Why I built this room.
I came to faith later, but once I did, I gave it everything. I served, I gave, I showed up. I was part of the Family Life Ministry and the Women's Ministry, on committees, at every event. I was doing everything a good Christian was supposed to do. And I was slowly, quietly hollowing out on the inside.
The noise was everywhere — not just outside, but inside me. I was producing so much for God that I had stopped being with God. There is a difference. It took me longer than I would like to admit to notice it.
In August 2023, my church — St Andrew's City Church — organised its first silent retreat. Rev Edwin Tan, our Vicar, had felt for some time that silence was a formation our community needed, and Julie — his wife, and my spiritual mentor — had her own quiet testimony of what God had done for her in past silent retreats. Her witness helped settle me. So I went — partly out of obedience to leadership, partly out of curiosity. I went in thinking I was sacrificing career time, family time, and a busy week to be there.
I had no idea how prideful I was, until I sat down in the silence.
I came armed with a long list — questions, complaints, all the unfair questions of Psalm 73. Why did things not turn out the way I wanted? Why does the wicked seem to prosper? What did I do wrong? I was Job in the ash heap, only quieter, and with a notebook. By the end of those days at Seven Fountains, Chiangmai — gently guided by Rev Simon and Sister Rinda of Listening Inn, who were our spiritual directors — the Lord had not answered every question on my list. He had answered the gist of all of them.
For the first time in my life, I experienced the gentleness of God — not the God I had performed for, not the God I had bargained with, but the One who simply waited for me to stop talking. I went thinking I was sacrificing. I left realising I had been the one received. The King had invited me. He walked with me, He worked with me — He showed me, in Eugene Peterson's words, the unforced rhythms of grace. It was — and remains — a privilege.
I have returned every year since. 2023 — His gentleness. 2024 — His extravagant love. 2025 — His call to restoration and homecoming, first to Him, and then to every path He has prepared: career, family, church, ministry, life.
None of this came to me alone. The books had been handed to me before I knew to look for them. The practices — Lectio Divina, the Examen, contemplative prayer — were taught patiently by people further down the road. What I once thought I had stumbled into was a 2,000-year-old tradition the Church had somehow stopped teaching to the people who needed it most. I had not found it. I had been led to it.
Young people. My generation. The ones who had been given every programme except the one that would change them.
The Hush Room was born from that realisation — and from the words of Jesus that would not leave me alone: "Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them." We had been hindering them — with noise, with programmes, with the assumption that depth was for another season, another generation.
I built this room so they could come.
