Creasmans World

Today the Parlato Family picked us up and took us to a national park that had lots of hiking trails along a river with several small waterfalls. Although it was low season for water, it was a beautiful hike and gave the boys lots of opportunities for climbing.
We had a leisurely day walking and [...]

This year we decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve in public. There is a huge crowd that gathers downtown to watch the fireworks at midnight.
We invited some friends, packed some snacks, and got on the subway to head downtown. Tens of thousands of people! All shapes and sizes! What a lot [...]

Life is all about people…
Since we don’t have extended family in Singapore, we want to share meaningful times together, like Christmas, with friends.
Today we had some friends come over and share Christmas dinner with us.

Here’s what Christmas morning looks like at our house…
We like to share one present with each other at midnight on Christmas Eve, then get up and listen to Christmas music and open presents and be lazy on Christmas morning…
Today we went to our church worship service after opening presents : )

Last year, I (Jim) realized that I love Christmas parties. I love the cookies, the music, the festive environment. I love mingling, seeing friends. I love singing Christmas carols and sharing stories with each other about meaningful Christmas memories. And I love reading the Christmas story by candlelight.
But we don’t normally [...]

We live on the fifth floor of a 25 story building. Virtually all Singaporeans live in high rise apartment buildings, and our neighborhood is full of them.
The areas surrounding the high rises are full of all kinds of shopping. Within a hundred yards of our building is our supermarket, bakery, hair and nail [...]

There are two things that are noticeably different in Singapore in the month of December.
One, it feels cooler. No, the leaves don’t change colors and we don’t bring out our winter wardrobes and wear sweaters everyday. Living ON the equator means the days do not get shorter or longer through the year (sunup [...]

Our first year in China, in 1997, we didn’t think we would have a Christmas tree. We had a few humble decorations, but in those days Christmas was not well recognized in China. In our city of a few million people, we saw maybe half a dozen signs of Christmas around town. [...]

It doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving without a family dinner…. but we still have plenty to be thankful for.
Kimberly decided to invite friends to come have a taste of the American tradition, learn about where Thanksgiving came from, and share some fellowship in our apartment. We had friends from church and the neighborhood, both foreigners [...]

Here we are in our living room, with the dining room in the background…

CRM Singapore is governed by an Executive Committee of eight elected members, with me serving as President. Today we met for the afternoon to talk about International Expansion.
Part of our vision for CRMS is to birth apostolic mentoring teams in every country in Asia. We want to reproduce what we provide in Singapore, [...]

I held a one day seminar today to teach mentoring philosophy and skills. Church Resource Ministries is primarily about mentoring Christian leaders. We create small groups and one-to-one relationships to focus on spiritual renewal, character formation, and leadership development. The result is not only leaders that benefit in their own lives and ministries, [...]

In Church Resource Ministries Singapore (CRMS), our goal is to not only help Christian leaders grow in their spiritual lives and leadership effectiveness, but to empower them to become mentors for others.
The primary way we do that is through training our graduates to facilitate our peer mentoring network curriculum, called Focusing Leaders.
This week, I spent [...]

A local newspaper (the tabloid!) ran an article on Tyler today. He is of local interest because of his ability to speak English with a local flavor, unlike most foreigners. His couple of clips on youtube have gotten nearly 280,000 hits!

The Singapore American Football League season has come to an end. The three Creasman males will now go into an extended period of mourning, and unproductive Saturdays…
Both of the boys had tremendous seasons. Tyler (11th grade) had his second year of starting quarterback in the 4 team league. He had a couple [...]