Hey all!
Hope your week has been great despite the exams coming up for most of you. Just wanna encourage you all to press on!!! Exams will always come and go, but God's always there with you. Even before you go into the exam hall He knows the questions that are gonna come out and the answers that you are gonna write. So just commit it to Him and don't worry!

Now on to more admin stuff, I'll be posting some guidelines as to how to do the Prayer for Nations and Life Stories (lame name but HAIYA! Can't think of anything else).

#1: Prayer For Nations

I think this is rather easy to understand by its own name. So basically the assigned person can choose to either choose a nation to pray for OR pray for a current event (for eg. the upcoming Hungry Ghost Festival or South Korean hostages in Afghanistan).

If you're praying for a nation, you'd have to give us some background on the country, cos if you choose some country like Abu Dhabi which hardly anyone knows about it'll be hard for us to pray with passion. So just give a short background like the population, no. of Christians etc. I will not limit your creativity and discretion by giving you strict guidelines!

Praying for current events is rather straightforward, but for the benefit of those like me who hardly read the papers, you'd also need to give a little background.

#2: Life Stories

As for this, you can choose any famous Christian general (not in the military sense!) or even modern day heroes to tell the cell about. Like that day, I did on Jim Elliot, but I would be really glad if you could go further back then the 20th century heroes to perhaps even the 15th C or 16th C, especially during the Reformation period. There's a whole load of interesting info on the people who spearheaded the Reformation, and if someone like me who doesn't like History can be captivated by this, so can you!

However, to keep drilling ourselves with stories about past great men and women will make it seem like an unattainable feat and that is not the point of this. The point is that we can all draw lessons from these people, to learn from their strengths and weaknesses, so that we can have role models, or rather, role model qualities, to imitate.

By modern heroes I mean people today, living now, who have glorified God in their present lives. It can be well-known people like Billy Graham and C.S. Lewis (who by the way, have passed on already), or people know who are being heavily persecuted but still choose Christ, or people who have given up a lot to dedicate their lives to Christ.

After you've told the story, you can bring the cell into a short time of prayer, like perhaps that God willing, we will be like these men and women.

Once again, these are very flexible guidelines which I will allow you guys to bend here and there. Better still if you can break it (with relevance)and come up with something really unconventional! I'm not a very creative person so if you can think of something else or some other way to better convey the message, go ahead and do it! :) Above all, remember that all this is to the glory of God, and for the glory of God . It is to make us aware of the power of God in our lives when we choose to follow Him, and also to encourage us to be better Christians in today's warped world.

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As for the "format" we will perhaps do this twice a month, once the prayer and the following time the life story. We will start on the 9th of September, so the people I assign will have ample time to prepare! Don't see this as a homework or like "i-pray-it-won't-be-me" kinda thing. It'll lose its efficacy if you dread doing it. So I really pray you will all look forward to it!

Till this coming Sunday when I see you, God bless and take care! Remember Norm and I are just a phone call away! :)