At age 13, Norma Sit literally lived in the dog house for two months. So strong was her faith that she defied her dad she loved and moved out of the home.

At age 24, she walked away from the faith “in anger and defiance”, and into 28 years of living a “backslidden lifestyle”.

In her studies and ascension up the corporate ladder, this overachiever and multitasker has spearheaded numerous initiatives, and her trophy cabinet creaks under a hoard of accolades – not just for her contributions to finance, but also as a woman who made a difference to the arts.

“When I told God, that I didn’t need Him anymore and did my own thing, I still had success through sheer drive, sheer determination, willpower … whatever you call it,” Sit, now 59, told Salt&Light.

Graduating from university, she topped the engineering faculty with first class honours, and later won a scholarship to do an MBA, also in Australia.

Norma today, a mother of two grown-up children, with her dogs.

Out of 700 applicants, she was among those cherry picked as a cadet AO (admin officer) when Singapore Airlines was looking for their future batch of corporate leaders. She worked with the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), before being headhunted to Visa International – her first of many forays into payments. She later worked for the former chairman of EDB in a private equity firm sponsored by Temasek Holdings.

Somewhere along the line, she took a brief detour from corporate life and started an art school for children. 

Around the same time, she started social enterprise Youth Life Ownership, which helped the disadvantaged, hungry for opportunities, climb back onto the first rung of hope.

Then she closed these chapters of her life to start digital payments platform, Numoni (pronounced “new money”), to serve the unbanked of the world.

It was here that she started coming back to God bit by bit.

And when she left the company she had built, she said: “I was really brought down to my knees. I could only pray.”

Norma during her Numoni days. She was in the outskirts of Lucknow, India, studying how payments and loan repayments are made.

Salt&Light sat down with Sit to find out why “God had to bring me to my knees”, and yet through it all, even in those 28 years she was lost, she found that “He never stopped being Father. He never stopped being God”.

Did you come to faith at an early age?

I grew up in Kuala Lumpur. My mother sent me to a little Sunday School near our home, thinking it was a free school where we could get stickers and hear stories.

The leaders were very kind and they loved us a lot. I still keep in touch with them.

Norma at age 12.

I gave my life to Christ at age 11. I read that if you die before you come to the age of reckoning, you go to heaven. But beyond that, if you haven’t accepted Christ, you go to hell. And I didn’t want to go to hell.

But if a child can think that way, they have already reached the age of reckoning. I wasn’t able to do meta thinking, which was to think about my thinking.

Why were you living in the dog house?

Because I did not want to eat food offered to idols or bow down to the idols in my home. 

My dad said: “Then you have to stop calling me Dad and you have to move out of the house.”

So for about two months, I lived in the storeroom next to the kennels where Dad bred pedigree dogs.

My mum would sneak out food to me.

She pleaded: “Can you go say sorry?”

So I went to Dad and said one of those sorries which was not a real apology: “I’m sorry you’re upset with me. But I am a Christian and will follow Jesus. And I will call you Dad because you are always my dad.”

How did someone so fervent in her faith walk away from the Church?

My dad was a very attractive and charming man, and everywhere he went, women would just crowd around him like bees to honey.

I think we have to be careful how we articulate certain things when we pray for others. Because someone praying for my dad during the chaotic time for my family used the word “evil” to describe him. It is never the right thing to call someone’s parents evil. Mistaken, yes. Wrong, yes. But not evil.

(Today, he and my mum are Christians.)

I was angry and upset. I loved my dad and so I walked away from the church. I thought I would rather burn in hell with my dad and that would be okay.

For 28 years after that, I lived a backslidden life.

What did that life look like?

I had a very terrible mouth that would use nasty swear words every half a minute. 

When you are not in living in a relationship with the Lord, you are not happy.

You might believe you’re happy – partying, attending cocktails and dressed in a $500 pair of shoes. But you’re not.

I did walk into church once or twice. But it was cursory. There was no sense of belonging, or wanting to be back.

Did you feel that God had forsaken you?

I was driving down a road in Malaysia in the 1980s. It was pitch dark and something told me to stop, turn the car around. When I looked back, there was no road. It was a highway that ended nowhere. My car could have sped off the ramp.

There were other incidents in my life when I could have died, especially when I was a child under age seven.

Five times in your life that this kind of thing happens, it cannot be a coincidence. It’s got to be more than just luck.

It is really a testimony of how the Lord protects.

He has called you out, he has identified you. He has known you. And He never lets you go. (Isaiah 43)

Where did your drive to succeed come from?

I wanted to work, I wanted to do well, I wanted to succeed. I wanted to show that women can succeed in our own right. In my own right – not in God’s right. 

Norma making a presentation at a symposium to remake Hoi An as a tourist destination, in Vietnam, 2010.

So I was pushing myself, getting myself into all sorts of committees and doing all sorts of things to show that I was capable of leading.

Tell us about fundraising to set up Numoni.

In 2010, my former boss from Kuala Lumpur, came to me and said: “I don’t know why you’re doing art. You should be coming back into payments because the mobile phone is changing the entire world.

And you’ve got to get back into payments because you are a payments person with your experience in Visa, ez-link cards, and starting up all these joint ventures for internet payments.”

Norma, when she was CEO of QB Pte Ltd, the company that brought the ez-link card into non-transit payments that including payments at McDonald’s (above), and Coke vending machines.

Together, we set up Numoni to empower the people who are underbanked or unbanked. About 80% of people in the world don’t have bank accounts.

Without bank accounts, there is no way they can borrow, save or accumulate wealth, and therefore remain poor.

We did very well and we won many awards, and the press kept picking up stories on us.

At the ceremony to receive the National Infocomm Award 2014 from PM Lee Hsien Loong, I was in the room with other winners – DBS, LTA, and the people who designed the entire energy system for the Marina Bay area. Their budgets for one project was more than what my entire little bitsy company was worth at that time.

At the start in 2013 when we had to do fundraising to take the company forward into proper corporatising and hopefully into a listing, my co-founder told me: “If you can’t raise the funds, it is game over.”

And I was thinking to myself: “I’m a dead duck.” I had put so much money into it, and borrowed money as well.

Receiving the award for Best Individual Contribution to Financial Inclusion in Asia, 2016.

So I prayed: “If you really help me to raise funds for Numoni, I will come back to church.” I did not say come back to You.

Then one night, when I stopping to buy something on the way home, I parked along a small slip road.

The lights on the street were not working. A man came out of the bushes. He was dark-skinned and the only thing I could see were his eyes and his teeth.

He said: “Can you give me some money?”

He kept following me and repeating it. I kept telling him to go away.

Eventually, I asked him what happened. He was a foreign worker. His employer had abandoned him.

So I took out $6 – the only money in my wallet and told him: “$2 you take bus back. $2 you take bus tomorrow to MOM. $2 you go eat chicken rice.”

I told the Lord: “You have a funny sense of humour. I’m the one who needs to raise cash or I’m going to lose the company, lose my house and everything. And you send this guy to frighten the heck out of me, so that I give him money.”

I drove back to my condo, parked the car, and walked past the swimming pool. It was a large area, completely open. Then $10 came floating down from nowhere and landed in front of me.

I picked it up and ran after a woman 5 metres in front of me, saying: “You must have dropped this.”

She said: ‘No, it’s not my money. It must be meant for you.’ Those were her words.

“So I took the money and put it aside with the note: “God’s money”, and the date.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked God.

As for my fundraising, I was supposed to raise S$3 million. I ended up raising S$5 million.

So, I always see it as God’s finger, because when I gave away $6, He gave me back $10. The ratios are the same.

What happened when you started going to church again?

The first sermon was on how Boaz, as kinsman-redeemer, extended his garment over Ruth.

It was like how the Lord has redeemed me and He has never ever, ever, ever, ever, left me. 

I was crying, crying, crying at service.

I said: “Lord, I know that this fundraising is You. It is not me. I am smart, but this is not my smarts. It is your finger on it.”

Later, during our second round of fundraising, I sat down for a meeting with a potential investor, and immediately offended him by asking him a question about a preacher in his church. I was then still rebellious against any type of church authority.

I only found afterwards that he wanted to get up and leave.

But the Holy Spirit told him to sit and hear me out. 

How did you know it was the Holy Spirit?

There was a real sense of peace and stillness in the room. When the Holy Spirit touches you, you get goosebumps galore.

Secondly, the arrows that the Holy Spirit shoot into your heart will pierce between bone and marrow, take away all pretences and get straight into the matter at hand. Which was: I was attending to church again, but I was still not submitted.

I broke down.

Imagine this weeping CEO in the middle of a business meeting – where everything is supposed to be so cut and dried –  trying to win an investor.

We were in his financial services company’s meeting room downtown. It was so hilarious, it could only be the Holy Spirit.

I wasn’t crying about the company. I was crying about the presence of God in the room. It was just real, it was really real. We were praying and praising God in tongues – slightly audibly. One staff, a pre-believer, was wondering what was going on.

You cannot say when the Holy Spirit will move. You can’t set rules for Him. He decides. The Spirit God moves as He pleases.

The man agreed to make the investment.

We completed our Series B fundraising and we did quite well. I invited this person to be on my Board.

I also started attending the church he goes to. The first two sermons spoke to me. 

How did things start to go south?

Things started going wonky at work. It was like having a rotten egg at every corner – all at the same time. It was really really weird.

You’re the CEO, and even though you didn’t create it, you’re still accountable, and have to try to clear it up.

Then on January 1, 2017, the church’s New Year message about breaking out of shackles, hit me. And I knew I had to leave the company that I had invested so many years of my life. It was not just the money, it was the dream, the friendships, my people, the position, the accolades. 

I called up my chairman and told him I had to go. By the time I left, it was April. 

It felt like the pearl that you’ve given everything up for, suddenly ejected you. It was like the oyster just threw you out.

I went into severe depression. It took an emotional coach to show me that it was not just related to the loss of the company I founded.

What did you do next?

Within a couple of weeks, my classmate from when I was seven years old called me out of the blue.

She said: “I just came back from Maui in Hawaii. There are two places in Haggai Institute. Can you go? God told me to call you.”

If I was in a job, there’s no way I could have gone for a month. But I had nothing to do, so I said I’d go.

I was hoping God would speak to me, but was proud and arrogant and thinking that I would buy a plane ticket home if I did not like what I observed. There were so many rules to obey.

On the very first night there, I got lost in the complex looking for the laundrette. I saw our facilitators in the chapel, on their knees praying for us. I saw their love for us, people they didn’t know. Something about that scene broke me.

The scene that broke Norma: Her Haggai facilitators praying for the participants they didn’t know. “I could not take the photo from the front of the chapel door as they would have seen me. So I had to step one side to take it, to remember that God spoke to me: ‘See, they love you. They really love you.'”

Thereafter, the Lord broke me part by part. 

He showed me the pride in my heart. All my successes of the past and the failures were to be sacrificed to Him. He wanted to remake me.

Tell us about what you describe as the Joseph Prison you were in. 

A Joseph Prison is when someone who has authority and is favoured is cast down and demoted to the lowest of low. Losing friendships, money, status and self-esteem. Losing nearly all that seemed important and being reduced from hero to zero.

It was the place where I had to learn to listen to the Holy Spirit to regain a sense of who I am in Christ.

I felt I had lost everything that I’d worked for, and my life’s aims, hopes and ambitions. I lost my life’a purpose. God had much to teach me about my life’s purpose and who He is.

It was very torturous. Because for the first time in my life, I had no ideas. Zero. I had the desire to want to do stuff, but I didn’t know what to do, where I was going to go. 

What did God say to you?

God was saying “submit” because I was still prideful.

It was a series of events to peel off all our false selves.

During that period, I heard God tell me to build a crowdfunding platform for The Great Commission. 

And He provided: My estate went en bloc. For all the losses I had, He restored.

With Haggai facilitator in Maui, Betty Byanyima of Uganda (left). Norma and Rev Dr Rachel Ratha (right), a Singapore missionary in Mexico, are now Haggai facilitators.

I was learning to listen to the Lord, and being in submission.

And so Acacia Mission was incorporated, and I was trying to build the website myself.

I would go to bed at night saying: “Father, I’m stuck. I don’t know how to code this part. Can you teach me?”

The word would come when I wake up. “Search in Google for this phrase”. I didn’t know this phrase beforehand. And it would work. 

You can call it inspiration, and other people may say: “You just got your solution sleeping.” I call it my Jesus Factor.

In 2020, the website was ready to be launched. And then we hit Covid-19. 

What did He show you next?

Just before Good Friday, the Lord showed me two things: The centrality of the Cross and how it changed everything for all creation, and that whatever He has commanded me to do, He will bless. 

After Resurrection Sunday, He woke me up and said: “I’m going to open a door for you and you’re going to walk through it.”

I said: “I’ll trust you.”

The open door that Norma walked through led her to start equipping sessions via Acacia Mission MODS Zoom TV on Thursday nights with speakers from around the world.

On the same day, I got a message that Rev Gerard Seow of The Oikos Fellowship wanted me to speak at Pentecost 2020.  I took this as confirmation of the door to walk through.

I realised that the audience of a hundred plus people that had gathered virtually had a hunger for The Great Commission.

So I suggested to Pastor Gerard that I do this every Thursday evening. I bring my Haggai friends, and we equip believers in areas ranging from multi-cultural issues to laws and local conditions across multiple countries to street evangelism.

 We launched Acacia Mission MODS TV. My role is as host and programme organiser. So far, we have hosted speakers from at least 10 countries.

How do you see God’s hand leading you?

I used to do five year plans and 10 year plans. I no longer do that. He teaches me to rest in Him, to trust His Wisdom and His path.

To speak to Him and seek His face. Each day, I do what He speaks and carry that out.

When I was ordained this year, Rev Gerard played a video as the message, called Keeper of the Stream. The job of the Keeper is to keep on keeping the stream clear of debris and dirt so that God’s message and blessings can flow.

The message is: Do what He asks you to do, stay rested and contented. The one thing He asks you to do is that which keeps the blessings flowing to you, through you and to others.

This does not mean there are no questions or ambitions. But that all are brought to Him and subject to His Word and wisdom.

Check back soon for Norma Sit on finding her identity in Christ and not ludicrously expensive handbags. 

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