My name is Grace. And my life is a living testimony to God’s marvelous grace!  According to my parents, my name Grace was not a casual choice, but a remembrance of God’s grace for me and my family...

"[I was] like sheep going astray, but now [by GOD's grace, have] returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of [my soul]”. (1 Peter 2:25)

I love drawing pictures of sheep. Before I became a Christian, I used it to represent my spiritual condition then: a lost sheep - a sheep that kept wandering around with no real direction in life, not knowing where it was heading… a miserable sheep. After God intervened in my life and brought me to Himself and into His glorious grace in which I now stand, I am a found sheep - a sheep that recognises God’s grace, which has been surrounding me all along, even before I was born.

My name is Grace. And my life is a living testimony to God’s marvellous grace! According to my parents, my name Grace was not a casual choice, but a remembrance of God’s grace for me and my family.

Back before when I was born, Mom, who was pregnant with me but was suffering from anaemia (or in medical terminology, thalassemia), fainted and fell from the top flight of stairs right to the bottom in a two-storey house in Wolverhampton, U.K. Dad rushed out from his room upon hearing the loud ‘bang’. He saw my Mom lying on the floor. Mom was sent to hospital, of course. However, the doctor could not detect my heartbeat, so no one knew whether the baby (that’s me) was alive or not. The only thing that Dad and Mom could do was to pray to God for mercy, that He would let me live. A couple of days later, I was found to be alive and well inside Mom’s womb. As a thanksgiving to God and a reminder to ourselves of what the Lord had done, my parents gave me the name Grace.

However, for many years, I lived a life totally ungrateful and ignorant of God’s grace. It was not because no one ever told me about it, but rather because of my self-centredness and spiritual blindness. But thanks be to the Lord, He saved me and I’ve finally come to understand what grace really means! Grace - totally undeserved, and yet freely and willingly given to me by God’s great mercy!

I was born into a Christian family, but I never really had a personal relationship with God. In fact, before I really came to Christ and committed myself to Him through baptism in 1999, I had always tried to avoid being called a Christian. This was because I knew deep in my heart that I did not really know God, not to mention believe and obey Him as my Lord and Saviour! I certainly did many ‘Christian’ things - such as going to church every Sunday, and going to youth groups on Fridays and the like. I also tried to live according to the standards taught in the Bible, such as ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, but of course I could not always live up to these standards. And yet, I still considered myself a good person. I studied hard. In fact, I studied so hard that my parents had to discourage me from studying too much! I liked helping people. In fact, I would even go out of my way to help people sometimes. But when I searched my heart, I knew these outward ‘good’ deeds were all motivated by a selfish desire to be approved and admired by others. Who doesn’t want to be accepted and praised?

For many years, I searched for a true friend - someone who’s completely true and honest, who will never betray me, and who will accept me for who I am, including my strengths and weaknesses. However, this true friend that I was seeking seemed nowhere to be found, perhaps with the exception of my parents, who have always loved me with God’s unceasing love.

As I grew up, I was under a great bondage of stress. This stemmed mainly from a constant drive to want to excel in everything that I do, and the fear of falling short of the standard that I had set for myself based on what I had already accomplished. I was scared that I would lose something which, at that time, seemed to be what I could hold on to: my achievements in this life. I always tried to present the best side of myself to others so that they would have good opinions of me. However, the harder I tried, the more I realised that nothing in this life was really in my control. I felt so weak and helpless. I began to understand that even if I could gain the whole world, what would be the point if God isn’t in my life? Because nothing in this world will last forever, and more often than not, all the glamour and glory that the world has to offer is short-lived and futile. In one second, glamour and glory could be gone and become part of a miserable past!

However, I learnt this lesson the hard way. Even though I had heard so much about God’s love for each one of us, how despite the fact that we have all ignored or rebelled against God by not trusting and obeying Him, He still sent His one and only Son, Jesus, to enter the world, lived a life in perfect obedience to God, and by dying on the cross, bore the consequence of our sins of disobedience, through which He demonstrated the greatest love of all! And even more, God raised Jesus to life again three days later. He has conquered sin and death so that we can now enjoy new life in Him, and have a personal relationship with Him, having been reconciled to God… I mean, I heard about all these ‘facts’, but for some reason, my hardened heart was never touched by this surpassing love!

Praise God for His great mercy. He brought me to a dead-end as a result of my own rebellion against Him! As I mentioned before, although I grew up in a loving Christian family, surrounded by good witnesses of Christ, my spiritual eyes were just so blinded that I could not be in touch with spiritual things. Everything remained at the head-knowledge level. As my problem with stress worsened, and after countless attempts and failure in changing myself, I finally came to a point where I had no choice but to admit to God that I needed Him. I had to totally surrender myself to God.

I knew deep in my heart that there was no other way but to turn to God! I seriously wanted to know Him, to really know and believe that He is the one and only true God. I knew that if He is who He claims to be, He could surely give me a way out of my miserable life!

By this stage, my stress level was so high that I could not face the demands of my studies at all. Everyday, once I got home from school, I would shut myself in my room, often in complete darkness. I also started to fall into the bondage of binge eating and depression. On the surface, I was still the pleasant hard-working Grace. That’s how those around me described me then, but I seriously felt that I was about to break down. There was no hope in life. I had lost everything that I had tried so hard to accumulate over the years: academic excellence, praise and approval from others and so on. I finally saw that I could do nothing apart from Christ. Everything was utterly meaningless if God was not in it. What I needed was a new life, a fresh start! My miserable state was best described by the cry of the apostle Paul, ‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ (Romans 7:24)

‘Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ (Romans 7:25). And that’s true! I experienced it myself! On 18th Nov, 1998, through a very powerful and real experience of God’s Word speaking straight into my heart during my quiet time, pointing out all my problems and showing me who Jesus really was, I finally came in touch with God! On that day, when I felt the weakest, almost in complete disgust at myself, God reached out to me and touched my heart. He used various Bible verses to call me to Himself. He kept reassuring me that Jesus, whom He had sent, was the Way, the Truth and the Life. He still is! For no one comes to the Father except through him. All I had to do was to carry my cross and follow Jesus. He would most certainly grant me the strength to overcome, and break free from these bondages that were tightly binding me. As Jesus said, “If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” And that was what happened to me; Jesus set me free from my bondages.

For the first time in my life, I felt a great sense of awe towards this Almighty God – something that I seriously lacked in all those years of ‘wandering in the desert’ like the Israelites. In fact, for the first time, I was able to say with complete certainty that, ‘Yes, God is real’. The Holy Spirit was working in such a powerful way that I could no longer deny the reality of this living God! My period of the ‘dark valley’, filled with bondage and doubt, was finally over. At last, I had come to know that God is real!

Not only so, God, knowing my doubtful character, gave me more than I ever asked for. He spoke to me, not in an audible voice, but in the form of a very clear message right into my heart – like a stamp that’s stamped onto my heart. He said (in Cantonese), ‘I am here’. At that point, I knew there could be no turning back! I knew that God had answered my prayer in wanting to know Him in such a way that I could no longer deny or doubt His reality. He did it! What relief and joy! What grace! I felt that all that burdened my heart, and all the chains that once bound me so tightly that I could hardly breathe, had been removed! I felt a sense of ‘lightness’ and indescribable joy that gushed out from my heart!

For the first time in my life, I cried not because I was sad or angry but out of mere joy and thanksgiving! I prayed to God that from that day onwards, I would turn my life in complete surrender to Him – the one true God - and that I would serve Him all my life. And on 27th June, 1999, I committed my life to the Lord through baptism.

Since then, I have experienced how the Lord is continually working His mighty deeds in transforming me day by day to be more like Christ. The experiences and joy that I have had from walking with the Lord are so abundant that it would be impossible for them to be recorded one by one here. However, I am determined to strive, by His grace only, to share with all those around me, both in words and in deeds, how great and loving our Creator GOD is! May God help me to always pay attention to the name that He has blessed me with — Grace.