I started studying English, a language I had shied away from since high school, at the age of forty when I decided to come to the UK for missionary work. I attended an English language institute, but it was not easy to juggle it with my pastoral duties, so I also studied one-on-one with native speakers from the Philippines via Skype, which was popular at the time. Inspired by this, and since we were already gathering at my home for dawn prayer meetings, we started using Skype to allow people from afar to join us online. We began this online gathering back in early 2011, so our church has been trying online meetings for 12 years.

During the time when all services and meetings were conducted online due to COVID-19, the Lord impressed upon me the importance of being trained to establish a personal prayer room. This means that in the last days, it might be difficult to meet not only offline but also online due to intense surveillance. Establishing this personal prayer room means cultivating a spirituality that enjoys God’s grace through His Word alone. It ultimately leads to becoming a worshipper who experiences God through personal meditation on the Word.

While reading the Bible often is necessary, what’s more important is listening to what the Holy Spirit says to me through the scripture I read. Looking back, I seem to have received a lot of training in personal meditation. The times when I hear God speaking to me the most and pray with all my heart are when I meditate on His Word. God speaks through visions, dreams, and direct voices in my heart, but the most common way is during meditation and prayer.

Therefore, if one can learn and experience meditating on God’s Word, they can lead an independent faith life. While this opportunity is available in our church, the place where one can practice and experience this daily is the ‘Bonfire Morning Meditation Meeting’. The name ‘Bonfire Morning Meditation’ was chosen to symbolize warming our hearts with the Word in the early, still chilly mornings after a dark night, to start the day with vigor. We used to conduct it via Skype, but from last week, we switched to the more accessible Zoom.

The morning meditation meeting is not like a regular dawn prayer meeting where I, the pastor, preach alone. When people gather around the bonfire, their hearts open naturally in its warmth, and they willingly share their lives in meditation. Even though we meet only online and may not know each other’s faces even after years, it’s clear that it’s a gathering in God’s presence, seeing how openly they confess their shortcomings, worries, and concerns.

I rarely get to meet our congregation members, and I always feel this is a pity. How wonderful it would be if everyone could get up a little earlier, open their doors, and come to where the bonfire is, to start the day feeling its warm embrace together. Then we, who have to live in the cold air every day, will gain the strength to live courageously, undeterred by the cold. Moreover, we could become people who warm others who are shivering in the coldness of the world. The effort of rising early in the morning will lessen the burden of the heavier loads we carry throughout the day.