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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Alden Ho

Life is a Gift

Our Father in heaven, as we come to you this afternoon, once again we seek to be fed.

And I pray that you will use it in such a way that it would touch somebody out here, that would bring them on a closer walk with you, to awaken them to the shortness of the time in which we're living.

Please, Lord, guide and direct them, guide and direct my words, be with us as we worship again.

Some of you look at me and you wonder, what am I?

People always get that question, are you Korean?

I was, When I say Chinese, many people are under the assumption that I was born in China.

You don't have to be Chinese to be born in China.

Some people are like, oh, well, that's in China, isn't it?

Singapore is about as far from China as Canada is to Rio de Janeiro.

You guys are American, I hope you know your geography.

I was born in Singapore, My parents immigrated from Singapore, which is always kind of a joke to me too, because people say, oh you speak English so well.

That's because I grew up in Canada before I was speaking.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada, which is why my English is more pure than some people who are a little south of Canada.

Well, I grew up in an Adventist home, but my parents would not send me to an Adventist school.

So I went to public school all the way through.

At the age of 5 and a half, I started playing the piano.

And by the time I was in the fourth grade, I took up violin.

Took violin fourth, fifth, sixth grade, moved to a different school, was still playing piano, but they didn't offer violin anymore, so they said, well, what instrument would you like to play?

So I said, at that age, I was very small, in 7th grade, I said, well, I want to play the tuba.

Then I looked at the tuba and I realized it was bigger than I was.

So when I started playing the clarinet, I was so involved with playing the clarinet, I was self-taught.

And then by the time I was in the 11th grade, they asked me to be the clarinet teacher at the academy.

So being self-taught in clarinet, I started teaching clarinet to students and I had 7 students while I was only 16 years old.

I thought, well I would like to be a music education person, but Prior to that I thought, okay, mechanical engineering, didn't know what it was, but it sounded good.

And then I thought I'd be a piano technician.

And then I finally settled upon music education.

I did go for my last year in high school, in Toronto, Canada, we had 13 grades.

And I decided for grade 13, I would go to Kingsway College.

Our education is a little bit better, but the naming convention somehow does not fit correctly.

Because although it's an academy, it's really a, I mean an academy, they call it a college, but then our college we name a university also.

So I don't know how they figure that part out.

But when I went through there, I finished my first year at Kingsway College which is really 13th grade.

I thought, I want to study more formally.

I played the piano, sang in the choir, I was the pianist for the voice teachers, and I enjoyed that a lot.

I guess on a normal schedule, if you're on semesters, you take a normal load is what, 12 to 16 credits?

I made it into the 2 that time for my GPA.

It was a struggle and I got really burnt out.

I was tired of playing on, anybody really very proficient in piano?

Jolene, you know what it's like to play on a piano that's not tuned correctly, right?

For some reason, now this I can say with confidence, many of you are in the medical field.

Now imagine, Union College, you're going to learn music, But they give you a piano that is so out of tune.

The windows don't close, so the snow comes in in the wintertime.

Now imagine on the same hand, you're studying medicine and you come to Loma Linda University and they give you a scalpel for surgery and there's like rust on it.

I got burnt out because I had so many classes, 13 classes.

So I just said, you know, I need a break from this.

And I was looking for some way to get out of this for a little while, and somebody came to me and said, hey, why don't you go as a student missionary?

Well, they said, but you get to take a year off of school.

So I was very interested in becoming a student missionary.

I thought, where could I go to be a student missionary?

And I thought, you know, since the whole field was open, I thought, I want to learn about my Chinese ancestry, so maybe I want to go to China.

So I looked in the book and I found Japan?

No, that's a little too far from Chinese culture.

I found out that Koreans actually use Chinese writing in their formal writing.

I was accepted to be a student missionary.

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Life is a Gift

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