Prelude

Hey there, I'm Jonathan, or some of you may have known me as Jon Black.
Regardless, this is my writing place where I will keep you all updated about my Calling.
Its a capital C, because if you're blessed enough, you'll get it in your life.
Let's define Calling~
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as its first definition:

1. : a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence

Now ain't that something?
I suppose it had something to do with me raised in a church where high over my head hung the words:

Life is Mission

Or maybe it was the time when I was in high school and I visited the missionary ship Doulos. These fine men and women of God who manned this ship as a crew are all professionals who would've made big money in the world, but instead chose to serve God on this vessel called Slave (Yes, Doulos means slave in Greek)

Or maybe because I was exposed to the accounts of the life-changing work of God through people like Dwight Lyman Moody, Jim Elliot, Hudson Taylor, William Carey, and David Livingstone. These titans were nobodys~ but God picked them up, sent them into the ends of the earth and made them carve a place where the light of Jesus may be seen by every people, nation, tribe, and tongue. They were my Ultramans, my Supermans.

Or maybe it was because I wanted to live beyond the ordinary, crossing over the boundaries of the mundane to the miraculous. The dream in my heart was to one day be involved in fulltime missions. I wanted to be used by Him. Anywhere, everywhere.

Did I have other dreams? Of course I did! I wanted to write music that would move my listener's hearts. I wanted to create beings of metal and artificial intelligence. You could even say that at one point in time I wanted to conquer the world and rule it like a supreme tyrant. However, some dreams were not meant to be, and in my humanly wrong way, I lumped in the dream of being a missionary together with all the others and chucked them into a box in my mind labelled

Impossible

And I went on to get my Pre-U cert in TARC (boy, was I miserable there), and then entered Universiti Malaya. It was my dad's dream come true. I was secretly miserable. Resentful, even. I had to give up my dream of becoming a missionary so that I could please my dad somehow (yeah, I crave his approval, it's an Asian thing) and then I was disappointed because I had to turn down an English degree from UTAR because my dad refused to let me take English as a degree~

"No ****ing way am I letting you go to Kampar and study English for RM30k" ~Dad.

So I thought that pursuing a Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) degree there would make him proud of me, and maybe then I'll be the son he always wanted. But I struggled, I do regret taking this course. Not that it was too hard, but it really isn't my passion. I didn't know how to tell my dad about this, and the years dragged on. If I continue on this path, it's going to be another 2 more years of fruitlessness before my graduation. And I despaired.

Then Singapore happened. I approached it with cold calculated skepticism. Really, a rally of fired-up teens and me, a washed-out, wasted potential, worldly, sinful, etc, person joining them? You might as well collide matter and antimatter and enjoy the explosion. But I was shocked to find they were just really normal people like you and me. They have doubts, regrets, disappointments, unfulfilled dreams, demands, pressure, but at some point in their life, God raised them up to be who they are today: leaders, teachers, pastors, and missionaries. And then the question stirred:

Is it really too late for me?