I have been wandering outside the church of Christ, feeling that God is so far away from my life. Although I have been attending Church services for many years, I have not tried to feel God’s love. Life seems to be the same with or without God’s presence. All these years, I felt that I can handle everything all by myself, and I have no need to pray to God for anything. How wrong I was! Looking back, all these would not be possible without God’s work and love, and I only start to realize this until now.
But all these years God has not abandoned me, instead, he has given me chance after chance for me to be close to him. The latest chance came when my Mother was diagnosed with a rapidly growing cancer. We were all nervous and worried. But God brought brothers and sisters of our Chinese Baptist Church to our home. They prayed for us and shared our burden. Pastor Jane drove my mother to see the doctors and explained the diagnosis in details to us. At Sunday services, all members of the church prayed for her. Their love and care gave us tremendous comfort and strength, and greatly relieved our worries. As a devoted Christian, my mother was also calm, because she found peace and faith from the Lord. Once again God showed his might. In the subsequent exams, the doctor told us that her cancer, although a bad one, didn’t spread, so she only needed a local radiation treatment. This was the best result we could hope for. All these made me to start to feel that God is indeed real, and his love is everywhere. I started to rethink my relationship with the Lord.
Once I started to look, I realize with much surprise that God has been showing his work among my family all these years, and we have always been under his love, only that I was too blind to see. A few years ago my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but because of God’s care, his cancer was completely cured, and has shown no sign of coming back. My wife graduated from school in 2002, when the job market was at its worst, but she landed a job quickly and has been working ever since. As for me, my company has been sold four times, and has had at least ten rounds of layoffs, but I sailed through all those difficult times without a scratch. All these could not be simply attributes to luck. It is only through God that these are possible.
2 Corinthians 5:17 says: Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Today I am standing here, praying to God to forgive my sins, and Christ accepting me into His family, and becoming a new person. I will still have questions and worries, but I am willing to learn to be a Christian, and to grow my faith in him!
By
Qing Liu
2017/10/29