Encouraging Testimonies from a Wife and a Husband

Testimony from the Wife: Madam Choy Sook Leng (Mrs. Shun) (6 June 2012)

We have 3 children – a 14 year old boy, an 12 year old older daughter and a 6 year old younger daughter. My husband started attending the Father’s club in July 2010. As all of us who are married with kids will testify, parenting is no easy task. I am glad Chris signed up for the Father’s Club.

Chris found some good friends there whom he could identify with and who share the same needs and challenges. He looks forward to going to the Father’s  Club  and MAG meetings every month and enjoys exchanging ideas and materials with the other fathers. I believe, to Chris, being able to unload parenting burden in a safe environment where almost everyone is in the same boat, is therapeutic. He is evidently very pleased with this new found MAG group and I was delighted to see him finding so much support and encouragement from them.

Not only Chris is happy, in the months that follow, the children discovered that they have a “transformed” daddy. The bonus for me is I have a “new” husband.

Having been born the eldest in the family coupled with many years in the corporate world, Chris adopted a more commanding style type fathering all these years. After father’s Club, one distinct change he made is he came down to the children’s level.  He has become “down to earth” and sporting.   More laughter and noise are coming from our kitchen cum work area whenever daddy is with the children or in the family car. There is never a dull moment.  Very often, they are pulling each other’s legs. When the children get out of line, dad is more patiently correcting and guiding. Daddy has also got to watch himself as the elder two children often will highlight his mistake in a teasing and diplomatic manner when the need arises. Nonetheless, the respect for daddy is still maintained as they know daddy has proven to be firm on the right things and is more discerning and wise than them.

Chris is more conscious about spending more with the family, either one to one or with the entire family. This is especially timely as our eldest two are in their early teens. I am especially thrilled to see Chris doing the “manly” things together with my eldest son as he is more of an introvert. We are also doing more things together as a family and we make it a priority. Going out for ministry together like teaching the Orang Asli kids and reaching out to the needy is one area that encourages me most.

Even though the Father’s Club is not the Husband or Marriage Club, somehow I believe the fathers also get refreshers on how to love their wives. These days, I hear a lot more “I am sorry”, I get dishes and teas brought to me by my beloved  husband. I thought, praise god for such husband. My son will learn by example how to be that godly and serving husband that God will be proud of.

Thank you so much Pastor Chris Kum and DUMC for starting the Father’s Club. Christian families ought to be strong, united families so that we can be the light of the world and reach out to the world where families are breaking up. Fathers, if you are not in the father’s club, may I encourage you strongly to start early. If you want your wife to treat you like a King, treat her like a Queen!

Testimony from the Husband: Christopher Shun Kong Leng (14 June 2012)

After hearing my darling wife's testimony, it is humbling and also encouraging to know that by attending Father's Club, so much positive things have begun to take shape in our lives as a family. In Father's Club, I think that the lessons that were most important is understanding about the Father’s heart and how much He cares for us  and loves us even as Fathers, we in turn seek to love our wives and children. I think that once we better appreciate our Heavenly Father, we feel encouraged to love our family in a likewise manner.

You know, we men have been raised to be the Generals and our wives the Majors. {We make General decisions for the family and wives make the Major decisions!} . Growing up, we did not have many good role models and the local church did not actively teach us practically what it was to be Husbands and Fathers, we had to "learn on the job" often with more failures then successes. I am so grateful that DUMC, two years ago began a Men's ministry called Father's Club to meet this urgent need and step into the gap. As we know, Satan' s strategy is to attack the Christian family unit to break it apart, then the family is neutralized then the local Church is crippled and the spread of the Gospel is impeded.

It is easy???..NO WAY!! but having the support of fellow Men undertaking the same journey as us, encourages us greatly. We get to share and laugh alot but we ALWAYS do PRAY so that we can overcome the difficulties that we are facing. For some, it is overcoming cultural chauvinistic mannerisms, for some it is learning how to say SORRY but for most of us, it is learning how to accept WHAT we are and WHO we are, as Heads of our respective families and taking up the challenge and baton to be MEN of Destiny.

Father Wound and Mother Wound

Last Saturday's Fathers Club Video Session on "The Overly Bonded with Mother Wound" was powerful indeed. For the first time, our men are discovering how our mothers affect us, even until today. The previous session was on "Facing the Father Wound", and one man testified how he wept through the session and moved on after that not only to be a better father to his children, but he decided to make a day trip back to his hometown to reconcile with his father. He has decided since then to make a monthly trip back to see his dad. 

A story like this makes the efforts all worthwhile! Father Wound are caused by their absenteeism. Mother Wound by their overly protective love and care. All the husbands at the end of the session agreed this is one video their wives must watch :)

Ministry is exciting! It is about transformed life!

Testimony - Father and Daughter Time

When I first heard about the father-and-child time, I was excited. I was excited because I know this is something I had wanted to do with my daughter for quite some time now. My daughter is turning 6 this year. I remembered reading a parenting article some years back which says that for a child, quality time is spelt as “quantity”. I couldn’t agree more to this statement and it had caused me to rethink about the definition of the quality time for my daughter since then. As much as the quality time is important for my daughter, the consistent and regular time spent with her is equally important to her too. After I signed up for the Fathers Club and attended the first two meetings, I am convinced through Pr. Chris and other fathers’ sharing that I needed to have a consistent and regular time with my daughter.

Being a typical man, my usual first response to solving a problem is to first find the solution “myself” and then only present it to my wife and daughter for acceptance and feedback. Little did I know that I was stuck as I couldn’t seem to figure out a weekly time to spend between me and my daughter! This troubled me for a few days without any solutions.

Because I was determined to have the father-and-daughter time, I decided that I needed help from my wife and daughter. In one family dinner time together, I explained to them that I had been trying to figure out this father-and-child time thingy without much success. To my surprise, just within a few minutes into our discussion, my wife had proposed a weekly timeslot that seemed workable for all of us and without much hesitation I happily accepted it. The thing that amazed me was that what I couldn’t quite figure myself for the last few days was able to resolve within a few minutes with the help from my family!

My first lesson learnt from this experience is that I must involve my family especially my wife when solving family issues although some of them may seem trivial to me.

Later that night after dinner, both my daughter and I decided that we should brainstorm about the things or activities that we can do together during the father-and-daughter time. To show my commitment to her, I took out one new writing notepad and told her that I would write down these ideas on it. Besides, to make it more personal to her I named our father-and-daughter time to Daddy-and-Enxi time and wrote it down as the title to our activity list. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we managed to come out with close to 10 activities in that night. Guess what, quite a number of these ideas were contributed by my wife (lesson #1). My daughter was equally excited about this process. She took out one of her writing notepads and started to copy the list of activities from my notepad. I think she was trying to tell me that she has a part to play to develop the list and share the ownership of the list – rightly so.

Second lesson learnt: Showing commitment to my action either verbally (telling her about the Daddy-and-Enxi time) or visually (writing the ideas in a notepad) is important to my daughter. It shows my commitment to her about our time and at the same time excites her to do the same.

I know this is just the beginning. Having read the Secret 3 on Consistency of The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers by Ken R. Canfield, I am reminded the key to success to our father-and-daughter time is to ensure regularity and predictability on my time with my daughter. Up till now, my daughter and I were able to spend time doing some of these activities during our Daddy-and-Enxi time and we had also added new activities to our list. In every week, I can tell from her look that she looks forward to this time as much as I do to spend the quantity and quality time with her. Cheers.

Teoh Sing Peng

Wife: Teoh Chiew Chuan

Daughter: Enxi

And now for the Testimonies! Graduation of 1st Batch.

We have just concluded our 7 weeks for classes for "The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers" and 7 weeks of small group activities, which we call the Mentoring and Accountability Group (MAG).

I have asked you to write your reflection as a testimony of how you have grown as a father over the last 14 weeks. I am overwhelmed reading your testimonies, which I will post on this blog with your permission. I rejoice with you that your relationship with your wife and children have grown deeper and that you are diligent in wanting to see change in your own life. I am overwhelmed also because I had only wanted to start small and what I am hearing is far far more than I expect. For which I can only conclude that it is God’s work. Can you now imagine with me what other fathers would do when they hear what’s happening? Only an ignorant father could not care less about the testimonies of these men. Our families are at stake here!

Thank you for being such an encouragement! I urge you to write and encourage everyone if you have not done so.

We have just read in our journalling from 1 Thess 1:2-3 and this is how I felt when I read your testimonies:

² We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. ³ We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me just share some thoughts here:

I am thankful for each of you and it is my prayer that the fruit of your fathering will abound more and more.

Therefore our fathering must be centred on three things: Faith, Love and Hope.

1.       Faith – our work must be produced by faith. We must have faith to believe that God is the Author and Perfecter of our fathering. Faith also means that in our fathering, God must be in the centre of what we are doing, because He is the perfect Father. We must therefore grow deeper in love with our Heavenly Father more each day. This is a non-negotiable and we must continually watch out lest we fall. And we get other men in our lives to watch out for us too. We should never be alone in this journey of faith but to walk together with other men in the Body of Christ.

2.       Love – our labor must be prompted by love. Not a selfish or self-centred kind of love. We are not doing this because we want others to notice how good we are as a father. We are not even doing it because we want to feel significant. We are doing this because we love our family too much to have them experienced the blessings of God less than what they deserved. Our wives and children need our best effort.

3.       Hope – we endure and persevere because of our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We long for the day when we appear before Christ and to hear Him say: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” That would be the greatest joy. In fact in 1 Thess 2:19 For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? 20 Indeed, you are our glory and joy. What will be our hope, joy and crown some day? To see our family in heaven together. They will be our glory and joy!

Fathers Club Testimony - Jeffery Choy

After attending the 1^st Fathers Club book study session on the 2^nd of August in DUMC, I realized that there are so many areas which I felt I need to improve in the way I father my children. During the session we studied on the 1^st Secret of an effective father, which is “Commitment”.  Being a last minute decision, I had not really made the time to prepare and read the chapter before I went, which was suppose to be our homework. When we were deciding which group to join for our small group meeting (MAG – Mentoring and Accountability Group), I chose the Monday night group since my kids will be in tuition. This would be the most ideal time for me to commit to this alternate week group.

When I got back after the study session, I was sharing with my wife about how wonderful the Fathers Club book study has been and all the homework we had to do. I also told her about the survey that I need to do with her and my son (my daughter is too young, she’s only 6 years old). 

We had planned for a weekend at Cameron Highlands the following weekend, to relax and also to spend time with my family and close friends. The trip to Cameron Highland was wonderful. We stayed at the OMF Bungalow and we had much fun playing board games such as Monopoly, Scrabble and Taboo with the kids.

When we got back on Sunday 8^th August, my wife and I were discussing with our son what he wanted to do on his birthday and where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner. We proposed a quiet dinner with just the 4 of us or he can invite some of his close friends home for dinner or have dinner with our close friends and their kids. My son was undecided but did comment that some of the proposals were not what he wanted. As we were discussing, it suddenly dawned on me that my son’s birthday dinner, which is on the 9^th August, clashed with the Monday night Fathers Club MAG group meeting. I blurted out that I had Fathers Club MAG group meeting and my wife immediately reminded me that she’s sure the members would understand that I had to spend time with my son on his birthday. The Lord immediately reminded me of the lesson we had on the 2^nd of August about “Commitment”.  It was really a reminder of how easily I could be distracted with other commitments and putting my commitment to my wife and kids in 2^nd place. I decided to spend time with my son and family on his birthday as this is my commitment to him and my wife. We had a wonderful time and my son really enjoyed his birthday dinner and we also surprised him by inviting our close friends and their kids for the dinner (though he didn’t say it but insinuated his preference, when we made suggestions during the discussion)

I really thank God for sinking the lesson of commitment deeper into my heart and mind, and also the privilege of being able to practice it. I also thank God for my wife, who is there to remind and support me in my commitment to be an effective father. Praise the Lord!