(Minghui.org) In the evening after a busy day, standing by the window, I could see waning lights and people still busying themselves as if in a maze. I was overcome with emotion as I felt the urgency of saving sentient beings and the importance of cultivating ourselves well while shouldering such enormous responsibilities.
I often remind myself that, when facing the busy world filled with temptations and interference, I must not get too involved, and I should always measure myself against the requirements of the Fa and regard unpleasant things as cultivation opportunities.
I should study the Fa with my heart and dissolve myself into the Fa so that every particle of my being is immersed in Fa principles and everyday people’s things have no place in my mind or body. In my heart, there is only Dafa that guides me in cultivation, and sentient beings who desperately hope to be saved.
I used to work closely with a practitioner in our local area, but later he went astray and sold out quite a few fellow practitioners, many of whom were subsequently arrested. I heard that he'd mentioned my name in particular. I was under a lot of pressure at the time. However, I knew I must not let the evil win out.
It was a very gloomy day and drizzling when those practitioners were arrested. My heart was very heavy, but I carried on, doing what I should do. On my way to a practitioner's place to fetch a computer to install software, I kept sending righteous thoughts and remembered Master's teaching:
“If every Dafa disciple can think and act righteously as he goes about things and can look at things with righteous thoughts under any circumstance, none of you will become afraid when facing persecution. If that is how you are, who would dare to persecute you!” (“Teaching the Fa in San Francisco, 2005”)
It suddenly dawned on me that my life belongs to Dafa and sentient beings. I have come to this human world with a mission to save people who have been fooled by lies, and my life has nothing to do with the old forces.
Immediately I felt an invisible power within me connected to the Fa, and no one could shake my righteous thoughts. The feeling of anxiety disappeared without a trace.
My family members were terribly frightened by the mass arrest, and they desperately urged me to leave home to avoid harm. I calmly explained to them, in a way they could understand, what I thought.
They calmed down in the end and said to me, “We've had a discussion and realized you wouldn't be safe anywhere we'd want you to go. It's safer to have you nearby.” I knew then that the plot concocted by the old forces had fallen through.
Right when everything began to go well for me, my husband suddenly began showing symptoms of high blood pressure and diabetes. He became slow, couldn’t see clearly or read, and didn’t know to avoid cars when walking or to pay when boarding a bus. I rushed home and took him to the hospital. A few days later, I received news that a practitioner in a nearby city had been persecuted to death. This sudden turn of events left me not knowing what to do. However, I quickly wiped away my tears, set aside my personal tasks, and headed for the other city with a heavy heart, along with another practitioner.
When I returned, memories of the late practitioner’s smile were still in my mind. I started preparing materials both for reporting her death online and for local distribution. Right then, a teacher called me to say that my child was not studying well and misbehaved, and she asked me to go to the school. Before I finished taking care of this event, my sister, who was usually relaxed toward family, berated me and cried over a trivial matter. It seemed as if the troubles would never end. I had to divide my time between taking care of family issues and validating the Fa.
One day, a few other practitioners and I were discussing how to take legal action against the agency that had persecuted the practitioner to death when another practitioner who installed NTDTV satellite dishes came in. He said he wanted to install dishes in the neighboring city but did not know any practitioners there. At the time, only one other practitioner and I knew the practitioners there, but the other practitioner could not take time away from work. I had just come back from that city and to take care of both my husband and my child. I also had truth-clarification materials to prepare.
I proposed having the dish installer go to the other city himself to a certain practitioner who could coordinate the installation. The other practitioner scolded me in front of the group, saying I was too attached to my family and so on. Facing the incoming stream of conflicts, I forcibly held back my tears and wanted to explain myself, but I stayed silent. I was at the point where if one more person yelled at me or even comforted me, my tears would have overflowed. I felt a formless pressure; their words had painfully pierced a human attachment I still had not cultivated away.
When I got home, my tears did come down. Was it because those words were easy to say for people who didn’t have families, or did I really have that problem? I searched within myself and knew that my grievance was not solely because of their words. Under multiple sources of pressure, I wanted others’ understanding–understanding of my family’s difficulties, understanding that there were many things I had to take care of, including online reporting, editing flyers, editing text and multimedia messages, resolving urgent technical problems, and taking care of my family. I often slept very late or not at all, and I still had to study the Fa and do the exercises. All of them were important, yet I couldn’t tell others about this work and had to hold it all inside. Looking at the clock, I kept telling myself that I couldn’t waste time crying, but I just couldn’t stop my tears.
I thought of what Master said in Zhuan Falun:
“By the time his gong reaches his xinxing level, the gong has also risen to that level; if he wants to continue increasing his gong, conflicts will also become very serious, as he needs to further improve his xinxing.”
I also remembered Master’s words in “Dafa Disciples Must Study the Fa - Fa Teaching Given at the 2011 Washington DC Metro Area Fa Conference”:
“Some people are unhappy when they meet with unpleasant things. Then aren’t you a human being? How are you any different? When you encounter unpleasant things, it is precisely time to cultivate yourself, to cultivate your mind. Didn’t religions used to teach that one should cultivate inward, working on the mind? Don’t listen to how modern people might interpret it—they don’t necessarily know the true meaning. Go and truly cultivate yourself—when you get into a conflict or run into some problem you should look at yourself and see what’s wrong, and ask yourself how you should handle it, using the Fa to evaluate things. Wouldn’t you say that is cultivation?”
I immediately stopped crying. While telling myself that I couldn’t hold a negative opinion of fellow practitioners, I calmly thought over what shortcomings and problems I still had. Hardship, tiredness, and others’ criticism and resentment didn’t count for much, and not being able to overcome them was only temporary; how to see things from the Fa was the key and the essence of cultivation. My grievance was the result of my capacity being too small, so it was time to increase my capacity. I wiped my tears and said in my heart, “Master, I can definitely do it.”
The worst of that hardship was my inability to see things clearly based on the Fa. I studied the Fa more and did my best to balance between family, work, and cultivation in the limited time I had. While I couldn’t spend all my time on family using the excuse of conforming to everyday people, I also couldn’t go to extremes and ignore my family because of my cultivation.
During that time, my elderly mother delivered steamed buns, pickled vegetables, and other prepared foods to help me save time. I didn’t have time to take care of her. Sometimes, when I came home, I only had time stand around the doorway for a while before leaving again. Alas, I didn’t have words to describe my gratitude and indebtedness to her. While I don’t have much to honor her in this world, I believe in the future I will be her eternal pride.
Another practitioner asked me, “Can’t you have him get better?” referring to my husband. Some others also felt I had too much sentimentality for him. I did not defend myself; I thought I did not have an attachment to family and sent righteous thoughts to eliminate the evil factors that used my family to interfere with my assisting Master to rectify the Fa. However, my husband did not get better. I thought to myself that some things were complicated and that each person has a different path of cultivation.
Master said in “2012 International Fa Conference at the U.S. Capital”:
“… cultivation is different for each Dafa disciple. I have said that there are no role models, no examples, and that at most one can draw upon others’ experiences and see how they handled things while having righteous thoughts. If you try to do things by mimicking what they did, or blindly do whatever they did, then you are wrong. Each person is traveling his own path, and each is gaining enlightenment from Dafa as to what will one day be his own Fa.”
My husband later started studying the Fa and quit smoking and drinking, to others’ amazement; he used to be a heavy drinker and smoked two packs a day. He said he didn’t want to smoke anymore after listening to one sentence by a wise man. Indeed, he couldn’t quit smoking at first after learning Dafa, but after I read out to him Master’s Fa about quitting smoking, he didn’t want to do it anymore. His cognitive abilities have returned to normal, and he can read the Dafa books fluently, do house chores, and conduct business. We had spent a lot of money at the hospital but didn’t see any improvement, but after he learned Dafa, he recovered without any medicine. Maybe he was supposed to obtain the Fa this way.
Looking back, his illness did not disrupt a day of the family business or even one task in my Dafa work. It was only that I had a lot of pressure that I have now overcome. My husband often says with a sigh that the consequences of his illness would have been unimaginable if he did not learn Dafa and that he thanks Master for saving our family.
The day my sister berated me, I sent her a message to tell her that I had been relying on her broad-mindedness and took a bad tone with her, that I would be more careful going forward, and asked for her forgiveness. She was moved and treated me much more respectfully after that. I knew it was actually her respect for Dafa.
(Ninth China Fahui on Minghui)