I’m a family physician as well as a food blogger on ieatishootipost.sg.

People don’t like to talk about death, but as a doctor, every week I encounter people to whom I have to break bad news.

One of the most certain things about life is death.

At your deathbed, you will know what your life really was – whether you lived a meaningful life, or whether you wasted your life away.

If you live life just going through the motions – every day you wake up, you go to work, and then you come back home and you’re so tired, you go to sleep.

And every day is the same thing. It’s the same sort of pattern. You’re sort of on a journey but you don’t really know where you’re heading.

In a sense, if you’ve lost the meaning and the purpose in your life, if you’ve lost hope that life will get better … you’re not living life to the fullest.

And it’s almost like a form of death.

That’s not life. Life is more than that.

More than food

As a food blogger, I go around reviewing food. But I do a bit more than that.

Rather than just going to a certain store and criticising them when they are not good, I try to help.

So I sat down with this young man, I analysed his wonton mee and then I said to him: “Oh, you know, you have to change this, you have to change that.”

And so we were having this conversation, and that’s when I found out about his real situation, and why he’s selling wonton mee.

So he told me that a few years back, he owned a big company, and he was renting out cars. But he became suicidal because he lost all his money at the casino. So he was trying to build his life again by selling wonton mee.

I felt that he was at a point in his life where he was trying to find a way out.

So I said, why don’t you come to church with me?

So the next day, he was in church with me. During the church service, he started to tear, he started to cry, and he told God that his old life was not going well and he wanted a new start. So he accepted Jesus into his life.

That night, he told God: “I don’t know what happened to me today. But I’ve been a chain smoker for many, many years since I was a teenager. If You are real, stop my smoking. But don’t take three weeks. Or else I will think it’s me and not You.”

The next day, when he picked up his cigarette, he couldn’t smoke anymore. Because he said that the smoke just tasted horrible. And that was the start of a new life for him.

Now he’s really found hope, because his family is fixed. He’s now got a job, they managed to buy a house, and life is starting to have a lot of meaning and a lot of purpose.

And in fact, he goes back to the prison to talk to other young men, telling them: “Hey, if you’re in a rut, there’s hope for you.”

When there is hope, there is life. When there is no hope, it’s death.

So if you want to find out about the hope that we all have, can I invite you to the Celebration of Hope which is happening on May 17 to 19 at the Singapore National Stadium. I hope to see you there and I’m really hoping that you’ll find life and life in abundance.