by Soo-Inn Tan | Jul 14, 2023 | 2023, Loving Others, Relationships, Spiritual Friendship
Encourage: to give somebody support, courage or hope (Oxford Learners Dictionary) When he heard that my father had passed away, he cancelled all his appointments and took the first available flight to be with me. My dad was in Penang. My friend was in the senior...
by Soo-Inn Tan | Jul 7, 2023 | 2023, Death & Grief, Following Jesus, Obedience & Faithfulness, Spiritual Friendship
I take a break from my series on friendship interactions to honour a friend. This morning (5 July 2023) I woke up to a message that my friend, Pastor Ng Kok Aun, had passed away. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He had been fighting cancer for more than six...
by Soo-Inn Tan | Jun 30, 2023 | 2023, Discernment, Spiritual Friendship, Work & Vocation
In my third year of seminary I had a very strong urge to go to Oxford to pursue a DPhil. I ran the idea by a friend and mentor. He said he thought that my doing a PhD would be a stretch. When I suggested that maybe I should do a DMin, a doctorate in ministry which was...
by Soo-Inn Tan | Jun 23, 2023 | 2023, Church, Corporate Worship
I can’t help it. I still feel that most church corporate worship services are more like being in a theatre or lecture. They usually occur in halls where the people are seated in rows all facing forward. At the front, raised or otherwise, is a stage where some...
by Soo-Inn Tan | Jun 16, 2023 | 2023, Following Jesus, Spiritual Friendship
In his study on friendship, Robin Dunbar discovered that there was a direct correlation between the strength of a friendship and the amount of time the friends spend with each other. He writes: How emotionally close we feel to someone is directly related to how much...
by Soo-Inn Tan | Jun 9, 2023 | 2023, Articles, Community, Spiritual Friendship
Conversation: talk between two or more people in which thoughts, feelings, and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and answered, or news and information is exchanged (Cambridge Dictionary) I first met him about two decades ago. I can’t say we were close...
