The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

Wow it's been some time since I last posted! I had been rather stressed out for a few months, without going into much details, I was just overwhelmed with coping with various responsibilities and demands and was worrying so much I was losing sleep and hair, lol!

But this period turned out also to be one of spiritual blessing. I had to turn to God to seek Him on direction, decisions, and for sustaining me. And over the last few months, I found that I 'heard' Him speak to me personally and specifically, through sermons, sharings, readings, quiet time, so many times. It is just so wonderful to know that my Lord knows me intimately, is looking over me, Deut 32:11,
like an eagle that stirs up its nest
and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them
and carries them on its pinions.

Just to share some of the encouragement I received

Ezekiel 34: 25-31 – God’s Promise
'I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of wild beasts so that they may live in the desert and sleep in the forests in safety........ Then they will know that I, the LORD their God, am with them and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares the Sovereign LORD....'

I know He will make a way for me!


1 Thess 5:16-18

Be joyful always. Pray continuously, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Yes I see, Lord!

Romans 12:12

Be Joyful in hope, patient in afflication, faithful in prayer. Yes Lord! 

Deut 11:13-14 (MSG)

From now on if you listen obediently to the commandments that I am commanding you today, love God, your God, and serve him with everything you have within you, he'll take charge of sending the rain at the right time...

If you are also going through a rough time, may you be blessed to know that He will take charge of sending the rain at the right time, our part is only to trust and obey!

And scrapping was my way of giving myself a break - the half or an hour every few days I could spend scrapping was always a wonderful time and I go to bed smiling those nights, :)
Here are more layouts from our first few nights in Hakodate, Hokkaido

And we did get a fantastic chance to visit the newest resort hotel in Singapore, up to it's Sky Park (53 stories up there) where we swam in the infinity pool overlooking the city (including where I work!) Here's the layout I made.

This template is now available as a set in the store HERE

Painted Papers used in my Layouts

Emily asked in comments where and which designers do I get my papers with beautiful painted and watercolor effects from, that is a great question, because I love them, and are always on a lookout for more. So far my favorites areby:
Gina Miller
Electic Designs by Gabi
Rachel Young
Emily Powers
Vera Lim
Creashens
Let me know if you know of others, too!

We are back from Shanghai!!

We're back! Shanghai was amazing! It was the boys and my first time in China, and Shanghai was just mind blowing in so many ways. First, the immense scale of everything, from the airport, to the highways, the train station, the endless skyscrappers and city-scape, the people everywhere, always busy traffic, shopping of every kind that stays open till past 10pm everyday, the city lights at night, what a buzz! Being in China is a unique experience for us, there's a certain home-coming feeling, where everyone speaks our 'mother-tongue' - chinese/mandarin, which we can speak and understand fairly well (the boys to a lesser extent), everyone we met were very happy to find that we are Singaporean chinese (even though we are usually speaking in english to each other) and we felt a closeness and very welcome!
Shanghai is very modern and a far bigger city than Singapore, and we found its old world charm delightful - the grand european architecture/buildings, mixed with the chinese style buildings and quaint shikumen homes and alleys, all a wonderful and fascinating mix.We loved wandering the streets and felt quite at home, the only main difference being the noise level was a lot higher as there were always so many people around and so much traffic! Although we travelled on our own, we had a fair share of tourist trap attractions and authentic local experiences, and enjoyed them all!
We also visited the nieghbouring Suzhou and Hangzhou famed for their beautiful gardens and lake, and of course had a fascinating time at the World Expo. For the 3 days we visited the Expo - an average of 400,000 people did too, making the average waiting time at popular countries' pavillions 3-4 hours long (Japan and Germany's pavillions was 5 hours wait on one of the days!!), so we decided to skip the countries that we've ever visited, or will likely have a chance to visit, and went to those pavillions of countries that we may never get to visit in real life. That brought us to fascinating North Korea, Iran, Morocco, Turkey, Iceland, some of the South Pacific islands, some of the Africa nations, middle east nations and so on - totally awesome experience!! Well I'd be scrapping all of these photos soon, but for now, a summary layout of highlights from our trip :

It was hard to have to go back to work and school respectively right after the holiday, it's only been a week since we're back, but seems a lot longer now! I had completed two more layouts from Hokkaido trip, will continue to work on these before I start with the rest of Shanghai photos.

This one is when we visited the morning market in Hakodate - you'd never see fresher seafood! There was this tub where squids were swimming around, and if you ordered, they cut them up (raw) (still alive I think- yikes!) and serve it up to you then and there. We passed.

Credits: fish by Dianne Rigdon, alpha by Kristin Aagard

And this layout is just of the many photos we took just strolling the snow-covered streets - totally fascinating to us, awesome really, never seen that much snow, that first day was so joyful, like the first time in Disneyland!

 

Credits: Background papers by Wild Dandelions, string an mittens by Cinnamondesigns,winter word by Dani Mogstad

This template is now available as a set in the store HERE