As the Trials Get Worse, Our Faith Grows Stronger (Part 1 of 3)

As the Trials Get Worse, Our Faith Grows Stronger (Part 1 of 3)

A four-month testimony of events that reveal the Hand of God

Khen Lim

Image source: NBC News

There has never been any year where our family had sustained the worst wave of challenges within a little more than the first quarter. From January to April, we were inundated with one problem after another much like struggling to sail over the roughest seas one can imagine. 

Tumbling from one to the next, our resilience was tested, our patience worn as thin as it could and our self-belief took a walloping that could have knocked all of us cold. Now that we’re have cleared a very tough April, we really don’t know what else would be in store for us.

The one thing we could not call upon were relatives beyond our small family. This is ‘we’ as in my wife and I including our pair of 17-month twins and then my 88-year-old father. Between us, there always seems to be an unending mountain of tasks and chores, duties and responsibilities and all of them already made life tough enough but in the four months past, our tests would put any formidable family to the sword let alone one as small as ours.

Inevitably, it was simply only my wife and I who took turns to battle the storms. At two years short of nine decades of life, my father could only sit and watch. It would be remiss of us to expect him to lend a physical hand. All my other relatives were too far away or too busy. 

My brother is even farther away – try 6,ooo-plus kilometres (4,000 miles equiv) – and forever busy. What all this meant is that no matter how and what, our small family will always have to fight our battles without much assistance save for a few precious church friends who were genuinely supportive and ever-present.

January

Image source: Physician's Weekly

Not long into January, the first disaster to hit us was my father’s early morning trip to the hospital. Although my father has been in and out of hospital for quite some years, this one has to be the most sobering experience. 

All in all, he spent around a week with the first four days under strict supervision in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) as he struggled to clear himself of a very threatening pneumonia. He became very delusional and that merely added to our worries.

At any age, pneumonia is stealthy and deadly. At 88 years of age, it’s a potent killer of repute. In the last two decades, many notable celebrities died from complications arising from pneumonia. They include the young Brittany Murphy (d2009, 32yo), Leslie Nielsen (d2010, 84yo), James Brown (d2006, 73yo), Corey Haim (d2010, 38yo), Bob Hope (d2003, 100yo), Bob Hoskins (d2014, 71yo), Luciano Pavarotti (d2007, 72yo) and Tony Randall (d2004, 84yo). 

There are of course many others but this short list is enough to underline pneumonia’s non-discriminatory nature. Even when one has the means to afford literally anything, life can still become very unpredictable when it comes to pneumonia.

With dad, the onset of pneumonia became a hugely complex medical issue mainly because he was under medication for many things such as platelet and haemoglobin, kidneys, heart, blood pressure, diabetes and prostate and so on. 

He’s on so much medication that every three weeks, he needs the specialists to keep monitoring and where necessary, juggle their doses. This is because all these critical meds not only have their limits but they have side-effects that require the doses to be constantly calibrated in case it clashes with others at the same time.

With his medical complications, anything could go wrong in the first place but the onset of pneumonia now added another complicated layer of deep concern for us. It made it harder for my dad to have to cope. We know that it isn’t just the medical condition; dad misses mom and has shown, every now and then, the sadness in his eyes. He can just sit at the dining table or stand and peer outside the garden with glazed eyes, his thoughts seem a million miles away. I could be wrong but it’s likely that he is thinking of mom and missing her.

With dad in the hospital, my wife and I had to scramble and organise ourselves. Before we had children, it was a lot simpler but now with the twins, the logistics became not just more complex but it forced us to spread ourselves thinner. 

However in this case, it wasn’t our physical exertions but dad’s serious condition that had us all more worried than ever before. We knew he missed our late mother badly (she passed away in late 2015) and with him in this condition, we were afraid he might not actually want to fight for his survival.

Thankfully, he made it but in the aftermath, his doctor told me that dad was ‘fairly near.’ In other words, it was possible that he couldn’t have made it past this point. Pneumonia has been known to man since the early Greek civilisation. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, it was the top-three leading killer in the world. Despite all the modern medical technologies, pneumonia remains a critical medical concern where every year, more than 1.5 million children succumb to it.

You can read more about this in the article ‘Near-Death Teaches Us Valuable Lessons’ available at this link. Alternatively, you can copy and paste this into your search box: http://hosannaefcluxmundi.blogspot.com/2017/02/near-death-teaches-us-valuable-lessons.html

February

Image source: india.com

With my dad finally discharged and headed home, we thought we could take a little rest ourselves. He was still weak but at least he could now slowly recover and regain his strength. Most importantly, he was back in the comfort of his own home. 

About a week or so after his discharge, my wife’s mother came visiting from upstate. It was the weekend and we did what we normally would to entertain her. In turn, she helped my wife to host our good friends for dinner at home where they cooked up a real storm. Everyone was happy and it was nice to have done what we did. Everything went well.

When Sunday came, I couldn’t attend church service because my mother-in-law had planned her return home by coach and we had to drive her to the terminus to catch her trip. Interestingly during my dad’s stay at the hospital, I also found myself unable to attend Sunday service. It was almost two weekends in the row but, however, I didn’t think much of it. I did, on behalf of my own family, gave a testimony in church and offered a love gift because of their prayers for my dad.

That morning, however, turned out to be another disaster and one that was totally unexpected. Next door to where we live was also our house. We own it because my late paternal grandparents had lived there until they passed away more than forty years ago. Thereafter, my dad’s sister lived on until she too died a little less than ten years ago. 

Since then the house has been empty save for a friend of ours whom we offered to store some of their belongings. Three years ago, I decided to teach a class of kids Communicational English but that was only once a week, which meant that for the remaining six days, no one would be physically around the house. Occasionally, we would take a peep and our two dogs would wander around in its garden. Other than that, it was pretty much unmonitored.

On that morning, my wife and her mother were in our front garden, checking out some plants. I, on the other hand, was in the dining room, chatting with my father. He wanted me to get him a pair of (trouser) braces and I was helping him check a few samples online when I heard shouting and screaming coming from the outside. 

The voices sounded like they were from the two women and so at the beginning, I didn’t think much of it but it didn’t take long before I was curious and took a look outside. That was when shock overcame me as I saw both of them physically fighting with a stranger.

I bolted out of the house and went for them. That was when I saw that the stranger had an accomplice who was on his bike outside the house separated from us by the locked iron gate. He was probably in a bind as to what he should do – to help his friend or to bolt. He eventually bolted. 


Image source: shuttlestock.com

As I joined in to wrestle the stranger, it was then that I discovered that he and his friend were attempting to steal the iron grating covers for the gutters. It made sense because these gratings could bring in good money at the junkyards. It was also immediately obvious to me that these two were drug addicts looking for a quick quid and the gratings were an excellent source of it.

As it turned out later, we were horrified to discover that all in all, they had already stolen over twenty pieces of gratings (!), which meant that they had been around for the past number of days. In other words, on the day we caught him, it would have been their fourth or so day at our next door house. Just the thought of them having been next door, wilfully removing all the gratings and then coming back for me sent chills through my spine. It made me wonder what more they would have done had we not caught up with them.

The physical struggle with the thief took so much out of us. As for me, it took the next ten days to recover. My mother-in-law sprained part of her body as well. My wife had some aches somewhere too. All because we all had to do all we could to subdue the thief. Even though a drug addict, he had enormous strength and in the beginning, he was feisty and arrogant and demanded that we let him go. 

He was screaming and ranting and basically went on and on about being a ‘Malay’ to imply that he was entitled to do whatever he wanted (echos of BLM perhaps). We could care less about his rants. All we wanted to do was to make sure he couldn’t escape.

Eventually we had him on the ground. I had my arms locked around his neck and my legs were entwined around his waist. By doing that, he could not get up but instead was prone on the grass. While this was happening, the two women were shouting him down and attempting to tie him up with whatever we could get our hands on. 

It was not easy but with the help of the opposite neighbour who assisted in calling for the cops, we were encouraged to keep him at bay. Slowly but surely, his feistiness and arrogance faded, replaced by desperation, wailing and fear.

He knew by now that there was no escape and we would basically nail him for good. He was literally in tears but none of us was buying it. Eventually the cops came and took him away. In the meantime, we checked the clock and realised we didn’t have much time to waste. 

We were required to go to the police station to lodge a report against him but we also had to get to the terminus – which was quite a distance away from our home – for my mother-in-law to grab her coach. In between, we also needed to pick up some prescription meds from the pharmacy for her to take home.

Under normal circumstances, it was impossible to get all of these done in time. Something had to give was what I thought. But in great faith, we somehow managed to wrap everything up and still got my mother-in-law boarding the coach in time. And then we trundled home, physically exhausted and completely stunned by all that had happened on that morning alone. 

Once the adrenaline deserted us, we took stock of the event and realised – in all our unmasked horror – that it could have turned out very differently. In the heat of the moment, we lunged at the thief. Anger took over our senses. In our minds, we were all determined to haul this guy into jail for trespassing and theft. And that was all we thought of during those frenzied minutes in which we fought tooth and nail with him.

What we now realised was that he could have wielded a knife. Being a small-time drug addict and fruit-stealer, it wasn’t likely that he would have been armed with a gun but a knife was a serious reality that we hadn’t thought of that is, until now. The belated awareness caught us out and within moments, my wife went into an emotional meltdown as I was driving home from the terminus. 


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Courage was one thing but stupidity was quite another. If he had a knife and used it, it could have turned out completely differently for all of us. If he pulled out the knife and thrusted at us while we were scuffling, the outcome would have been disastrous. At least one of us would have been injured to say the least. Life would have been at stake and there would have far more than just tears.

But we also understood one thing very clearly in all of this; that God was there. This was evident because we were spiritedly empowered to do what we did. We overpowered the thief – no small matter, mind you – and we did everything we could do make sure it actually ended well. 

Never mind the knife scenario; the outcome was proof that only God could have orchestrated it every bit of the way. No knife? God made sure of that. Nailed him and hauled him to jail? Check, God’s work, no doubt about that. None of us really hurt badly? Praise the Lord, God lent us the strength to eventually heal.

All in all, the most important and central element that pulled it through was faith in Christ. It was this faith that helped us not to think too much but to get the work done and out of the way. It was this faith that helped us to garner our strength and coordinate our efforts to perfection. It was this faith that helped us to overcome our own nerves, to collect our thoughts and to ensure that what we started, we would finish it and send him to jail. 

It was this faith that offered us the certainty to do the morally right thing and not fear about what the ramifications might or might not be. Through the scuffle, none of us withered under the immense pressure. Two women and one man – that was what we were. We had neither the fighting experience nor the skills to apprehend such a person in broad daylight. We were clearly not geared up to do what we did.

But we did it. God saw to it that it all ended well although if you must, all of us suffered the repercussions for the next week and a bit. But, yes, we finished off this chapter in our lives and dragged out tired feet to the next month.

Part Two next week will cover the months of March and April Part One.