Posted by Hugh 19 Feb 2008

Several months ago, Peter Loke actually told me to start a journal. At that pt in time, I didn't really see the benefit of it, nor did I think I would have the time. But over the past few weeks, God has been working in me that there is real meaning in writing a journal, and tracing the goodness of our God. So, here's my 1st attempt at it, although not so much in a conventional style of a journal, but I think it'll serve its purpose still. Someday, when I find the time to learn, I'll get a blog going and move with time! ha ha.

Anyway, there's so much to write about how God's been working over the past year, but I think I'll leave that to another time when I can really find lots of time to summarise all that's happened in 2007 and early 2008.

But for today, here's just a couple of things:
We won the tender for the ASEAN Economic Ministers' Meeting 2008! Now why is this such a milestone? After all, in terms of size, it's not really one of our BIG projects, it'll be a mid size project. And working on such projects really mean pain...... strrrrreeeessssss......etc etc. But the significance of it really is God's faithfulness.

This was a tender we worked through in Dec, submitted in early Jan. This was a time of real challenges as we were running into a real shortage of staff, and Yinn, Gayle and I had planned our trip to USA; so we won't around to work on the tender. We really only started working on it in early Jan, and had less than a week to put it all together. And somehow, I think we did come up with a sufficiently good submission, actually just the night before tender submission dateline.
The next challenge came when they called us in for a presentation, and I was away on a business trip. So, Dawn and Eunice went to do the presentation, and they are not the most eloquent people. And they were worried, maybe even scared. And all I could really do was to tell them that I would be praying for them, which of course I did lah.

I remembered messaging them to find out how it went, and the reply was "Not much hope". The vibes from the client was one of "disinterest". Our competitor went with their bosses, and apparently spent quite a long time in the presentation room, and they heard lots of laughter coming from the room. Again, all I could say was "Will pray", and again, of course pray lah.
Somehow there was this peace that this project was ours. When I got back to Singapore, the client had called us in for a meeting. I finally got to meet the client, and somehow I sensed that this project was really going to be ours.

Then came the real test. We will told results would be out in about a wks time. After a week, we were told to wait another 3-5 days. And Chinese New Year went without hearing anything from the client. 2 weeks after Chinese New Year, Dawn received a call from the client and informed her that the results will be posted on Gebiz in about 2-3 hrs time. Now this is really weird. After years of working on government tenders, we never ever get anyone who would actually call to tell you to check the results on Gebiz 2-3hrs later. Again, Dawn said, "Doesn't sound good man". Eunice and Jessica said "I think gone already". The worse part was after checking Gebiz for the results for about 2 weeks, the results were still not posted! And we tried to call the client, but could never reach them. This was a real test of faith. Could it really be that I was reading wrong all this while, that perhaps this really wasn't our project after all?

Today added a further challenge. As we are making decisions on who to employ after going through 3 rounds of interviews, it suddenly hit me that maybe we shouldn't be employing as many as we wanted. The global economy is so unstable now, what if things get worse? I'm sure that's going to affect our business. I actually dropped an email to Yinn on this, and she too had no answer. All we could agree on was to pray about it. And I asked God to give me a sign to let us know what we should do, and some how I had in the back of my mind this ASEAN Economic Ministers' Meeting, that if God wants us to recruit the original nos. of staff, he would grant us this project.

Guess what? We got a call from our client at abt 3pm to tell us WE GOT THE JOB!!! PTL!
So, now you understand why winning this tender is so important. Because it showed me that I was not listening wrongly to God, that God put us through a test, and God showed us that He is real in our lives and doesn't fail us. And now I also know we are to recruit to the maximum number of employees. Thank you God for being so direct this time.

Now, the question is: who do we hire. Haven't got a clear answer on that one yet. But I'm sure God will again prove faithful and show us.

On to another story. Yinn sent me an email that Gayle sent her. It put a BIG smile on my face, even tears in my eyes. See, Yinn had sent Gayle an earlier email using "u" in place of "you". And Gayle's reply was, "Dear Tan Poh Yinn Next time dont write a u for a y.o.u" ha ha. Way to go Gayle. You're so funny. I'm so thankful for my family. They have really been God's blessing to me.

I guess that's all for today. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up this journey of writing. It won't be a daily affair, I'm sure, but as the Lord leads..... Hopefully, will be able to chart how God's working in my life.