Yesterday I read an unexpected Facebook post on the home going of a Bartley missionary, Dr Chua How Chuang. It took me by surprised and I learned from a full time staff that Uncle How Chuang, whom we taught our youths to address him as, was cancer stricken and was taken home to be with the Lord at 4am on 5 March 2015.
I had not known Uncle How Chuang personally, and neither do I know his wife Kaori and their adopted Japanese girl, Airi. But I had heard him speak at both English and youth services, and as well as during staff devotions and other similar gatherings. Uncle How Chuang stood out amongst the many missionaries. He was also a scholar and from a post I read this morning from Sabbath Walk, Uncle How Chuang was a teaching assistant of the J. I. Packer and had excelled in "research quality and academic excellence."
It was a great loss to the Christian academic community in Singapore. More to that, Bartley lost yet another scholar amist its already-stricken academic leaders within the church. Uncle How Chuang's most impacting and memorable pulpit message was to me a message that spoke of God's graciousness and kindness to the Japanese during the worst tsunami in 2011. Dr Chua's ability and academic insightful to correlate biblical principles and the world's happenings were what was essentially missed in Bartley's pulpits in the recent decades.
Yet last night, I could not have imagined that Uncle How Chuang had just left us, at least to me. It got me thinking of how our lives can be that short, and what really counts was the quality of how we had lived it, and not how eventful or lavish our lives had been. It also made me thinking of a will, or a last instructions to my dear wife in the event that a critical situation happens to me. Perhaps this is what they call it a rainy day plan, or a worst case scenario planing.
And I should get down to that, soon.
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