“I Was the First”

No one in my family had walked this road before me. It began quietly, the way most life-changing things do — through a friend, a Seventh-day Adventist, who pointed me toward a Book I had never taken seriously. I started reading. And slowly, like dawn breaking over still water, I began to understand the love of Jesus.

The distance between where I had been and where I now stood was vast. I had grown up burning incense, pressing my palms together before the goddess Guan Yin, following the rhythms of a household shaped by folk religion and superstition. And now, here I was, undone by a question I could not shake loose: How could there be a God — a real God — who loves the world so much that He would send His only Son to die on a cross for sins He never committed?

I had no category for that kind of love. It broke something open in me.

“My brother Keith came next, though his journey was his own.”

At first, I suspect it was the pull of brotherhood — he saw something shift in his older brother and moved toward it. But I believe, in time, he stopped following me and started following Someone else. Life handed him his own crucible of hardships and uncertainties, and it was there, in the fire, that he encountered God's faithfulness for himself. Not borrowed faith. His own.

A treasured moment between brothers during a train journey years before God would answer decades of prayer, leading their entire family to Christ one heart at a time.

“Our mother was another story entirely.”

Before she believed, she was a devoted worshipper of the God of Wealth — Cai Shen Ye — with a particular hope that his favor would one day align her lottery numbers in just the right order. Faith, for her, was transactional. Practical. You asked, you offered, you waited for results.

I remember the evening she came home from the wet market, arms full, eyes bright. Fresh prawns. The large kind, steamed simply, the way she knew I loved them.

"Quick, come and eat," she called from the kitchen.

I came to the table. I looked at the plate. And I told her, as gently as I knew how, that I couldn't — that God's Word called these things unclean.

The table went quiet.

The next morning, my father found me before I had fully woken up. His voice was low, matter-of-fact, but it carried weight.

"Your mother cried last night," he said. "Because of the prawns."

I sat with that for a long time. I could picture her — standing at the market stall in the morning heat, choosing carefully, paying without complaint, carrying them home for me. Love expressed the only way she knew how. And I had turned it away with a verse.

The guilt was real. So was the conviction. I held both.

But something had shifted in that household, quietly and irrevocably. Not long after, the unclean foods disappeared from our kitchen — not by argument or ultimatum, but by the slow turning of a tide. And then came the miracle none of us expected: my mother's hands, gnarled and aching from rheumatism for as long as any of us could remember, began to heal. The change in diet, we believed, had done what years of medicine could not.

She noticed. How could she not?

She began attending Bible studies. She asked questions. And eventually, she was baptized — drawn to the Lord not only by Scripture, but by the undeniable evidence of two sons whose lives had been rearranged from the inside out.

Kevin shares a joyful moment with his parents, whose lives became a living testimony of God’s faithfulness and the power of persistent prayer across generations.

“My father was the most patient chapter.”

He would come to church with us sometimes — sit in the pew, nod along, seem almost moved. But the moment any of us reached for something more, he retreated. His reason was simple and immovable: Saturday is a workday. He was a practical man. There was no arguing with that.

Years passed. Then he retired.

One unremarkable afternoon, I felt something stir in me — a nudge, quiet but insistent, the kind I had learned not to ignore. Ask your father if he wants Bible studies.

I almost didn't. The risk of a "no" felt too large. We had come so far as a family, and somehow his resistance had calcified into something I was afraid to touch. But the impression wouldn't leave.

I walked to where he was sitting.

"Dad," I said, trying to sound casual, "would you like to study the Bible?"

He looked up.

"Sure," he said.

Just like that.

I stood there for a moment, not entirely sure I had heard correctly. But I had. And we began.

The studies unfolded week by week. And when they were done, I faced the same precipice all over again. Should I ask about baptism? What if he said no? What if, after everything, he pulled back one final time and I had to live with that answer?

I asked anyway.

"Dad — would you like to be baptized?"

He looked at me with the same quiet ease.

"Sure."

Hallelujah.

A few weeks after my ordination, I stood in the baptismal pool with my father.

I had placed my hand on the shoulders of strangers, of young people, of seekers and wanderers finding their way home. But this was different. This was the man who had taught me to ride a bicycle, who had worked Saturdays so we could eat, who had sat in the back pew for years without crossing the threshold.

I raised my hand. I steadied my voice.

"I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

The water moved. And I wept.

Pastor Kevin stands beside his father moments before baptizing him — a deeply personal testimony of God’s faithfulness, decades of prayer, and the joy of seeing an entire family led to Christ.

“Only my sister remained.”

For more than twenty years, my brother and I had prayed for her together — faithfully, persistently, and, if I am honest, with slowly dimming expectation. She was unmoved. Not hostile. Just unreachable, the way some people are when they have built their life carefully without God and see no reason to dismantle it.

Then, three years ago, our mother died — suddenly, without warning — and the ground shifted beneath all of us.

My sister fell into grief the way you fall into deep water: all at once, and with no clear sense of which way is up. She had not expected to miss our mother this much. She had not expected that loss could hollow a person out so completely.

It was my father who showed her the way — not with arguments or altar calls, but with something far more persuasive: his life.

Every Sabbath, without exception, he drove forty-five minutes from his home to the Kuala Lumpur Chinese Church, where my brother and sister lived. He sat in the service. He drove the same road home. Rain or blazing heat, it made no difference to him. He simply kept going — this old man, alone now, moving through his grief with a quietness that looked, from the outside, almost inexplicable.

My sister began accompanying him. Not out of faith. Out of love — the desire to sit beside her ageing father and give him company on the road. She was not looking for God. She was looking after Dad.

But God was there too, in the car, in the pew, in the long silences of the drive home.

She started asking questions. Then she started studying. And on May 16, surrounded by the community of the Kuala Lumpur Chinese Church, she walked into the baptismal waters.

I was the one waiting for her.

The same hands that had baptized her father now held his daughter. I raised them once more, steadied my voice once more, and spoke the words I had spoken before — but this time, they carried twenty years of prayer in every syllable.

"I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

More than forty years I had known her. More than twenty years my brother and I had prayed — sometimes with fervor, sometimes with nothing left but the bare act of praying itself.

And here she was.

And here I was.

The first to believe. The one chosen to baptize them both — father and daughter, in the same lifetime, with the same hands.

Kevin’s sister shares her testimony before her baptism at the Kuala Lumpur Chinese Church, reflecting God’s faithfulness through years of prayer, quiet persistence, and the transforming power of His grace.

Only God writes a story like that.

“I was the first in my family to believe.”

Because of Jesus, a light came on — and one by one, it found every room in our house.

If you are reading this and your family does not yet know Him, I want to say this to you as plainly as I can: do not give up. Not after ten years. Not after twenty. Not after the prayers begin to feel like they are disappearing into silence. God’s Spirit is at work in ways you cannot see, using instruments you would never choose — an old man’s faithful drive, a plate of steamed prawns, a daughter who only wanted to keep her father company.

Pray. Keep leading them toward Jesus, in whatever small ways you can.

Because in a world filled with headlines of heartbreak, division, and fear, these are still the stories that matter most — stories of grace quietly entering homes, of prayers answered across generations, of lives changed not by power or fame, but by the patient love of God. This is the kind of news that reminds us heaven is still working among ordinary people every day.

He will do the rest.

Emmanuel — God with us."Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved — you and your household." — Acts 16:31

The original article was published on the Southern Asia-Pacific Division news site.