Berea’s Testimony

I was born in the lakeside hospital in Wenxi, Shanxi of China. I especially like the name of my birthplace “Wenxi” which means “heard good news”! After I was born, my father still worked in another city. My parents couldn’t move together. Only my mother took care of me，yet she still had to work. She was a middle school Chinese teacher. At that time, no one dared to hire a nanny, so my mother often put me alone on the big bed at home. I often cried and cried at home for hours and I was famous far and wide. Later I would crawl, and it was even more dangerous. My parents had to hand me over to my grandparents to raise me. When I was less than one year old, my grandparents took me to their home to raise me.

My childhood was the most brutal era in our history, the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese families were broken during that time and many people were killed. But we were in a hidden place. I only remember that one time my dad brought my brother and me to the city. All of a sudden we heard many gunshots. My father quickly told us to hide and pushed us under the table. After the gunfire stopped, my father rushed us back to the village, my grandparents’ home.

When I was seven or eight years old, I went back to the city to live with my mother. Later, after studying hard for several years, I graduated from high school and went to Peking University. After I got my BA, I entered graduate school, also at Peking University. My dreams were being realized one by one, but I was not happy. I was not satisfied. I was heading toward studying for a PhD, but I could not see that the road ahead would be any different. So I gave up. Romance became the new idol in my life. But I failed at romance miserably. I felt life had no meaning, and I lost my appetite. My mind was exhausted, and my body became very thin. In 1998, after I graduated from graduate school, I went to one of the farthest cities from Beijing, the city of Shenzhen. I worked in the university there, where I taught Chinese students modern Chinese literature and taught foreign students Chinese.

Shenzhen is the city beside Hong Kong. It was the first city in China to have a free-market economy. Foreigners started to come to China to visit and study. So some Christians came from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to study Chinese in my school. I was their teacher. For two and a half years, all my students were Christians! All of them shared the gospel with me and gave me Bibles and a lot of Bible materials. They were always very friendly. Their stable and friendly attitude impressed me. One of my students and his wife invited me to their house for dinner and prayed for me. But I rebelled a few days later.

At this time a new student, Alicia, arrived at the university. She was a single Christian from the Philippines. She approached to me too. She spent a lot of time listening to my troubles, so I opened my heart to her. One day, she said to me, “You know your life is very unhappy. Why don’t you leave the darkness and come into God’s kingdom of light? Can I pray for you?” I thought, “I do not know how good God’s kingdom is, but I do know that the way I’m going will not getting better.” So, I decided to allow Alicia to pray for me. When I closed my eyes, Alicia laid her hands on my head. A warm sensation flowed through my body, and deep peace came into my heart. This peace was so deep that I almost fell asleep! Alicia said to me: “You go ahead and sleep; I’ll leave and lock the door for you.” I fell asleep and slept like a baby, like I hadn’t slept for a long time! I hadn’t had a good sleep for several years. Alicia came to visit me twice a week to answer my many questions. She also taught me the basics of the faith. Since then, my life has completely changed. Jesus Christ has become my Guide and the Lord of my life. Later, I learned that Alicia always fasted and prayed before she came to visit me. She persisted in this for a long time until I had completely turned my life over to the Lord.

After I believed in Jesus in 1990, I met one of my student’s good friends, an American. We got married in 1991. I became a United States citizen in three months in 1992, and we went back to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We attended the Revival Christian Church in Hong Kong. I went through a lot of spiritual healing and we often knelt down at the altar before God, crying out with tears, confessing our sins, and receiving the wonderful love of God. We often caught the last subway back home. We were full of the joy of the Lord every day.

In 1995, our first son was born in Hong Kong. In 1998, our second son was born in Shenzhen. We started to attend a house church in Shenzhen. The pastor was very good at training disciples. He had a very systematic training program. He and his wife and in-laws counseled us in all aspects of our lives: marriage, family, parenting and so on. My husband and I began to lead a small group. In 1999, I returned to Beijing with my husband and sons. We began making disciples. We baptized more than 100 Chinese in our family’s bathtub. We built a small church. At the same time, we attended the largest international church BICF in Beijing for 14 years. For the last three years at BICF we served on their lay leadership team. Also, for seven of those years, I also managed a Christian bookstore in Beijing. In 2013, we returned to the United States, and in 2014, we went to Jakarta, Indonesia to teach for 2 year. In 2018, I entered CIU Seminary to study the Bible.

I’ve been longing for years to go to seminary to study the Bible for a couple of reasons. First, because while leading a Bible study group in China for many years, I found that the popular Chinese translation of the Bible has quite a lot of verses with unclear meanings. Second, because God spoke to me in a dream 15 years ago. In my dream the end time was coming very quickly. Everything was in a state of emergency. I asked the Holy Spirit in the dream, “What should I do?” The Holy Spirit replied, “Go to your home! Study the Bible!” I woke up very puzzled. I thought, “If the end is coming so soon, what’s the use of studying the Bible?” Now I feel there is nothing more important than knowing the Word of God. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). If we do not know the Word of God very clearly and deeply, how can we really understand His will? As the Word of God says, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

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