To what End?

When Jesus stood before Pilate, and challenged to say whether he was a king, Jesus' response was telling: For this or to this end, I was born, which means he was born to be king and to witness to the truth (John 18). As I am in my early 60s now, perhaps it is not too late to reflect, though I once said if one was in his or her 40s and know not what to do, then it is surely time to gather oneself and make oneself useful so that one's life could be meaningful. It is never too late to reflect. Even now in the past three months, I began to reflect - to what end was I born? What are my primary gifts?

Manuscript Ready

As expected, as I said about writing a commentary on Galatians in 2022, completing, revising and editing a book for publication is like labour pains, like giving birth to a child, which pains can last for a few weeks as I took much longer this time round to make corrections for my commentary on John's Gospel. I am not sure whether my current printers will agree to printing my book this time, let's pray and commit it into the Lord's hands. Many things changed in the last two years.

Writing Books & Travel

I don't know how many percentage of the population in Malaysia are authors or writers. Perhaps 0.001%, though in United Kingdom, there are hundreds of new books published each day, close to 200,000 books a year for a population of just over 60 million people. Self-publishing has also increased many times over a decade with the ease of computing, self-upload, e-books on Amazon and Apple etc. For me, I serve a very tiny market of Malay speaking and reading audience in this small corner of the earth, in North Borneo. A few Sarawakians and West Malaysians also buy my books, but I have not gone on a book tour as yet.

Book Culture in Sabah

I am amazed how little value is given to books even among Christians who are known to be people of the Book (the Bible). With the invention of smartphones and other techs, I think bible reading has actually gone down, with nowadays people don't even bring a printed Bible to church. Well and good if they consistently read their online Bibles. So over the past 7 years since I started writing in earnest, I get all kinds of responses when people know that I am writing or selling books. Some have a pitiful look on their faces and said, "pastor, people don't read books". "Our members don't like to read".

Last Reading

This weekend will be crucial as I am doing my final reading, from the beginning to the end. I hope to decide by next Monday whether I could send the whole thing to the printers, or should I ask my proofreader to read the book a second time? I need the Lord's wisdom and I need to be decisive. Mistakes there are bound to be, but after the corrections were done in the past week, I feel the book is going to be fine, despite whatever weaknesses there are. The cover, back and front are done. Even the first page is included.

Proofreading Theology

I do not know how to repay my sole proofreader as she spent a full two weeks going through every single page of my 200 page manuscript. I thought I might take 2 or 3 days to do the corrections but now I am giving myself another 2 weeks to do so. It is not just spellings or minor mistakes but I need to brush up or strengthen my arguments at several places, especially for a Malay reading audience.

Let the Dead bury the Dead

 I did not know how this topic came about. It happened 10 years ago when I just took up my appointment as Acting Principal of our Bible College at Namaus Ranau. My friend called me at 12.30pm to convey his condolences of my father’s passing and it was the first time I knew that my dad was no longer with us. Apparently, my three brothers called me since 9.45am without getting through as the line in Namaus was not stable and they could not get through to me. At that time I had one phone number on pre-paid.

Rare Occurence

A couple of days ago I was up in Kota Belud, a town about 70kms from Kota Kinabalu. I was invited to preach on the Sunday service at a village church, one that I had preached Oct 2023 and a couple of times in 1990s when the church structure was built in wood. I was pleasantly surprised that a total of 278 people attended the Sunday service with about 58 kids present as well. The worship was quite short, only about 20 minutes as we started at 9.10am and I went up to preach at 9.30am and I took about 5 or 6 minutes to introduce my 5 books to the congregation. I thank God that the response to my books was fantastic with about 25 books sold.

Going Global

Even our denomination's theme for the next three years is about going global. But I had gone global since 2006, when I started blogging as a pastor/scholar and by the 2nd year, it reached about 200-300 readers per day which was incredible. Then in Singapore, I stopped blogging for one year and restarted in 2012. For the first few years of version 2 Revelation is Real, readers were low with less than 100 per day, sometimes just hovering around 50 per day. But in the last couple of years, readership took off again, and I noticed a real spike last May during the Harvest Festival in Sabah and I spoke about reaching nations and nations are being reaped for Christ.

Waiting is a Virtue

In the last couple of days, I have been patiently waiting for my proofreader to return the manuscript to me so that I could make final corrections and have it sent to my printers. I hope and pray everything gets done by end of the month and by middle of June, I should know when my books will reach me since my printers are based in Kuala Lumpur and shipping (by sea) takes time, minimum three weeks to five weeks. I have done three of my books with the same printers and this will be my fourth book with them.

Typewriters & Laptops

I can't imagine myself writing a book 30 years ago when personal computers were still rare. When I did a BTheol at Auckland University (1993-1994) essays were written by hand and I only once paid a fellow student's friend to type an essay for me on her computer and it cost me NZD50.00 for a 3,000 word essay. Well, I guess by the time when I commenced my doctoral work at Otago University in 2000, it was all the craze that almost everyone owned a laptop.