Whatever Have You Got Yourself Into?

By Wang Jiao

Recently I had a long-distance phone conversation with an old friend of mine whom I hadn't seen for twenty years. When I mentioned my religious faith, she was shocked, "Whatever have you got yourself into?"

Why I felt dissatisfied

She went on, "I often tell my sixteen-year-old son that you need to have dreams. Look at your Auntie Wang Jiao. She wanted to be a soldier; she wanted to come to Beijing; she wanted to go abroad. And all her dreams were later realized."

I gave a bitter smile as she talked.

Thank you for bringing up my past dreams of being a female soldier and wearing an army uniform. That dream is still vivid and it was very real. But it was brief too. As soon as I got to college, I completely abandoned that particular dream. I even felt quite glad that I hadn't become a soldier after all, or I very probably wouldn't even have got to college.

Life is full of twists, however. After several years, I came to Beijing in fulfilment of a different dream. Not only did I really get to wear an army uniform, it was the much-envied uniform of an army official.

My dream of going to Beijing had also come true. As for going abroad, that was not part of my dream to begin with. It was the outcome of love. So things were not so bad after all! College, love, marriage, going abroad, re-union, you name it! All my dreams came true. And then I began to dream my next dream, and that was either to find a job or to earn a master's degree as many other visiting scholars' wives did.

About this time, however, that I began to feel tired of it all. What have I been doing? Am I going to spend the rest of my life just doing this?

Did I have any reasons for complaint? At seventeen I graduated from high school just at the time of the restoration of the college exam system and quickly become one of the lucky ones on campus, as I had not had to go to the countryside for "re-education". Following my college graduation, I fell in love and was married. Oh, what a suffocating and fearful happiness my husband and I shared and experienced! Then came my life as a graduate student, followed by my enviable job in one of Beijing's top research institutes. Then my son was born and off I went to America.

I didn't know why I was still not satisfied. I just knew I was not satisfied. I was most unhappy.

Wise men say that there are two great tragedies in human life. One is not to get what you want; this is called disappointment. The other is when you do get what you want, and this is called despair. Oh wise men! What a concise analysis of human life ! But why have you not suggested some way out of the dilemma?

My feelings as a newcomer

After my husband went abroad, I struggled on in Beijing for two years. In order to obtain the necessary paperwork for my application, I made repeated visits to the local police station, the office of Job Transfers of the Army Reserve, the office of Beijing Job Transfers, theBeijing Human Resource Exchange Center, the Public Safety Bureau, the city municipal court, the office of a notary public, the Friendship Hospital where my husband worked, the residents' registration office, and so on.

Encountering one obstacle after another made me sick and angry. At that time, to go overseas was something exciting and happy. But I kept saying to my friends in Beijing, "When I've finished going through all these hassles to get my final approvals, I want to have a good cry. Then I want to get myself drunk and go off to sleep for two full days. I haven't had much sleep, you know."

So I finally arrived in America. Even while my past misfortunes were still haunting me, new troubles came along. But in Tennessee I met up with a Christian friend who told me to hand over my heavy burdens to the Lord Jesus. The Lord said, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Mt. 11:28-30) My Christian friend also told me not to worry. "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" (Mt. 6:26)

I was confused at hearing such nonsense. Was she mad? She didn't look like it. I took another look at her. She seemed to have a kind of joy I didn't have, while I seemed to have a misery she didn'share.

Several years later, Jesus really did take my burden from my shoulder and helped me out of my sorrows. My days became happy and gay.

Landlords by chance

During our settling down period in America we often had to deal with landlords. Shortly after we moved to New York City from Tennessee, we rented a house from a Taiwanese couple. After three months we realised that this community wasn't at all suitable for us, although it was a very good area. So we decided to move.

We found ourselves a new house, but we didn't know what to say to our landlords about our early termination of the lease. So we came up with a lot of excuses. We expected to have some trouble and only hoped they wouldn't be too hard on us. To our surprise, they didn't give us a hard time at all. Instead they refunded all the unused portion of the rent. They also said that they wanted to pray for us and to take us to their church. So this was a Christian family.

Although we soon moved away and left them, from that time we started to go to church once in a while. I also remembered what the landlady had said to me, although once again I didn't understand her words, "We had problems like this too when we first came to America. But we lived a life of faith."

What was more inexplicable was that I was also beginning to have some faith in my heavenly Father. When my boss told me a year later that he had failed to secure a research grant and therefore my job in the lab would have to be terminated at the end of August, I didn't feel that this was a big blow at all.

Evolution and creation

My high school years had overlapped with the Cultural Revolution. I had never seriously studied any of the subject courses, including evolution. Even so, I still couldn't forget how we learned in our biology class that humans had evolved from apes, although I had a hard time understanding just how monkeys had managed to become men.

More importantly, this evolutionary teaching had left an element of pain in my heart. One day when I was trying to trace back my own ancestry, I saw a disgusting hairy monkey. Emotionally I could not imagine that thousands of generations ago it was one of my ancestors.

Then one day I learned that God created men. He had also also created the birds in the sky and the land animals, all according to their own kind. Man was to care for the birds and the animals (Genesis I). So no wonder men were much smarter than animals. This theory was startling and exciting. So if I wanted to ask who I was and where I came from, all I had to do was to look up to God's glory as well as to the dignity and nobility of man as created by God.

So did I have any particular trouble accepting all this? Technically, yes, but not as much as I had with evolution. This is because our daily experience tells us that purposeful creation is much more likely than purposeless impacts. Men have many limitations, yet they can still "create" delicate artwork and immortal literary works. So why could an Almighty God not do it all?

Furthermore, according to the evolutionary principle of the survival of the fittest, men are supposed to be selfish, ruthless and violent. But then where does conscience come from? How about compassion for the weak?

I do not understand evolution and therefore I will not try to declare a war between evolution and creation. All I have is my own spiritual reflections on the two theories and my subsequent choice between the two.

The turning point

Two years after I began going to church, I was baptized, in October 1996. Perhaps somebody may label me an idealist because Christian doctrine seems to have provided me with the kind of perfection and eternity I had been seeking.

Maybe I can't deny being an idealist. Maybe I can't deny that from the very beginning Christianity has appealed to me with its perfection. However, if a beautiful concept alone could bring me ultimate satisfaction, then communism would do the job because I still believe that communism is idealistic concept.

Besides, if God had never been relevant to my life, then I would have left him even after my baptism and after an incident which I refer to as the turning point.

It was early 1998, about a year after my baptism. From my Sunday school classes, I had learned many of the great doctrines. For example, baptism symbolizes my old self being nailed to the cross with Jesus and my new life being united with his resurrected life. It turned out that my old self was precisely the thing I disliked and wanted to change.

A year after my baptism, I found I hadn't really changed much. I liked to read testimonies about the Lord being with believers. For instance, a Ph.D. student suffering from long term insomnia accepted the Lord. One day in faith he threw away all his medications and, miraculously, from that day on he was healed and was able to sleep well. For myself, however, insomnia had never left me. Besides, I had heard that new believers were under the Lord's special care and that their prayers were often effective. But none of my two prayers became reality.

At that time, I thought that perhaps God Almighty had nothing for me and that a beautiful Christian life was not for me either. So I stopped going to church and refused to think about anything religious.

But all that time I felt that something was wrong. It seemed as if God would never be willing to give me up. Or that, having tasted his heavenly grace, I would never want to give him up.. Anyway, my days were full of confusion until one day I finally grabbed the phone and called a mature Christian friend. We met at his house at seven that evening to talk about faith.

When I got to his house he asked me what problems did I have. I said, "God does not seem to have anything to do with me. I want to leave Him, but I can't." He replied, "The only way to communicate with God is through reading the Bible and praying. Scripture reading is listening to God and praying is speaking to God. It is best, before your Scripture reading, to start with a short prayer that God will reveal himself to you and will help you understand."

We sat there talking for over an hour. I don't remember most of what he said, except for this one thing, "You must discipline yourself. Read the Bible for at least thirty minutes every day." Another one shocked me, "Actually, I can't really help you. God does everything. If he hadn't been working in you, you wouldn't have come here to talk to me tonight."

Since then I have started to read the Bible daily. I used to believe that North America was a favorable environment for Christian believers, who are able to go freely to church every Sunday, and that should be quite sufficient for them. Actually, this is not true. Right after I started listening to God's word through daily Scripture reading, He started to change me and I started to experience the beauty of being with God. The insomnia demon that had bothered me for years just quietly disappeared. One day I suddenly realized it had been a while before I lost sleep at night. I wanted to pinpoint just when I had started to have good sleeps, but I couldn't remember the exact date.

An old pot

One day I went to the clinic for a routine mammography checkup. Before the procedure, the nurse asked me if I was pregnant. I said no. Then I added that I wasn't sure. The nurse said she couldn't do the procedure on me if I wasn't sure because of the radiation.

So that day I went to have a pregnancy test. The result was positive ! That moment would have been wonderful for a couple with high hopes. For me, though, it was shattering. We had taken necessary steps to prevent us from having a second child. We didn't want another burden to come in and compete for our time and we didn't have enough money either.

At that moment, my first response was was to have an abortion. But I also thought I should consult at least two pastors or elders before I did anything. In fact, I was just looking for any remote chance of support, as there was nowhere in the Bible that would permit abortion.

I finally gave birth to the child because the Bible requires us to treasure life. Today, Joseph is three years old. In fact, from the day he was born, he has never been a burden; on the contrary, he is the joy of our family. Daddy calls him the fruit of joy; his big brother also loves playing with him. We all have plenty of stories to tell about him.

Financially, we are not wealthy, but we have enough. In fact the concept of wealth is relative. When you are rich and you want to be even richer, you will be poor in satisfaction and joy. To have enough implies that we are satisfied with what we have and so we are happy. While wealth is not an unworthy goal to pursue, it is a pursuit that is not worthy of taking up your whole life.

When my husband was getting ready to go to America in 1989, we had two pots of the same size. One was a new pot made of shiny stainless steel and the other was a used one of gray aluminum. I told my husband to take the old one and I kept the new one... We thought he would be back in a couple of years and he could throw the old one away in America. Two years later, however, the one we threw away was the new one in Beijing because I was also going off to America. In contrast, the old pot followed us around for several years in America until its handle finally fell off.

We all love ourselves and we all love our families. But many times we are confused and we don't know how to keep the "better pot" for ourselves.

The story of the old pot and the story of my younger son make me understand God's words: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isa. 55:8-9)

Epilogue:

Dear friend, this is what I got myself into and how it happened. In fact, every believer has his or her own particular experiences. The important thing is that we all do come to believe in Jesus. Wouldn't you like to make the same decision? It will be the most crucial decision of your life.

The author was born in Sichuan. She left home at seventeen and lived in various places. Now she works in a diagnosis lab in the state of New York.