STAYING FRUITFUL AS A CELL FAMILY

By William Koh and Low Kok Leong

“Though the fig tree should not blossom and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fail and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold and there be no cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, and makes me walk on my high places.” Habakkuk 3:17-19 (NASB 1995)

I think many will agree that 2020 was a strange year. It came and went mysteriously and many of us will have issues recording what we had achieved in various facets of our lives. Church activities came to a grinding halt, we were restricted as to how we could visit friends and family, we missed the sight of aircraft taking off and landing at Changi Airport, work projects were cancelled, and many found their incomes reduced.

“The Lord God is my strength, and He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, and makes me walk on my high places.”

Our Prime Minister described the COVID-19 pandemic as “the crisis of a generation”. Yet, we are reminded that despite fruitless times, the prophet Habakkuk reminds us we are to exult the Lord and rejoice in God.

At the start of 2020, our Cell Group (CG) set out to meet fortnightly. We managed to do so for a few meetings but the circuit breaker and other restrictions made it impossible to continue. Undeterred, we switched to using the Zoom platform to meet. We had to quickly learn how to set up and host meetings, work around the 40-minute time limit Zoom imposed on free accounts and find a way to conduct our usual prestudy worship despite the lag imposed by the Zoom platform.

With little other social commitments, many of us made it to the fortnightly meetups and we recorded better attendance than we did pre-COVID-19. We covered a good part of the book of John and in greater depth. But we missed our usual catching up over supper after bible study.

In response to the lockdowns of the foreign worker dormitories, Crisis Relief Alliance (CRA) made an appeal to raise funds to care for the needs of our foreign worker population. This soon became a cell group effort to pool together some funds which went towards our church’s wider effort to purchase fruits as gifts to the workers who could not leave the dormitories. Some members also volunteered in the distribution of these gift packs to the workers.

Phase 3 marked the easing of restrictions and we have started in-person meeting again, limited to eight visitors as per the restrictions. We hope we will still maintain the momentum with CG meetings and this time with live worship!

Even as vaccinations commence and the world moves towards more normalcy in time, there will be challenges along the way. As we are reminded by Habakkuk, let us continue to hold on to the promise that “The Lord God is my strength, and He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, and makes me walk on my high places.”