By Jermain Chua

In July 2010, I had the opportunity to participate in a program known as Touch of Harmony, representing the Christian faiths.

Touch of Harmony is a cultural exchange cum community service collaboration between Jamiyah Singapore and New York University (NYU). This program has been held every other year since 2004, with a group of NYU students being hosted by Jamiyah Singapore in one year and Singaporean students (one from each main religious denomination) to be hosted by NYU in the following year. This program aims to expose us to New York and its culture and hopes that by observing and participating volunteer work there, we can form a focus group or think-tank when we return to find solutions to social problems that affect Singapore.

My most memorable experience in volunteering was at a soup kitchen at The Church of Holy Apostles, which has been providing free meals 5 days a week for anyone who chooses to come during lunchtime, and for 28 years! It was a great experience to serve the throngs of people (whom the church refer to as their “guests”) who came. There were many volunteers there; some are also students, some are retirees who volunteer their time regularly, what stuck me most is that they all serve diligently and with a smile. I really came to understand what President Monson shared about Service--that it is “a formula for happiness! … a prescription for contentment, for inner peace—to have inspired gratitude in another human being.” Although we were all tired out from standing and serving the whole morning, the other students and I all felt the same spirit of contentment and happiness that comes from making a difference in another’s life.

It was a nice change to never have to explain what “Mormons” are to Americans but I have a rather hilarious experience with a female Interfaith minister who exclaimed, “I am not surprised that there are Christians in Singapore but wow! There are Mormons too?!” And I was fortunate to be allowed to go to Church on the two Sundays that I was in New York. I attended the Mandarin-speaking Canal Street branch in the first week with Andrew Woo, who happened to be interning in Manhattan for the summer. It was a small but homely branch and they were very warm to us when they heard that we are Singaporeans because Dawn and Kelvin Goh had attended and served faithfully in that branch before they moved. Coincidentally, the RS president and her counselor came to visit that branch that morning and it was interesting to find that I can help translate the RS lesson for them.

For the last Sunday, the group planned to go to a Columbian Festival at Queens. But in response to my request to attend Church and not go for the festival, the people from Jamiyah agreed to compromise to come to sacrament service with me in return for my participation in the festival. We attended the YSA ward this time round and I really felt that Heavenly Father had it all set up for a good missionary experience. The speakers gave talks on missionary work and they shared about what we should share to others—our core belief that we have a loving Father who knows us all by name and has a plan for each of us, and that if we are obedient, if we listen and follow, we can gain the highest, most exalted form of happiness we can ever find on earth and beyond our time on earth. The YSA ward sang amazingly as well and the spirit really touched me and the hearts of my Buddhist and Hindu friends as they told me how much they enjoyed the hymns and they loved the closing hymn “We are all enlisted” because it was “catchy”!

Even though our meeting houses are not grand or ornate as some of the churches in New York (as I “warned” the Singaporeans not to have too high an expectation), it is where we worship and where we learn and grow and fellowship. I am so grateful for the gospel in my life. I know the gospel is true, and I have personally felt how it has affected and changed my life for the better. There are so many different truths out there with all the different churches, but the gospel provides us with simple and powerful truths—that we are children of God and we are all here for a purpose—to learn, grow and serve and ultimately to return to our Heavenly Father again.