Wang Yi
My wife said to me in a dry voice: “Let’s get divorced. Our life can’t go on like this. We have run out of money and you can’t do any labor anymore. How will you feed our child and me?”
I asked her, puzzled: “Divorce? Even if you don’t think for me, you should think for our child. She is too young to lose her mother.”
But my wife replied: “Think for our child? Who thinks for me? The situation is such that I can’t think too much about it.”
Then I asked her again: “If I had 200,000 yuan with me now, would you still divorce and leave me?”
“Of course not,” she answered.
“Do you still have any conscience?”
“No,” she replied coldly.
My wife’s words made my heart extremely distressed. I really could not believe that she was the one that once vowed solemnly to share with me both joys and sorrows until old age.
I used to have a happy family.
My family was not well off, but I found a wife who loved me. I remember in 2005 when we got married, I asked my wife: “My family is poor, won’t you regret marrying me?” She said: “I won’t regret it my whole life. I marry you because you are good and that’s what matters. As for money, it’s merely an externality which will come and go. Now that I have chosen you, I will share the bitter and the sweet with you. No matter how difficult things are in the future, I will always hold your hand till we grow old.” After I heard her professions of love, I was so moved. At that moment, I felt I was the happiest person in the world.
After we got married, there were almost no quarrels and fights between us and she was very respectful to my parents. My relatives and neighbors all praised me for having found a good wife. A year later, we had an addition to our family, our lovely daughter, which made us feel incomparable happiness and joy. In order to give my wife and daughter a better life, apart from working overtime in the factory to make more money, at home I also actively made delicious food for them to eat. This way, our whole family lived a joyous life. Seeing my beloved daughter and my kind and wise wife, I felt so satisfied and could not help but feel glad in my heart that I had found true love.
I got a disease and sought treatment everywhere but to no avail.
When my daughter was over one year old, I always felt exhausted and very sleepy. After going to the hospital for an examination, I was diagnosed with ascites due to cirrhosis and being infected with hepatitis B virus carriers; this disease was infectious. I was stunned and could hardly believe my ears then, thinking: “How can I have this disease at such a young age? My child is yet so young, how will we make it through the days in the future?” But my wife consoled me: “Don’t worry. Science is highly developed nowadays, so there will be a way.” Her words brought me some comfort and I nodded in agreement.
With my wife’s encouragement, I looked everywhere for folk remedies and took both Chinese medicine and Western medicine. After over a year of treatment, we went through all our savings but my illness never got any better. My wife then showed a complete change in attitude toward me, starting to cold-shoulder me. But considering that because of my illness, I had got her involved in trouble, I thought I should show understanding of her feelings. Thus, I tiptoed around to maintain my relationship with her so as to keep this family together.
One day in 2008, when relieving myself in the bathroom, I found myself passing bloody stool. Then I spent seven days in hospital on a drip before the bleeding stopped. The doctor told me: “Your disease is rather serious and you need an operation. Otherwise, you won’t be able to do any work in the future. It seems like you can continue living for three years at most; you must know this. In addition, the operation carries great risks.…” Hearing his words, I felt my mind went totally blank.
After my wife learned that the operation would cost a large amount of money and it would be not necessarily successful, she began to give me the cold shoulder. My parents, seeing my condition, had no choice but to borrow from our relatives and friends and we finally scraped up enough money for the operation. To be on the safe side, we found a doctor by going through connections. After learning about my condition, however, the doctor told me: “Your disease is really serious. It seems to me that there is no need to have this operation. It will cost you money and cause you suffering, and moreover, there isn’t much hope of you getting better.” After I heard his words, I could only resign myself to my fate. In the following days, my wife was all the colder to me and I lived in the midst of pain and helplessness.
My wife left me heartlessly.
“I will divorce you, with or without your agreement.” My wife’s heartless words pulled me back to the reality and made me feel that there was no way to get her to change her mind. At the same time, her words also made me lose all hope in life. I thought: What’s the point of living like this? I would rather die than live this way. But I had second thoughts: “If I do this, won’t I harm my child? Besides, what about my parents? They worked hard to bring me up. When I fell ill, they borrowed money everywhere just to enable me to live on. I can’t hurt their heart.” In desperate straits, I agreed to divorce my wife. The moment I held the divorce certificate in my hand, I was in excruciating torment and felt so desolate. … At that time, I truly experienced that human relationships are fickle and the world is treacherous. Just as the oft-heard sayings: “There is no true love in the world,” and “The couple did actually like the two birds of the same forest that flew away separately when the disaster impended.”
Dogged by misfortune, I began to give up on myself.
Before long, my father passed away. The continuous misfortunes made me dispirited and weak, feeling powerless to support myself anymore. Since I got sick, my father had become the pillar of the family, but now, he died, which made our life even more difficult. Additionally, my relatives and friends didn’t want to have any contact with us; they all avoided me like the plague. I tried to do some temporary job to make a living, but nobody dared to hire me for fear of my infecting them. At that time, I was in total despair, feeling that I was good for nothing. The various setbacks caused me so much pain that I didn’t want to live anymore. I started to give up on myself and, despite my illness, drank and smoked so as to anesthetize myself and drown my sorrows. After a period of torturing myself in this way, I really wanted to kill myself to end it all. Just when I was living helplessly in pain and despair, God’s salvation in the last days came upon me.
I accepted God’s work of the last days.
It was one day in December 2011. The biting north wind was blowing and it was so cold that I was shivering. I was chopping wood in my yard when there came a 70-something aunt who asked for my mother. Later, she told me to come inside and said to me in a gentle tone: “Child, I have known what happened in your family. Since we don’t have God within our hearts, we are harmed by Satan and live in pain. Today all the sufferings befall us is all from Satan. Only God can relieve our pain, and only God’s words can solve all our difficulties. Believe in God and He will help you.”
Then she read me a passage of God’s words: “When you are weary and when you begin to feel the desolation of this world, do not be perplexed, do not cry. Almighty God, the Watcher, will embrace your arrival any time. He is watching by your side, waiting for you to turn back. He is waiting for the day your memory suddenly recovers: becoming conscious of the fact that you came from God, somehow and somewhere once lost, falling unconscious on the roadside, and then, unknowingly having a father. You further realize that the Almighty has been watching there, awaiting your return all along.”
After hearing God’s words, I felt warm in my heart and my eyes filled with tears. Through His words, I felt a mother’s urgency of longing for her child who had long been lost to return to her side. I recalled that after I had the disease, my wife, relatives, friends, and the worldly people all rejected me. However, this old aunt, despite the freezing weather, walked more than 50 miles to preach the gospel to me. She didn’t despise me but read God’s words and fellowship the truth with me. This was really my good fortune. Originally, I had lost faith in life and was completely disheartened. But God didn’t despise me, this sick person; instead, He used His words to awaken my depraved heart, giving me the hope and confidence to live on. Just like this, due to my disease, I fortunately received God’s work of the last days.
God’s words eliminated my misunderstanding of him and I gradually got better.
In the following days, I read God’s words whenever I had time. However, due to my illness, sometimes even a little housework would exhaust me, and there was often blood in my sputum. When I saw that, I was scared that I might bleed a lot and my life would be in danger. Unknowingly, I lived in negativity, thinking: “Is the God I believe in not a God who saves man’s life? Why does my health not improve?” At the point, I remembered the words the old aunt told me: “Everyone who has just started to believe in God will encounter Satan’s disturbance, such as getting a sudden illness, a misfortune befalling our families, or being laughed at and slandered by others. This is because Satan does not want God to gain anyone. At such times, we need to pray to God and ask Him to strengthen our faith.” Thus, I knelt before God and prayed: “O God, I’m very passive and weak now. I live in illness and feel scared. May You enlighten and guide me so that I can understand Your will and do not live in pain anymore.”
After prayer, I read the following words of God: “When sickness happens it is due to God’s love, and His good intentions are surely behind it. Even when your body endures suffering, take no ideas from Satan. Praise God in the midst of illness and enjoy God in the midst of your praise. Do not lose heart in the face of illness, keep seeking and never give up, and God shall shine His light on you. How faithful was Job? Almighty God is an all-powerful physician! To dwell in sickness is to be sick, but to dwell in the spirit is to be well. If you have but one breath, God will not let you die.”
God’s words made me suddenly see the light: Right! Without this illness, I wouldn’t have come before God, nor would I have received His salvation in the last days. Wasn’t this God’s great love coming upon me? Although I am not well yet, I have clearly felt that I am much better than before. At the moment, I also realized that those timid and fearful thoughts were Satan’s trickery. It wanted me to have doubts toward God, and lose faith in and betray Him. Satan is so malicious. But God used Satan’s deception to do a service so as to perfect my faith in Him. This was God’s almightiness and wisdom. After this experience, I understood God’s earnest intentions and no longer misunderstood or doubt Him. Afterward, when I felt unwell and met difficulties in life, I would consciously pray to God and read His words. Soon, my situation would be better and I could face my illness and the difficulties I encountered optimistically.
Gradually, my health got better and better, and so was my mood. When I walked in the street, people in and outside my village, seeing me in high spirits and ruddy health, all said that I seemed to have become a different person, nothing like someone who once had an illness. I knew it was God who saved me from suffering and enabled me to live in the light. Now I recall that the doctor once said I would survive for no more than three years. However, after nearly ten years have passed, I am still alive, and moreover, have recovered from my illness. It is really due to God’s great power.
I came to know why there is NO true love between husband and wife.
After I experienced God’s love and salvation for me, I read God’s words even more hungrily. Unconsciously, from His words, I understood many things I didn’t know previously. For example: As to whether there really was true love between husband and wife, I saw God’s words say: “‘Man has been so corrupted by Satan that he no longer has the appearance of man.’ This phrase has now gained slight recognition from the vast majority of people. It is so said because the ‘recognition’ here is merely superficial acknowledgment as opposed to true knowledge. … All of you are familiar with the word ‘betrayal’ because most people have done something to betray others before, such as a husband betraying his wife, a wife betraying her husband, a son betraying his father, a daughter betraying her mother, a slave betraying his master, friends betraying each other, relatives betraying each other, sellers betraying buyers, and so forth. All of these examples contain the essence of betrayal.” “Why does a husband love his wife? And why does a wife love her husband? … What kinds of intentions do people really harbor? Is it not in order to satisfy one’s own plans and selfish desires?”
Through comparing what was exposed in God’s words to my own experience, I realized that the nature of us who were corrupted by Satan is betrayal. Take my wife and me for example: At first, when our family was rich and peaceful, my wife treated me very well and I thought she really loved me. But later, when I had an illness, which cost all of our savings, my wife’s interests were affected, so she heartlessly asked me for a divorce. Thus, our relationship as husband and wife came to an end. Being treated in this way by my wife, I detested her and took revenge on her by not allowing her to see our child. I thought that since she gave me a hard time, I should, in return, do the same thing to her. I did not have any tolerance, patience, or understanding. What I had done was a display of my selfishness and maliciousness. Now, the revelations of God’s words made me understand the truth of mankind’s corruption by Satan. Gradually, I came to have some understanding of my wife; I hated her no more and no longer prevented her from visiting our child. Thank God! It was God’s words that resolved my hatred for my wife and led me to live in a more and more relaxed way.
Later, I performed the duty of hosting brothers and sisters. They not only didn’t cold-shoulder me but supported and helped me. I felt God’s true love and thus offered thanks and praise to God from my heart.
Conclusion: Only God has true love.
I used to believe that finding a good wife meant finding true love. Through experiencing God’s work, my wrong view was corrected and I came to know that only God has true love for mankind. Thinking of my past experiences, I felt it was really unforgettable: When I was ill and in desperate need of help, my wife heartlessly left me. Being unable to bear the misfortunes of my family and the disdain of worldly people, I abandoned myself to despair and thought of death as an end to my woes. Just when I was at my most desperate, God’s salvation befell me, saving me from the brink of death and allowing me to lead a happy life under His guidance. God’s love is selfless and true. I have resolved before God to seek truth to repay His great love. All the glory be to God!
No comments:
Post a Comment