Ng Hui Ing has been praying for her parent’s salvation for the past 30 years. On the final day of a 10-day Fasting and Prayer Challenge she had embarked on, they finally received Jesus into their hearts. She shares her testimony with City News.
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (2 Chr 7:14)
This is the verse that Eileen Toh, the pastoral head of the Intercessory Ministry and Harvest Kidz, shared when she introduced the 10-day Fasting and Prayer Challenge to the two ministries in October. Pastor Eileen challenged her ministry members to consecrate themselves before the Lord in those 10 days and to focus on Him.
Prayer meeting online during the Circuit Breaker.
“When Pastor Eileen talked about this challenge, she encouraged us to pray and fast, to seek God for the breakthroughs that we wanted to have in our lives,” said Ng Hui Ing, 45, an intercessor who took up this challenge. “The only area I wanted a breakthrough in was my parents’ salvation.”
For that reason, Hui Ing took up the challenge and chose to fast from coffee. “Because I cannot do without coffee,” she said candidly. “I can go without food but I cannot go without coffee. When I’m stressed, I will run to coffee, my comfort drink. In fact, I wasn’t so confident of going 10 days without coffee, and I didn’t want to have to break the fast halfway through, so I only committed to doing four days of fast from coffee. I would do a 12-hour fast for the remaining six days.”
Besides praying for each of their own personal breakthroughs, the team also prayed for the nation and the church. Hui Ing recounted that Pastor Eileen set a theme for each day and gave them a set of devotional readings. Madeline Chua, Hui Ing’s team leader in the Intercessory Ministry, also initiated nightly online prayer meetings for her team to pray together according to the theme of the day.
HER PARENTS RECEIVED SALVATION ON DAY 10
Hui ing experienced caffeine withdrawal in the first two days, which made it hard for her to focus at work. “Something in the devotional reading spoke to me: it said, “Every hunger pang, every fatigue, every caffeine headache is a reminder for us to turn to God and to cry out to God for the things that you are seeking Him to do in your life.’ Every time I have a headache I remember this sentence. So instead of reaching for coffee, I turned my attention to God and cried out to God. This time it was specifically for the salvation of my parents.”
Hui Ing has been praying for her parents for the past 30 years. When her father’s health deteriorated a few months back, the need for salvation had become more urgent. “My father was sick, and I wondered if he would ever get saved. My friend suggested that I asked Pastor Maria (Tok, CHC’s Dialect Service pastor), to visit my parents. But I had brought them to church many times and they said no to accepting Jesus every time. I was afraid that if they said no to Pastor Maria, they would miss the last chance God gave them.”
But the Holy Spirit came and reminded her that God’s hands are never too short to save. “His love and His mercy for our loved ones is beyond our understanding,” she says. “So, I repented and said, ‘Yes, I shall not stop asking. It will not come to a point where God will say, ‘They have said no too many times.’”
When Madeline heard that Hui Ing’s father was sick, she came to visit him. “She encouraged me to lay hands and pray for him but I struggled,” Hui Ing confessed. “It was easy for me to pray for others but when it comes to my father, I found it a challenge.”
Nevertheless, Hui Ing tried. “So this one night I thought I should just do it. I told my father in Chinese, ‘Pa, I pray for you’ and he replied, “Okay lo“. I just prayed a short prayer in Chinese. And then after that when I said ‘Amen’, surprisingly my father said ‘Amen’ too. I was quite surprised. After the first time, it got easier.”
Hui Ing was encouraged and she got Madeline to arrange for Pastor Maria to visit her father on the morning of Oct 9. However, he developed the flu the day before and had to be tested for COVID-19. “That meant he had to be isolated until the results were out,” she explains.
Thankfully, the results came back negative, but they had missed the appointment with Pastor Maria. Hui Ing decided then that, together with her husband, she would share the gospel with her parents and ask them if they wanted to receive Christ.
GOD ANSWERED THE PRAYER SHE HAD MADE FOR 30 YEARS
On the evening of Oct 10, the last day of her fast, Hui Ing and her husband sat down with her parents. Her husband started sharing with them about Jesus and how He protected his mother when she was battling cancer. After the sharing, he asked if they wanted to receive Jesus.
“I was quite surprised that they were not resistant this time. Before this, whenever we asked them, they would always say no. But this time around, they automatically closed their eyes and repeated the sinner’s prayer after my husband,” she recalls.
“The scene of my parents sitting on our sofa and saying the sinner’s prayer—I will remember it forever,” says Hui Ing. “After the prayer, my mother’s eyes were still closed. And she kept saying, ‘Thank You, Jesus, thank You, Jesus’ on her own. I was really very touched. I knew that God had moved their hearts.”
Her parents’ salvation took 30 years. “’It happened on the 10th day of the prayer and fasting challenge. In fact, when I just started this prayer and fasting—of course, there is this expectancy and the hope that God will answer my prayer—but somehow after 30 years of not seeing any results, I wondered if it would really happen. But God is really so good, He has shown me that I should not underestimate His mercy. It really is beyond what I can comprehend.”
Daniel 10:12 is a verse that spoke to Hui Ing in that 10 days of fasting. “Then he said to me, ‘Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words.’”
She now understood that her prayers had never been in vain. “This was a revelation to me: when our breakthrough doesn’t come immediately, it doesn’t mean God hasn’t heard our prayers. From the very first time I prayed for my parents, my words were heard and they were sent to heaven. It’s just that along the way there was resistance.”
To all those who have been waiting a long time for an answer to their prayers, Hui Ing says, “We should not be wary and not lose heart, but keep on going.”
Hui Ing (back, center) with the prayer warriors of the Intercessor Ministry.
