I had been asking God what was next. After years in the marketing industry, enjoying my job as I supported my husband in his full-time ministry as a pastor, I had known for some time that I needed to move from a life of success to one of God-defined significance. 

There had been clues over the months as I prayed and sought God for clarity and direction, but the answer only came clearly in November 2018, as I was putting my newborn daughter, Kate, to bed. From out of nowhere, God suddenly spoke, saying: “Do you remember what happened in Israel, and what I told you there?”

I did. Almost a year before this, I was in Israel with my husband and some of our church members. The moment God was referring to was the day we were visiting a well-developed neighbourhood. Our guide had invited us to see a bomb shelter that they had recently built within one of the houses.

As our group walked through the front gates and started going down a small stairwell within the compound, I remember being overcome by an unexplainable heaviness in my spirit. The minute I stepped in, something in me just froze and tears started rolling down my cheeks.

I could not comprehend why, so to compose myself I broke away from the group and told them to go ahead without me. As I wandered through the garden, I came across an area strewn with toys. Curious, I found a chair and took a peek through a small window of the building.

Inside, I saw many little children no more than 3 years old. That’s when I realised that this house was actually a school. We were visiting a bomb shelter built for the children here. By then, I was weeping again, but this time I could feel God speaking strongly into my heart: “How can a place so safe, be so dangerous?”

I thought about how I sent my own children to school daily and how the parents here did the same – but with the knowledge that an attack could happen at any moment. School was supposed to be a safe place, yet there was a bomb shelter specially built here because of the uncertainties of war in the region.

How can a place so safe, be so dangerous?

I left Israel with this encounter sealed in my memory, and went on a hunt for a career switch over the next few months. I was quite convinced then that God wanted me to leave the marketplace and enter the pre-school education sector.

That was until He decided to reveal His heart to me that November in 2018. “Yes, I remember,” I told Him as I felt Him ask about Israel. “You said: ‘How can a place so safe, be so dangerous?'”

“So what is that place?” He prompted. 

I knew He was giving me time to think, so I cradled Kate as I thought about it. And suddenly, like a lightning bolt, He shot it straight into my heart.

It was a mother’s womb.

This was the place He’d designed to be the safest – for life to form and grow from almost nothingness – but this very same place had also become the most dangerous to life. Where the most innocent of human beings could lose their right to live in the cruelest of ways, for whatever reason.

I knew then that it my call to respond and pick up the mantle to join forerunners in the bid to end abortion in Singapore. In the next few months, I left my job and founded The Heartbeat Project with my husband. The platform provides real-life stories and resources for Christians to converse about life and abortion.

We’re confident that we are going to save lives.

Looking back, I see how God has prepared me for this role in my own journey as His daughter, a sister to others, a wife, a mother and even my roles in the marketplace. Each stage was important in helping me gain the Father’s perspective of my identity and destiny – to walk in the fullness of life, that others may have a chance to do so too.

More than half a million babies have been aborted in Singapore since the 1970s. The Heartbeat Project serves to inspire the church to build a culture that chooses life and supports those facing unplanned pregnancies, so that every unborn child may have the chance to live life to the fullest.