The countdown...

One more week till freedom.  Actually, 6 days to be exact.  6 days from now, I will no longer be the chairperson of the C&C fellowship.  I will hand the buck to somebody else to do the job, to carry on the work that we have so painstakingly carried on over the last 12 months.  I will make an address to the fellowship, to my peers, those I have worked with on the committee, to the elders and the pastor, and perhaps ultimately to God.  What will I talk about?  Will I talk about how our numbers increased and that many's faith were strengthened, and many more came to Christ because of the work that we do at C&C?  Will I talk about all the events that we hosted, and how wonderful it was to work with everyone to make these events happen?  Will I talk about all the challenges I and the committee have faced in the past year and how in the end, God gave us the strength to carry on?  Will I talk about how my faith has been increased because of the past year?  Unfortunately, I am not sure that I want to paint a rosy picture of what I have experienced in the past year.  I feel like I have a lot of reflection to do in just one year.  How can I leave my fellow C&C brothers and sisters, including next year's committee members, the best of what I've learned from God despite a path full of difficulties we've had to walk through this year?

At the beginning of the year, I was naive and hopeful.  I was ambitious.  I wanted to make C&C great and this would be the year.  We had a new pastor and a brand new committee.  Gone with the old, and in with the new.  We would become a more spiritual fellowship - we would pray more, we would follow God's laws, we would live like people set apart from those in the 'sinful' world.  The first month or two, every Saturday I would start to get butterflies in my stomach hours before C&C would start.  We ran a fundraiser for Typhoon Morakot, in which we made care packages to be sold to church members.  We did well, and it was a fun experience, though tiring.  In November we organized someone who worked with the marginalized in Cambodia to come talk to our fellowship about the work they did.  We had nearly 70 attendees, and it was a great talk.  Christmas time rolled around, we went caroling and did a skit during the holiday celebrations in the church hall.   We did gym night with the BTPC youth in January and in the spring, the committee, in my absence, pulled off the Iron Chef competition.  Summer came and we organized a coffee house event, and sold 'winter melon' tea at Taiwan Day to raise funds for our sponsored child.  Then, the long-awaited day of the committee transfer is finally upon us...

Of course, in that list of events (in which I'm sure I missed a few), I haven't really talked about all the stressful times we've had to endure.  One of the committee members, due to work conflicts, stopped coming to C&C full stop.  We were in between supervisors right from the start, and both times I had knots in my stomach after interacting with these whom we were supposed to look to for spiritual guidance and leadership.  Of course there were the many opinions, 'advice' that people gave me, though not always through the appropriate channels, of how we should be running the fellowship.  Ideas of what we should do came flying, but nobody really shared my concern of 'well then, who's got the time to do it?"  Committee members did not always pull their weight.  Some became angry with me without me knowing why, and wouldn't come to meetings.  Finally, two of the committee members stopped coming to fellowship, and couldn't always make it to meetings.  We added a few new committee members, but that didn't necessary ease things up.  People became very opinionated, and many times I had to listen as someone told me what they thought I did wrong as the chairperson.  I was pushed to the limit.  Only then did I remember a book I ready by Henri Nouwen on Christian leadership, in which he concluded that Christian leadership is about forgiveness and acceptance.

To be continued...