By Yang Mei, China
In 2007 I suddenly fell ill with chronic renal failure. On being told the news, my Christian mother and sister-in-law, and some Catholic friends all came to visit me to preach the gospel to me. They all told me that I only had to go to God and 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 form of psychological crutch, and I was an upstanding state school teacher, a person who was educated and cultured, so there was no way I’d start believing in God. So I turned them down and started 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 didn’t improve. 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 and that curing illness was just a question of finding the right process.
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 do new work, which involved issuing truths to judge and cleanse people. This was a phase 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 stuff in the book was 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 improve a jot. 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 diagnosed drug poisoning from all the years of taking large quantities of medicines. I first spent a week in the county hospital, was then transferred to a military hospital in Beijing where I was treated for a month, and finally ended up in 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 wasn’t there any improvement in the problems with my eyes and legs but my kidneys were getting worse due to all the drugs I’d been taking. 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 been found sorely wanting when faced with 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 the pain and suffering, I often got lost in thoughts like these: “Why have I got so many illnesses and why can’t they be treated with drugs? I believe 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 cry when no one was around. 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 …
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