Hi, my name is Ka Mun. My family immigrated to US from Hong Kong when I was 7. As long as I remember, my dad worked dual jobs for years and my mother worked in a restaurant where she stood for many hours a day. Their main drive in life was to work hard to provide for the family. Their hope was for my sister and I to obtain a college education so we didn’t have to end up working as hard as they did.
Fast forward to 2002, I graduated from college with a pharmacy degree. I had no trouble finding a job and was paid well. I was proud of my achievement and I also made my parents proud. I was also happy that their years of working were not done in vain.
It seemed as though I should be content with my life at that point, however, I wasn’t. I started to wonder what life was about. Working hard to provide for our loved ones is important, but that being the sole purpose of life did not satisfy my soul. I questioned the purpose of humanity’s existence and our grim and inevitable death. Life seemed purposeless and it made me very sad to think about it.
Thankfully, God knew my heart and started to pursue me. One day while I was browsing at the store, I came across a book that was titled, The Purpose Driven Life. To be honest, I was at the store shopping for music CDs (remember those?). When my eyes met the title of the book, my hand instantly picked it up, and I began to skim through the front and back covers. My heart got excited as I read that God knew me even before I was born (wow!) and that he has a purpose for me (really?). It was after that encounter that my spiritual journey began.
Shortly after, a family friend invited me to a Bible study. I began to learn who God and Jesus is. I was introduced to the idea of sin and how sin separates us from God. I learned that Jesus died for our sins as our atonement and that he was resurrected. After a few months of attending the study, my eyes were still spiritually blind because I couldn’t see myself as a sinner. I am not perfect but I also did not commit any crimes.
So I took a spiritual break for a little while until my grandfather died. My parents flew to Hong Kong to attend to the funeral arrangements. The day they flew back, I had a nightmare their plane was in danger and I woke up after I heard myself screaming to God for help. After my parents shared with me their trip overseas, I learned they had experienced a prolonged and very turbulent flight back. My parents told me they were actually very scared they were not going to make it back safely. It wasn’t until then I remembered my nightmare and how I screamed for God’s help. But I brushed off the possibility that God heard my cry for help and I quickly filed it away as coincidence.
Another year or so passed as I continued to attend Bible study and church service as a non-believer. In November 2004, I joined a group of volunteers at a church to pack food for a Thanksgiving outreach. I was very impressed by the genuine enthusiasm the volunteers showed during the early morning event. I told myself that the world would be a better place if everyone had this kind of love for others.
Little did I realize it was the love of Christ they had. That day, I decided I wanted to join them and live my life loving others. Over the next year, I started to look at myself differently and finally accepted I was a sinner. I embraced Jesus’s death as the only atonement for my sins so I can have the right relationship with my Creator. The world around me made more sense than ever in the eyes of a Christian. I found the answer to why we exist, and that is for us to love God back. I found the purpose of my life, and that is to live for God’s glory.
This Easter, I feel it is time to get baptized not only as an act of obedience but to publicly declare my faith in Christ Jesus.
— Ka Mun Dunavant, Baptized April 2019
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