Slow Down To Hear God

Sorry I said that I won’t post till Easter but God has been good and I really need to share this with my readers. Hope that you will find encouragement in reading this. Apologies for the length of this post but it is LONG!! Please make a nice drink and read it your own leisure. Well, CMF (Christian Medical Fellowship) National Student Conference was last weekend. With much persuasion from Peter, Jo and BJ, I rather reluctantly went. Well I had a very busy week in the weeks running up to CU mission week but praise God that He knew how much pushing I needed!!! Even when we were getting there I found the journey extremely tense and stressful especially when all the road signs were posted up with Bolton for most of the initial journey. And when we got there pretty much everyone had the “Fresher’s Week Syndrome”…..extremely extroverted and friendly. I was already drained from mission prep, OSCE prep and PBL and the evening was very tiring. Even so by God’s grace I was able to focus on the talk and learn a lot from it. I have to say that I have NO regrets at going. The weekend brought many blessings to my and set me new challenges. God used the weekend powerfully and we all saw many blessings. The weekend served as a perfect opportunity to allow me to set aside the stress of uni and life, and this gave me a proper time to rest; and most importantly to spend time with God, just to rest in His presence and properly listen to Him. Even if the weekend didn't do any thing else, God had made it clear to me that medicine was the path that He had chosen and put me in. It was reassuring to know this as this was one of the many things that lead to later decisions. But I got more than that from this weekend. No words can describe the wonders that God did over the weekend (there is loads that I have missed out in this post). I'm not just talking from the ecstatic high that weekend aways can bring but it was clearly from the work of the Holy Spirit in people. The first seminar that I went to was called "making choices", looking at balancing medicine, ministry, family and life. Well the seminar was what is said it was but God used it in a COMPLETELY different way! Part of the seminar involved us looking at scenarios in groups of four. So I picked one for my group and went for the middle one. The guy said "ooh the middle choice is always a dangerous one to go for...." Well I read the scenario to my group, and it went like this...... "Mia is a Malay-Chinese girl. Her parents have made considerable sacrifices to let her come to the UK to study medicine. Mia became a Christian shortly after arriving in the UK. Her parents are displeased at her new found faith. What would you say to Mia?" I was like "oh my gosh, this is me!" the three other girls in my group kinda stared at me. Well it was close enough apart from the fact that I was already in the UK and that my parents weren't supporting me at uni. We went on to discuss the scenario. I decided not to talk much as I would be like "do this and that" as I was familiar with the situation. But the responses were pretty much what I’d done. When we went through all the scenarios together, one of the leaders asked "how could Mia still honour her parents even though their views so are different?" No one could really answer the question. The guy pointed out that parents like it when their kids still come back to seek their wisdom and advise. He said to make it clear that their views would differ and there is no guarantee that you would go for their advice but you really wanted to hear what they had to say. I was so challenged by it and it was something that I had never thought of before. This is simply too much to be a coincidence. God knew what He wanted to tell me and He did. It was an answer to a prayer that I’ve not even prayed. Afterwards, I spoke to the wife, who was co-leading the seminar. She said that after praying for her parents for 30 years that her dad recently became a Christian and her mother was close. I was like “WOW! Praise God!!” We talked for a while and we prayed together. It was so encouraging!! This wasn’t the only thing that happened over the weekend, God was really good to me and my friends. It’s somewhat sad that we need to have a weekend away to put our focus on God and to properly listen out for God. But God is patient with us. Even though we think that God isn’t guiding us, He is and all it takes is for us to slow down and hear His voice. Just one more thing to include…..over the weekend God really gave us a heart to set up Student CMF in Liverpool. Its going to be a great opportunity for us to support and encourage each other as Christian medics and to learn to apply our faith our work! I’m really looking forward to see how exactly God will use Student CMF, for all I know so far is that it will be good. :) If you are a medic in Liverpool and would like to know more leave a comment. Before this turns too much of medic-talk I shall stop here.