January 6, 2003
(Clearwisdom.net) My mother-in-law is a very hard-working person, and she came to Canada to visit us about ten months ago. Both my wife and I practice Falun Dafa. Since my mother-in-law did all the housework for us, we could spend more time doing Dafa work. My wife tried to tell her about Dafa and she seemed to agree. However, every time we asked her to come with us for Dafa activities or group exercises, she always found excuses not to go.
My mother-in-law's situation caused me to think deeper. Master requires us to be a good person under any circumstances, but I did not do that. Lots of times I was spreading the truth about Dafa with an attachment of doing things. How could I explain the facts well in this way?
Last New Year we went to the US to visit my wife's brother and tell him about Dafa. We spent two days introducing Falun Dafa to him and explaining the facts, yet the result was not good at all. After we came back, I tried to look inward to find the problem, and realized we went there with a strong attachment of achieving a goal. In addition, we had the attitude that we were doing him a big favor spending the time out of our busy schedules to tell him the facts, which he disliked from the very beginning. As a result, he argued with every point we made.
It is very important that we consider people's particular situations, and introduce Dafa and explain the facts of the persecution to them from the angle of their interests and attachments.
Two weeks ago, my wife's brother came and visited us with his girlfriend. This time we just welcomed them and enjoyed the time together relaxing and chatting. In the first day and a half, my wife and I did not mention a word about Falun Gong at all. During the last half day of their stay, when we started the topic of Falun Gong naturally in our conversation, his attitude was completely different. Afterwards, he sent us an e-mail praising us, which was quite unusual from him.
In our daily life, our pure and righteous conduct has a great impact on our friends and coworkers around us.
At the beginning of last May, my company hired a researcher from the US who is Chinese. I did my best to help him learn our business and work environment. One day when several Chinese employees in my company chatted about Falun Gong, he had some misunderstandings about Dafa at first. When I told him I practice Falun Gong, he was quite surprised and explained, "Actually I don't really know Falun Gong. I hope you can tell me more about it. I know that you are a nice person."
A friend from Hong Kong came to visit us for a week. Due to my busy work schedule, I did not have time to sit down and talk to him until the last day of his stay. When I mentioned Falun Gong, he said my mother-in-law had told him a lot about it already. She told him that Falun Gong practitioners are great. Once we had activities in front of the City Hall and it started raining suddenly. All the Falun Gong practitioners voluntarily cleaned the square without anyone telling them or coordinating. She also told him that we did great last time when my wife's brother visited us. She said it is not true how some people claimed Falun Gong practitioners do not care about their families.
I was quite touched after hearing all of this. Whether we did well or not, our friends and relatives around us noticed and remembered.
Master told us in "Teaching the Fa at the 2002 Fa Conference in Boston,
"No matter how busy you are, you have to see yourself as a Dafa disciple; no matter how busy you are, you have to consider how you might affect those around you. Since April 25th of 1999 and after July 20th , the evil has used the scoundrel means of slander and put us on the defensive, causing the minds of numerous beings to be poisoned. In your efforts to save sentient beings you've labored so hard to allow people to have a new understanding of us. So when you don't do well, it's quite possible you are unwittingly undermining the efforts you've made and some of the things you plan to do. You are cultivators, whose conduct is [supposed to be] pure and righteous. There are so many people who think you're great just by having seen how you act. If we don't pay attention to our own behavior in our daily lives, everyday people will see our actions and, since they can't get to know you at a deep level such as by studying the Fa, they will just look at how you act. And it's possible that one sentence or one action of yours will make them unsavable or create a bad impression of Dafa. We need to think about these things."