With Mum in Spring, Kuching!

I had a lovely time with my mum in the mall called Spring in Kuching tonight! I must record here my thanks to the management for allocating 4 parking lots, right near the entrance of the mall at the basement level,specifically for those who are on wheel-chairs. Such caring gestures from this management ought to be emulated by other businessmen all around the world, especially Malaysia.

I especially appreciated this because my 85 year-old mum needs a wheel-chair to move around and I often find it difficult to park my car at the entrance of any building to let my mum get out of the car and into her wheel-chair, without people getting impatient waiting behind my car which they cannot pass until I wheel her to some safe spot and driving somewhere else to park my car. At Spring, I can do it so easily and other cars have ample space to pass my car on one side while my mum slowly gets out of her carseat into the wheel-chair! And then, I just have to reversed a little to park my car into the lots specially reserved for those with wheel-chairs. Often we meet kind-hearted security personnel who helped me with my mum while I parked the car! Bravo to such kind consideration! The world is a better place because of kind people like them!

So Spring will always be my choice of destination whenever I want to take my mum out for dinner or shopping or just to get out of the room where she spends most of days of her sun-set years!

We had a simple but lovely dinner of hot-plate chicken/beef with rice and our favourite dessert - ABC ( Ais Batu Kacang), a huge bowl of ice-shavings topped with sweetened red beans, chandol (a green rice noodle with pandan), chin chau (chopped black jelly), mixed fruits, syrup and evaporated milk and vanilla ice-cream! Always a delicious treat!!! I think my mum was happy tonight and I am happy because she is happy.

The best part of the dinner was the opportunity to make friends with a most wonderful couple from Coffs Harbour, Australia who owned a bakery for 31 years and have come to Kalimantan to build a bakery in Living Waters Village so that the orphans in the orphanage there can be trained to be bakers who can bake well and sell good baked products so that they can be self-sufficient and financially independent soon! What nobel efforts to help the poor ! A wonderful example of teaching the underpriviledged how to fish for themselves and not just give them fish! May God sustain and empower this lovely couple to finish this task He has placed on their shoulders and may He grant them great joy!!!!

I thank God that I had a Happy Mother's Day after all!

Unhappy Mother's Day

Wouldn't any mother feel unhappy on Mother's Day when she tried to teach her children about wise spending and commented that they do not feel the pinch when they spend needlessly because they did not have to earn the money, her children replied that she, a homemaker, did not earn the money either --- implying she has no right to teach them about monetary things!!!! Well, I was that mother today and I have been deeply wounded! May God grant me the healing I need! I will focus today on showing love to my aged 85 year old mother, who lives with me, instead!

Today I wish there is no Mother's Day because at least I will not expect to be appreciated. When you do and you are not appreciated, it is a huge diasppointment. When you do not expect any appreciation and it comes to you, you will be pleasantly surprised and you will feel you are at the top of the world!

I know a 15 year-old boy who is dying of cancer. The doctors have tried everything they could but they could not help him to conquer this disease. He came to Sarawak General Hospital for treatment when the cancer has already spread from his bone to his lungs and it really was too late. The malignant growth in his leg has been removed surgically but the lung cancer was just not responsive to the chemotherapy he was given. Now it has spread all over his lungs and spine. Tommorow he is going back to his home in Sabah, knowing that he does not have long to live.

How does one talk to a person who knows he is dying soon?

I wanted to see him today, to take him and his mother to a nice place for a meal. But on my way to fetch him and his mother, I got a call from his mother saying that he has a headache and wanted to rest instead. I really hope to see him again tomorow before he leaves for Sabah because I do not know if I will get to see him again. He is a wonderful chap who has been brave in going through all the treatments at SGH and who has really hoped for a cure until last week when he was told that nothing else can be done for him. Cancer has triumphed again - how sad! If only he was diagnosed earlier and treated earlier !!!!

Months ago I have shared with him that he can have eternal life by accepting Jesus as his Saviour and Lord. But because he was hearing this for the first time in his life, he was not sure how to respond to this good news. I hope he has read more of God's love for him in the Bible I gave him and that in his own way, he has opened his heart to God but I do not know and I hope I can find out tomorrow. May God use me to encourage him to let God into his life and become a child of God. May God give him the faith to believe he can have eternal life through Christ Jesus! O, Lord, please have mercy!!!