In a while, I will be baptized in the name of Jesus. Looking back on my growth in faith over the past few years, it's been quite a long journey.
In high school English class, the teacher played a video of Nick Vujicic's speech. He spoke of a heavenly father who loves and accepts you regardless of your height, weight, or appearance. As someone who had lacked affirmation and love from a young age, the video brought tears to my eyes and moved my heart. That was the first time I would like to seek God.
When I was young, my Christian relatives often took my father to church services, and he would bring me along. While the pastor preached at the altar, my father and I would doze off in the pews.
After the college entrance exams, I was admitted to Fujian Normal University, which provided me the opportunity to study in Taiwan during my third year at the university. However, I encountered two major crises during my university years: confessing my feelings to a girl I liked and being rejected, and becoming unpaid labor during an internship at a media company, ending up as a bottom-tier extra in society.
I sank into the depths of despair, questioning the meaning of existence. I needed a savior even more urgently than I did in high school. During my third year, our entire class went to Taiwan.
One day, I happened to pass by a church. I had a vague understanding of the stories in the Bible and was skeptical about the existence of God, but the pastor's wife encouraged me to pray to God. Throughout that year, I sang hymns with others without fully understanding their meaning, but I felt inner peace and occasional emotion; I listened to sermons sleepily for a year, only remembering the name of the righteous man, Lot.
Because I had experienced the warmth and acceptance of the church staff, I desired to find a church in Fuzhou as well during my internship in my senior year. Later, in a community near the university town, a teacher surnamed Chen led us in studying the Bible, and a foreign teacher often guided us.
I started attending Sunday services around the end of 2017. After the Sunday love feast, Mr. Chen would lead us in studying a small green book called "The Westminster Shorter Catechism," which repeatedly emphasizes one proposition—the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Initially, I didn't understand what it meant to glorify God, but gradually, I experienced His presence. I studied His precious word, the Bible, and refrained from breaking the Ten Commandments.
Gradually, the Bible no longer seemed like a mysterious book, and I could understand the sermons. I also opened my heart to share my experiences with believers at work in the youth fellowship. Gradually, I understood more doctrines.
Gradually, this shriveled wheat grain fell into the soil by the stream, and it is about to break its shell and sprout. God took five or six years to change my life.
- Translated by Abigail Wu
