The Journey Thus Far…

Final personal post for a bit, I hope! Then I’ll be back to blogging some more fun stuff from the past few months. I’ve travelled quite a bit and all the photos are still on my phone/laptop (some have been shared to social media) but with the career change and job hunt weighing down on me the past couple of months I’ve found it difficult to write anything light-hearted for a while.

Still, it’s now 2017 and I think certainly worth a reflection on the past year; a year of blessings, a year of hardship, a year of trials and a year of triumph. But most of all, a year of equipping me with vital spiritual gifts to take on challenges yet to come.

Last year my prayer was to grow in faith and patience.

Pretty much immediately after that, Skimlinks asked me to move to New York. From a business perspective, it made sense. From a personal perspective, it sucked. From God’s perspective, it was exactly what I needed.

I’d only just settled into LA, gotten into a routine and found myself a church family/community that I was so close to it surprised all of us when we realised how short of a time I’d actually been there for. I had literally just uprooted my life from the other side of the world to tough it out in a new country, new city, new environment by myself (and gone through a break up with the guy I’d moved for pretty much immediately after moving) and no sooner had I felt a little more at peace I was facing potentially another move again.

This time, it was to a city I really didn’t want to be in. No offence to New York – I thought it was a great city to visit, but there was a reason I left London and wanted to move to LA, and going back to that kind of environment really wasn’t what I’d signed up for.

But my prayer was being answered, and miracles happened.

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Friday the 13th

DokDok Chicken

For the superstitious, Friday the 13th is an unlucky day. For my mum, the number 13 is lucky. In my case, it happened to be one of the most blessed days I’ve had so far this year. I love that my previous post documented my anxiety during this job hunt and the importance of not losing faith. That was a short week and a half ago, and in the following 7 days of that post, miracles have happened.

The picture above was my celebratory dinner on Friday the 13th, because in those 7 days from 6th – 13th Jan, I was blessed with not one but two very attractive job offers, both at impressive companies, and finally accepted an offer with one of them. I’ve signed the contract and start a week on Monday.

It also happened to be my mum’s birthday (happy birthday, mummy!) and she was thrilled at the offer I’d ended up accepting, saying that was the best birthday gift ever (I feel sorry I couldn’t be there to celebrate with her, but I did work hard to show her daughter was worth 2 offers and felt fuzzy butterflies when she wrote in our family chat that she was proud of me <3)

The crazy thing is, the company I ended up accepting the offer for only got in touch last week, and initially I thought it couldn’t possibly work out because I was pressed for time and at the end stages of interviews with two other companies already, and I’d begged for Him to let me complete the process that week already.

But I should know by now that that’s never the way He works :) And in a way, I love that – the fact that things just worked out so perfectly, so wonderfully, at the very last minute, are a sign to me that miracles still happen on a daily basis. Some people like to call it fate, but as a Christian, I call it grace, not least because I know that it’s not something I could have ever accomplished on my own.

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Faith, Hope.

One of the most dangerous things, I’ve realised, at least for me, is to lose faith.

I think at various points in my life, I have felt it. Lost, confused, restless, directionless, even if things are continuing as normal, even if things seem to be fine, there’s an inner numbness that cannot be overcome.

These days, I feel anxious. I’m exhausted; I’m mentally drained, I’m physically tired.

I don’t want to sound negative, but I think I am going through a phase in my life where there are so many uncertainties that are manifesting itself into negative energy and anxiety in my body. I can’t help but be negative, even if I don’t necessarily *feel* negative. Mentally, I am thankful and glad for my situation. I feel blessed. Let me talk about those blessings, to see if it might help:

I had a wonderful Christmas on the whole (although I did need to adjust my mindset for a different way of celebration over here) and an amazing New Year’s celebration (I went for dim sum lunch followed by KTV with Bellman Fellowship, then another brother’s house for a New Year’s party in the evening).

Santa Monica Pier
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A Minor Update

Do you notice anything different about the site? If the last time you checked was last year, then the answer would probably be no – and that’s a good thing! Pretty much exactly one year ago, my host at the time, Servage, suffered a DDOS attack and lost more or less the whole of my site – all 3 sites I had running at the time, actually. One of them was incredibly personal to me that I kept but nobody visited (I liked it that way – it was a sweet site with a beautiful layout called Summer Sonata, I believe I still own the domain), one was BobbieRecommends, that I gave up in favour of Bobbieness but still kept it up, and of course there was bobbieness.com, this site here.

When Servage lost my site, I was frustrated to say the least. I felt like years of me disappeared. The last time I’d backed up Bobbieness had been March 2015, and Summer Sonata had never been backed up (my bad). Even upon retrieving the majority of Bobbieness, there were still issues on the back end that I couldn’t figure out how to resolve and Servage were altogether not helpful at all. WordPress support advised that they’d need a ___ file from me for them to check the logs, but Servage naturally didn’t have them. Then WordPress noticed that the host I was using was running incredibly old code and full of security holes, and recommended I switched hosting provider asap.

So I started host shopping earlier this year, and with help from an amazing friend/colleague, I switched to Webfaction. Apparently, it’s all backed up for me, my developer friend recommended it, so I’m going to take his word for it that I won’t be losing my site again. Read More

A Beautiful Summer Wedding

Forest Row 1

Towards the very end of my 3-ish week trip back to England I took a day off to attend my friend Cindy’s wedding. We met at a Christian camp in Milton Keynes and became close as we shared stories about life and love, Jesus’ work in our lives and God’s guidance through it all. We would call each other every now and again for updates, and even before she was engaged I promised her that one day when she got married I’d attend her wedding.

The timing of everything worked out perfectly and I felt so thankful that I was able to keep my promise.

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