When I tell my vocation story, basically, I will be telling God’s salvation history in my life. It is a journey of finding my identity, finding ME. It is also a journey to discover that God wants that ME and had always wanted that real, basic, solid me that dwells deep within me to come out. It is that ME in me that kept crying out to be shown, to be given a voice. It is that restlessness that embarks me on my journey, even before I have words to describe any of these experiences.
I was born and raised in Malaysia, in a comfortably comfortable family. Life was rather easy and smooth, but that smoothness smothers the search for more in life. It was easy to go with the flow, to conform to being the best according to my intellectual capacity. I was a Quantity Surveyor for a while, but the professional title, plus all my other achievements, education, all the stuff that I used to put on my CVs often seem like decorations that I hung on myself. They say something about me, but at the same time, they distract me from being able to formulate who I am, really. Sometimes, I get scared too. Beyond all those decorations, do I really matter? Who am I, if I shed all those trinkets?
But when I started to learn to pray, and to pray even deeper with the Word of God, I discovered the true worth and value of my life, my existence. Over and over again, in prayer I will come back to that realization, and the security to discover that I am wanted by God. I am wanted with my gifts and my limits, my talents and my lack of it, my history, and my capacities still to be unfolded, etc. I am wanted not because of anything external, but just because God says so. (And he will never say otherwise). That conviction is what sustains my life and my existence. That conviction is what shapes my identity.
My desire is only to be generous with my life. Sometimes I still get scared. What if I cannot accomplish what is entrusted to me? What if I make a mess and become a counter witness. What if… But again and again God reminded me it is not the external success or failure that matters. It is the desire to share the love that I have experienced that matters. When I see many young people, or just anybody, struggling to find themselves, struggling to give a voice to who they really are, it wakes up in me that longing to share my experience, to bring them to encounter this God that is so personal in their lives, that wants to find them and lift them up where they are. I realize God did not put me through my entire search for myself only. He needs me to walk a path to true humanity, so that others can see that it is possible to be authentic and real.
At the moment, I am studying Theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California. I am supporting the English Apostolate of the San Francisco Verbum Dei Community, which also involves campus ministry and the ministry to the Chinese Catholic Community in the Bay Area. I am enjoying the challenge of balancing studies with ministry and community live. But more and more, I realise, God always give the grace for me to live what he has invited me to live.
