Testimonies of Faith | Returning to Life From the Brink of Death (Part 1)

By Yang Mei, China

In 2007 I suddenly fell ill with chronic renal failure. When they heard the news, my Christian mother and sister-in-law, and some Catholic friends all came to preach the gospel to me. They told me that as long as I turned to the Lord, my illness would be cured. But I didn’t believe in God at all. I thought that illness could only be cured through scientific medical treatment, and that any disease that couldn’t be cured by science was incurable. After all, was there any power on earth greater than the power of science? Faith in God was just a kind of psychological crutch, and I was a dignified state school teacher, a person who was well-educated and cultured, so there was no way I’d start believing in God. As such, I turned them down and began looking around for medical treatment. Within a few years I’d been to virtually every large hospital in my home county and throughout the province, but my condition still hadn’t improved. In fact, it was getting worse, but I stubbornly clung to my own way of looking at the situation and insisted that science could change anything, that curing illness was a process that takes time.

In 2010 a sister from The Church of Almighty God came to preach the gospel of God’s kingdom to me. She said that the Lord Jesus had returned to the mundane world to perform new work, which involved issuing truths to judge and cleanse people. This was a stage of God’s work designed to thoroughly save mankind, and was also mankind’s last chance to be saved by God. I still wasn’t willing to accept all this, but because of all the failures and frustration that I’d encountered over the previous few years seeking medical treatment, my attitude wasn’t as unyielding as it had once been and I allowed myself to be persuaded to take a book of God’s words from the sister. But, at the time, I certainly didn’t believe that the words in that book were truths expressed by God. I still maintained that only science could change my fate, and thus continued to believe that only drugs could improve my condition. Eventually, I was ingesting more drugs every day than I was eating food, and yet my condition didn’t show even the slightest sign of improvement. I lost count of the number of times the sister came to my home, but I still refused to believe in God. This went on for about a year.

Then one day, out of the blue, my vision in both eyes went blurry and both of my legs became so numb that I couldn’t walk. The doctors said that my symptoms were the result of drug poisoning from taking large quantities of medicine over several years. I first spent a week in the county hospital and was then transferred to a military hospital in Beijing where I was treated for a month. I was then transferred to a well-known traditional Chinese medicine hospital in Beijing to receive TCM treatment. But these 2 months of treatments did nothing to improve my condition. My primary doctor even asked the retired former head of the hospital’s neurology department to come and take a look at me, but there wasn’t the slightest improvement in my condition. Then I heard my future daughter-in-law mention a doctor in Yunnan who was famous for being able to treat difficult and complicated conditions like mine. After various twists and turns, I managed to be taken there in a wheelchair. But after being treated for nearly a month, not only did my condition fail to improve, but the drugs I was taking for my eyes and legs actually exacerbated my kidney disease. Feeling beyond help, and in great discomfort, I decided to go home. After that, I gave up all treatments and drugs for my eyes and legs in order to protect my kidneys.

During that period, I felt that there was absolutely no hope for me. I often thought about how I’d put all of my faith in science but science had proven to be utterly ineffectual in the treatment of my disease. After any hope I had that science could cure me was destroyed, I felt extremely depressed and had a complete breakdown. I had no idea how I was going to go on with life. In the fog of pain and suffering, my thoughts often ran wild: “Why have I suffered from so many illnesses and why can’t they be treated with drugs? I believed in science and trusted in science, and did my best to seek out the best treatment, and yet nothing worked. In fact, my condition just got worse. Could it be that science really can’t save me? Could it be that there really is a God in this world? Is the fate of every person really in God’s hands?” No matter how much I thought about these issues, I couldn’t come up with any answers. During that period, I lived in great pain and suffering every day, and every time I thought about my being a useless invalid I would secretly break down in tears. I felt that I was involving my family too much and I didn’t want to be a burden to them anymore. On more than one occasion I wanted to end my own life but I was afraid of death. So I just took each day as it came and waited for death to come to me …

One day, my husband saw the book that the sister from The Church of Almighty God had left for me and opened it. He saw the following heading, “Did You Know? God Has Done a Great Thing Among Men,” which immediately grabbed his attention. So he read out the following passage for me: “The work of God is something that you cannot comprehend. If you can neither fully grasp whether your choice is correct, nor can you know whether the work of God can succeed, then why not try your luck and see whether this ordinary man may be of great help to you, and whether God has indeed done great work?” (The Word Appears in the Flesh). This short passage was like a jolt to my heart! The phrase “then why not try your luck,” in particular, kept reappearing in my mind. It was like a shaft of light shining down upon my desolate heart, and it seemed that I could see a glimmer of hope of staying alive. I urgently made my husband read out another 2 passages of God’s words, which contained truths about God using His word to judge and cleanse people and transform their life dispositions. All this was completely new to me, and even though I didn’t really understand the full significance of what was being said, I could feel in my heart that these teachings were different from the gospel of the Lord Jesus that I’d heard from other people. They had mostly told me about how to gain grace, and that all I needed to do was believe in God and my illness would be cured, which I didn’t believe. But the words of Almighty God seemed much more practical, and the more I heard the more I wanted to hear.

After that, I had my husband read some of God’s words to me every day. In the book it said that religious people believe in God but don’t know God and even resist God, and that they often commit sins in the daytime and confess them at night. This was even more convincing to me because my mother, and two sisters-in-law were all Christians and the way they lived was just like God’s words described. They really did commit sins and then confess them and then commit them again. That’s when I had a spiritual awakening: Is this really God’s voice? If it’s not God, then how is it that the author understands the religious world so well? Unbelievers don’t understand, the great and famous haven’t a clue, and even religious people themselves don’t realize that they believe in God but also resist God. The more I thought about it the more I felt that the words in the book were not things that people could express, and that they probably were the utterances of the incarnation of God in the mundane world.

Only a few days later, the sister who had originally preached the gospel of Almighty God’s kingdom to me heard that I was back at home after being in the hospital and came over to my house, accompanied by another sister, to preach the gospel to me again. This time I was aware of the voice of my conscience telling me: “I’ve become an invalid but the sisters haven’t abandoned me in disgust and have even come to preach the gospel to me again and again. This is something that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to do. Anyone else would have forgotten about me long ago.” In my mind it was very clear that this kind of love must have come from God, as it can never be found in the mundane world. As the saying goes, “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” and that day I experienced this profoundly. That my family stayed by my side was something that they couldn’t avoid, but for these people, who were totally unrelated to me and who had no ulterior motives or conditions, to come regularly for over a year to preach the gospel to me and put themselves out for an invalid like me, showed how amazing their faith, love and patience really was! I was truly moved by God’s love, and from then on had no reason to refuse God’s gospel anymore. As a result, my husband and I both accepted God’s work of the last days.

In June of 2011, my husband and I formally began our church life in The Church of Almighty God. Because my eyesight wasn’t good enough to allow me to read on my own, my husband usually read out God’s words to me, and during church meetings the brothers and sisters also read God’s words to me. Sometimes when I was by myself I’d also listen to hymns. Later, I found the reason for my illness and suffering in God’s words: “Where did the pain of birth, death, illness, and old age present throughout the life of humans come from? What caused people to have these things? Humans did not have them when they were first created, did they? So, where did these things come from? These things came after humans were tempted by Satan and their flesh became degenerate. The pain of the flesh, its afflictions and its emptiness, as well as the extremely miserable affairs of the human world all came after humans were corrupted by Satan, from when Satan began to torment people; the result was that they became more and more degenerate. The diseases of humanity grew more and more profound, and their suffering became more and more severe. More and more, people sensed the human world’s emptiness and tragedy, as well as their inability to go on living there, and they felt less and less hope for the world. All this came after Satan’s corruption. Thus, this suffering was brought down upon humans by Satan, and it only came after they had been corrupted by Satan and they had become degenerate. … This is why it is possible for you to have illnesses, troubles and to feel suicidal, and at times also feel the desolation of the world, or that life has no meaning. That is to say, this suffering is still under Satan’s mastery; it is one of man’s fatal weaknesses” (“The Meaning of God’s Experiencing the Pain of the World” in Records of Christ’s Talks). God’s words were spot on in describing how the suffering brought on by the pain of illness was so great that I had lost all the will to live and wanted to end my life. But God’s words said that all that pain of illness and suffering was due to Satan’s harmful ways. At first, I didn’t really understand why God said these things, but after reading more of God’s words I gradually came to understand these truths.

To be continue… 

Source From: Gospel of The Descent of The Kingdom