeds” (Heb 10:24), with the freedom to come as we are but the desire to not stay as we are. It’s a second picture that’s completely different from the first. No longer individual, isolated silos of loneliness and shame, but a family of redeemed sinners, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, encased in the warm embrace of a God who has gone to death and back to include us in His family.

By Ethel Yap (YCKC Bulletin 19 May 2019)