I started serving at my home church, the Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston, when I was in middle school. I was encouraged to join the praise team, and played piano for our relatively new English service. Through the encouragement of my youth director, Sandy Liu, I also went on a mission trip doing a VBS program for Navajo people. Into high school, I continue to be involved with serving in student leadership, music, and various service activities. I loved to spend time at church and found myself using my free time there, looking for any kind of ways to serve.
While in a discipleship group with two friends, I began to understand how to apply my faith to my life much more. We took our religion seriously, and we vowed to dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to serve God and seek out how to honor him. Going to a mall to hand out tracks, listening to and playing Christian music, and doing any kind of service at our church was a normal part of our lives. Even when I spent a year attending Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, I continued to be involved in serving, music, and discipleship, there and at my home church.
After being rejected from my first choice college, Cornell University (New York), I decided to try attending a Christian college on a trial basis, before transferring out. However, when I actually got to Wheaton College (Illinois) I loved it so much that I decided to stay there. Without question those four years were the ones in which I grew the most spiritually, through teaching, experience, and relationships.
In college I was involved with many para-church activities and grew an incredible amount through being taught by Christian professors and by being in a Christian community. I also continued to serve in churches and ministry. Throughout the years my major shifted from history to philosophy and then to Biblical theology. I had come into college pre-med, switched to pre-law, and left thinking about being a professor in philosophy or theology. En route to a doctorate degree, I thought I might get a Masters of Divinity, for the sake of learning more about ministry yet still getting a degree that took steps towards a Ph.D.
I decided to enroll in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (Massachusetts) over Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Illinois) because my youth director from home offered me an internship at my home church beginning as soon as the year started. Somewhere during that last semester of college and summer following, it dawned on me that ministry was very important to me. I had always been involved with doing ministry in and outside of church and I realized "I really could just do this full time, for the rest of my life." It was in this revelation that I believe my calling to ministry was realized.