On Furlough?

After 20 days in Ranau I found myself in KK again, a kind of retreat or reprieve for the first 20 days of my ministry. Former missionaries spent 5 or 10 years in the jungles of Borneo before they went for their furlough. Ranau is not exactly the jungles of Borneo. It is a pleasant village-town right in the centre of the State where traffic goes from East to West coast and vice versa. I can't pretend that 250 worshippers are a huge responsibility while you have megachurches in Singapore boasting 25,000 attendance on a Sunday or more impressive still the 6-million strong crowd that witnessed Pope Francis in centre Manila. Numbers don't prove a thing.
Truth is not known by its majority adherents. On the contrary there have been many times in the past that vast majority rejected the truth of God, if we look at the prophetic history of Israel as a testament to that. Nevertheless, numbers still matter as I preached from Jeremiah 3,15-16 at College that God will multiply his people in the land when good shepherds rise up to feed God's people with knowledge and understanding. It is an 48 hours furlough to attend a workshop. Nonetheless it is good to be home if I can call my present place of abode home. For once  I appreciated the warmth of KK after nearly 2 weeks of cold and chills. A pastor told me that it was 13 degrees celcius in Kundasang, near Mount Kinabalu. I am glad I am in Ranau "suffering" from temperatures just a notch under 20 degrees.