“So, what inspired this whole thing?”
I always found myself fumbling, unable to put to words an experience that pierced so deeply.
Words can’t express how grateful I am for @saltandlight.sg penning my journey so vividly and sensitively. For those of you who’ve wondered how this journey began, this is it.
“As a child, Dr Tam Wai Jia (@tamwaijia) spent every Sunday morning on Chinese calligraphy.
For hours, she’d blot character after character in black ink on snow white rice paper, and watch them covered in red marks.
These were mistakes – circled by the teacher – as she competed with peers to outdo each other.
Calligraphy was but one in a string of achievements the medical doctor pushed herself to achieve as a model student at Tao Nan Primary School.
This, she says, was her way of coping, as family relationships became rocky, intensifying further during Chinese New Year.
This meant the young girl grew to fear the celebrations. “Strife would always appear around that time,” she says. “I often felt caught in the middle, and had to take sides.
“It was stressful. I just felt the whole season was very depressing.”
But she kept plugging away at calligraphy and, when she turned 12, her efforts bore fruit. Wai Jia beat hundreds of peers at the National Chinese Calligraphy Competition to come in Singapore’s best.
Winning only brought the Primary Six student sheer relief. “I finally could free myself of this,” she says. “I decided that I would put that part of my life away.”
Two decades later, however, God brought calligraphy to her mind again as she thought about how she would raise funds for her nonprofit in 2023.
She was reluctant, she admits. “Calligraphy and the pain of my childhood were too intertwined.”
But as God continued to speak to her heart, she understood that He wanted to do something new with that old part of her life. He wanted her to paint not as a way of coping, or to gain others’ approval, but as means of worship to Him.
And as she obeyed, miraculous doors opened that she could never have imagined.
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