Every year at the Christmas Praise Worship, we would go to the cathedral in the city to celebrate the festival. Brother Luo Yongdeng would be very happy to sing with everyone on the stage. Although Brother Luo would always hold the book of Hymns, he had not learned a complete song after singing them for several years. He just stood among other believers, enjoying equality and love from God.
One day in 2017, when my husband went to a private clinic for acupuncture for back pain, I was at home preparing a Sunday sermon. Suddenly I felt a little uneasy. I thought I should go to the hospital and accompany him. So I turned off the computer and walked to the clinic.
Acupuncture is a slow job. I sat down in the consulting room and started chatting with the doctor. The doctor talked eloquently and said that he had helped many people already and that many people especially came to this clinic because of his good reputation. I turned to him and said, "Doctor, you heal the body, while God heals the soul."
The doctor quipped, "Do people really have souls?"
"Yes," I said, "when God created man, he breathed life into his nostrils, and he became a living man with a soul. He was Adam, the ancestor of mankind."
The doctor laughed as he worked, looking incredulous. In fact, I had preached the Gospel to him in the past for several times, but he never believed it. He never believed even when he was about to die.
Just then a man came in and sat down beside me. About sixty years old, he already lost his front teeth, and wore shabby clothes and dusty shoes. Later, I learned that his name was Luo Yongdeng, and that he was just visiting that doctor, because the doctor was his brother-in-law.
I left the doctor alone and began to preach the Gospel to him. I told him about God's creation of the world, man's rebellion, and Jesus' saving grace, and finally asked him, "Do you believe in God?" He answered briskly, "I do."
I thought he didn't listen carefully to me and just made a random reply. I preached the Gospel again, and then asked him, "Do you really believe in God?"
"I do." he said.
The doctor scoffed. "Finally you persuade someone to believe in your God."
"He is a blessed man," I said.
I led him through a decision prayer sentence by sentence, left my contact information, and asked him to come to the church on Sunday afternoon.
On the afternoon of the Lord's Day, Brother Luo Yongdeng came to the Christian meeting place. He sat on his stool shyly, looking around from time to time. I told another brother about him, who had known him before and said, "Is he here to just have some fun?"
Sometimes Brother Luo would call me and come to my house. He did not talk much, I would find some topics to chat about with him, such as repentance, not having idols and so on. He would listen to me quietly.
Once I asked him, "Brother, why do you believe when I try to persuade you to believe in God?"
"Because you have a point." he said.
Once, he called me and told me that someone in the village had died, and the family of that man asked a Taoist priest to pray to some gods. He asked me if he could attend the funeral and what he should not do, and he also asked the brother who had known him years ago about that. The brother later told me that Luo was serious and had truly believed in God.
His home was high in the mountains. Every time he went to the town to attend church, he would ride a motorcycle, which would take him about two hours back and forth. When I tried to visit his house several times, he said, "It's too far and too troublesome. Don't come."
The first and only time I visited him at his home was three years after his conversion, when he called me to say that he had had a stroke, and that he couldn't ride his motorcycle or come to church in town. I talked with several brothers and sisters about it and we went into the mountains to visit him with a red envelope (which contained five hundred yuan), some cakes and cookies.
His house was located halfway up the mountain in a small farmyard. It was a little dirty because there was no maid in the house.
There was a photo of his parents hanging in the hall of his home, and no censer or superstitious articles on the table below the photo. "Where's the censer?" I asked, pointing to the empty table.
"I took it somewhere else." he said.
I asked, "You are the only person in a village who believes in God. Do people laugh at you?"
He said, "Yes, but I don't mind about that."
We prayed for his illness and asked the merciful God to have mercy on him and heal him.
Thank God, about six months later, he was well enough to ride his motorcycle to the church again. Knowing his predicament in life, some of the members would give him some money and buy him some clothes. Brother Luo would take some jujubes, grapes, persimmon, bamboo shoots, honey and so on to the brothers and sisters according to different seasons.
By 2022, he had sporadic heart attacks and was hospitalized several times. The Sunday before his death, he came to church in town in the heat of summer. I saw him wearing a straw hat that day, so I gave him an old helmet because I thought it was unsafe for him to ride a motorcycle with just a straw hat.
When I saw him again, he was dressed and lying peacefully in his coffin. We gave him a Christian funeral at the funeral home.
This was goodbye in this life, but we would definitely meet each other again in a happy paradise. Then we will stop being mean, cringing, and shabby, and will be noble as princes, laughing and rejoicing with the faithful, and praising God who has given us life and breath and redeemed us from sin and death.
(This article is originally published by the Gospel Times and written by a volunteer evangelist at Yong'an Christian Church in Fujian Province.)
- Translated by Nicolas Cao
