By Carolyn...

As some of you may know, my grandfather passed away on 29th Dec 2006. He was a Buddhist.

During the funeral, there were many disputes among the relatives because of religion, and hence, to avoid more quarrels, my mother, uncle and aunt (who are Christians), had to conform to the Buddhist religious rituals to send the spirit off.

Luckily, for my two brothers and me, we had the option of not doing the rituals as we are “outside” grandchildren, meaning that we are related to him through our mother, and not our father.

The last night of the wake, the rituals started. Luckily that night, I was in charge of collecting the money given by those who visited, so I had an excuse not to do the rituals. My two brothers were asked to do, but they went, “Aiya, lazy lah…”, so my relatives let them off, as they are young kids.

The next day we sent our grandfather off to be cremated. Before we left, there was one last ritual. This time round, I had no excuse. But I didn’t want to join in the rituals. My cousin told me to, but I told him that I refused to do so as it was wrong of a Christian. And he scolded me, saying that he knew he should never have let my mother turn us to Christians.

That one sentence of his really hurt me, although I didn’t show it. At that time, I started to think if I was wrong, if my stand was wrong. I disobeyed my cousin whom I’ve looked up to and respected since I was young. He was always looking after me and looking out for me. As I always tell my friends, my cousin is the most important man in my life (besides Jesus of course!).

Thus, I was very troubled throughout the whole day.

This incident has always been weighing on my mind, and the burden finally lifted when I told Si’er about it, as I needed some confirmation of whether my stand in refusing to do the rituals was right or wrong.

You can’t imagine the joy and relief I felt when he told me that I made the right choice. As he said, sometimes, we have to disobey our parents to do the right things.

I never had my faith tested in such a manner, and I used to wonder if I would be able to stand up for Jesus. But this incident helped me to grow stronger in my faith in Christ, instead of drawing me away from Christianity.