Hallelujah, in the name of our Lord Jesus I testify about how my family came to believe in the Lord, and how wondrous was the way that the Lord chose us. Thank the Lord! My family was baptized in September of 2002 in Toronto Church. Thinking back over the past 18 years of being believers, we have definitely experienced how God crowns the year with His goodness and how His paths drip with abundance (Psalm 65:11). I believe God chooses each one of us differently and gives us all different experiences. Now I think about how we first came to believe in God, we truly have received countless grace from God, and it was like what Jesus said, "You did not choose Me, but I chose you," (John 15:16). How then did God choose my family? Just like what is written in Ephesians 1:4 and 6, "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world... to the praise of the glory of His grace." As such, we are extremely grateful.
My husband and I married in 1996, and at the time, we both had stable jobs in Taiwan and were not stressed about our mortgage. He always worked in foreign banks; I always worked in state banks. One day, we were casually chatting when he asked whether I had thought about immigrating to another country. He had colleagues who were working towards immigration at the time, and Taiwan also had an emigration boom, and the more popular choices were New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. From then on, we started to research and not long after, we decided to try immigrating to Canada through the Federal Skilled Workers Program. We went through the entire application process on our own in the hope of saving costs. This included collecting related information, finding interpreters, certifying our documents and submitting the documents. If the application was successful, great! If not, it would still be okay since it was all an extraordinary experience. We were not stressed since we applied for immigration ourselves and we also did not tell anyone around us about it. In the beginning of the fall of 1997, we flew to London, UK for the interview because we heard that submitting documents via a third country was faster. As expected, getting the notification for the interview was fast: it took about a year, perhaps even less. We also brought our oldest daughter who was just born to the interview. Not long after, our household of three successfully obtained the papers to immigrate to Canada that specified a time frame for landing. When our extended families and friends heard that we were immigrating to Canada, they were all shocked. Even we ourselves found it hard to believe since neither of us had ever gone to Canada. As such, the landing day for the three of us was also the first time we ever set foot on Canadian soil. As Proverbs 16:9 says, " A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps." Thinking back, I believe that God was slowly guiding us toward Him, one step at a time.
I grew up in a Presbyterian family as a fourth generation believer, and many members of my family were Presbyterians. Some were elders, some were deacons, and even some were pastors. My dad was already a Presbyterian deacon by the time he was 30 some years old. In that kind of environment, if we had remained in Taiwan, we definitely would not have had the chance to come to True Jesus Church and know God. Moreover, my husband was an atheist and he would rather believe in evolutionism than to believe that there is a God. Even so, he respected my faith and never opposed my going to church.
After getting the immigration papers and landing, we entered and left Canada many times because we wanted our status as permanent residents (PR) to remain active, and in the blink of an eye, two years have passed. One day, a Taiwanese friend of mine living in Canada contacted me and said that they, a married couple, wanted to move into a standalone house. They asked us when we would be staying in Canada to fulfill the 730 days for actually keeping our PR status and if we wanted to live with them so we could support and accompany each other. After some discussion, my husband and I decided to officially move to Vancouver to start our 730 days in the year 2000. I do not even know how I gathered the courage to leave what we had in Taiwan to move to Canada, a completely foreign country to us where we had no family and not many friends. At the time, out of our family and friends, 11 out of 10 were against us, meaning that absolutely no one agreed with our wish to immigrate! But thank God, now I know that it was all part of God's guidance and arrangement.
At the beginning, I brought our 3-year-old eldest daughter to live with the Taiwanese married couple, and I am truly grateful for their meticulous care. This married couple were believers in the Vancouver True Jesus Church. We gradually started assimilating to their lifestyle, such as regularly praying and reading the Bible together, and going to church together on Wednesday and Friday nights as well as Saturdays. Thinking back on the faith I had with the other Christian church, I was only following what the adults believed, and as I grew up, I felt that faith was just a safety blanket that caused no harm in having but didn't give me any experiences much less testimonies. Therefore, when I first started truthseeking in True Jesus Church, I had the same mindset but since I lived with the married couple, it was very natural to just go to church with them.
It was only after I started truthseeking and listening to sermons that I realized I was finally starting to understand the Bible, which was strange because the Bible is what I grew up with. However, throughout my truthseeking journey, I discovered many passages and stories that I had never seen or heard. I did not know what was praying in tongue, or that baptism required living moving water, or that you had to pray to God for the Holy Spirit, or many other things. Turns out that there are many wonderful stories, amazing showings of grace, and mysteries of salvation that I needed to study deeper into from the Bible. From that point on, I realized the faith I had seen and heard since young was completely different from the faith and truth I started to ponder upon in the True Jesus Church. A familiar passage in Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose."
What God let me experience next was my first impactful experience of Him in my life, that brought me the same feeling as Job had in Job 42:5, " I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You." When I was just about to start life as an immigrant, I found out that I was already 3 months pregnant, and in Canada, you had to be four months pregnant before you could get the first ultrasound. I went to get an ultrasound on schedule, and on the afternoon of the next day, I got a phone call from the OB/GYN to schedule an appointment to look at the results. When I saw the OB/GYN, she told me that there were two small dots, about 0.1-0.2cm big, behind the fetus' brain. At the time, I had not understood what she was trying to tell me and did not know what those dots were, but she continued saying that since the dots were too small, there was nothing that could be done.As a result, I needed to wait a month to do another test to really know what they were. I remember that I was really calm at the time, and that after the doctor was done, I only asked one question, "What effect(s) would they have if they were bad?" She said that they could affect the child's intellectual development, and that if they were very bad, surgery could be done. When I got home, I called my husband and told him about the child's situation. He did not believe in God but he was also very worried and told me, "If the God you worship can heal our child, I will believe in Him!" That night, I told the married couple about my child, and the sister told me not to worry and they will pray with me. She immediately called the preacher and some other sisters and asked them to pray for me.
The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 18:19, "Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven." Likewise, we prayed often for my second child. I still had not received the Holy Spirit and did not know the efficacy of prayer, and it would be a lie to say that I was not worried. That month of waiting felt like years, full of anxiety, worrying, fear, and other emotions, but the preacher encouraged me to continue to pray to God and entrust it all to Him, because in Matthew 21:22, Jesus said, "And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive."
When the long month was finally over, I went to the hospital as scheduled for the ultrasound and an assortment of tests, and I went to see the results the next day. When I saw the doctor, he was holding the two images, comparing the current one to the one from a month ago, and then he held the images out for me to see while muttering to himself. I did not know what he was muttering about, and since he still had not spoken up for a while, I asked him if my child was fine. He was still looking back and forth between the two images and simply said, "They are all gone. Everything is normal with the baby."
On the drive home, I happily talked to the Father above in tears, unceasingly thanking Him. I knew clearly then that God wanted to let me experience this wonderful grace personally so I truly thanked God. From then on, I told myself to not go back to my parents’ church and instead stay in the True Jesus Church. As I continued to truthseek, and I started to pray for the Holy Spirit in every prayer.
Ever since that drive home and talking with the Father above, I naturally started to converse with the Abba Father every time I was driving alone in the car, even now. I talked to Him about anything: things that made me happy or angry, things I have said and/or done wrongly, and even about the times when I was aggrieved. I often told Him words of thanks, but I would also complain to Him, and after every conversation, I would feel peace and a great sense of security in my heart. In April of 2001, my second child was born successfully and healthy. In the same year, my husband got accepted to a school on the east coast, so we left Vancouver in the summer that year and moved to a city close to Toronto: Hamilton. It was a 10 minutes drive between the school and where we lived, but it was a bit far from Toronto. Toronto was a foreign city to us where we did not know anyone and our children were still young, so the preacher gave us the address to the Toronto True Jesus Church as well as the person to contact there when we left Vancouver. However, my husband's heart was still hardened, and he had already forgotten saying he would believe in the Lord if everything went well with the second child. Instead, he thought nothing of what he had said and believed it was all a coincidence.
After moving to the east coast, we began our busy life, and my time became very segmented: I drop off and pick up my husband at school in the morning, I drop off the eldest daughter at kindergarten for a half-day, and I go get groceries. I had to do all these with the second child since she was still an infant. In my heart, I really wanted to go for service in Toronto Church, but technology and the internet back then were not as advanced nor convenient as they are right now. Internet access was not as prevalent, there was no GPS, nor smartphones, so there was just a thick book of the Ontario atlas in the car. Moreover, my sense of direction was not good so I often get lost. It was through much effort that I finally finished calculating the distance between Hamilton and the Toronto Church, and that was 100km, one way. My husband said that there was no way since it was too far and there was no time; his graduate school kept him very busy, how was there time to go to church? All I could then was pray and talk to God by myself for the first 2-3 months.
One day, I got a call from the preacher in Vancouver. He told me that it was not easy getting my number, and that he had come to Toronto to sort out a few things, so he wanted to visit us before he went back to Vancouver. Thank God that he brought a brother and sister from Toronto Church with him when he visited us, and I was really touched! Afterwards, this sister, who lived in Burlington, would come pick up my children and me to go to church every week. My husband's heart was still hard so he came up with many excuses to not go, but he did not oppose us going to church at all. The masters program he was in at the time had a co-op component, so he would be in school one semester and working in another. Time went by really fast and his first semester was about to end. Most of his classmates have already found a co-op job but he still had not, and he grew very anxious and depressed. I knew that he had a hard heart that did not believe that there was a God so all I could do was pray for him. God then started to work on him. One day, I told him that I was praying for him and invited him to pray with me. That was the first time we prayed together. Thank God, that was also the day when the school notified him that there was a job opportunity in Calgary. Pleasantly surprised, he applied for the job and very soon, he got the offer, and there were only 2 weeks left before the start date. Where was Calgary? How far away was it? Where do we live? At the time, we had no clue and nowhere to start.
The end of man is the beginning of God.
During that time, the preacher and some brothers and sisters were always praying for my family. Just when we were anxious and worried, the preacher from Vancouver called us two days before that first week's Sabbath and told us that the preacher from Calgary church was going to Toronto to assist in holy work that week. He also asked if I wanted to bring my husband to church to get to know the preacher. My husband then had no choice but to go to church with me. That was the second time for him to go to True Jesus Church. (The first time was back in Vancouver where he was very against the way we pray.) When Pr. Tseng saw my husband and understood his situation, he immediately called his wife in Calgary and arranged a place for my husband to stay. Afterwards, when he arrived at Calgary, Pr. Tseng and his wife went to pick him up from the airport, helped him get settled, and took care of him during his stay there. I remember that winter in 2002 was an extremely cold one across Canada. It was a nightmare for us who just immigrated from Taiwan especially since we had to be in two different locations. My two children and I were in cold snowy Toronto and my husband was in Calgary, a place that was not just cold but actually freezing where temperatures of negative thirty, or even forty, degrees Celsius were very common. Thank God that outside of my husband's work times, the preacher and the brothers and sisters of Calgary really took care of him. Over time, he started going to service with them. At the beginning, he went because of their zealous invitations and not wanting to turn them down. He originally could not accept the way we pray but after observing for a while, he realized all the members at Calgary are all very normal. Afterwards, he started to pay attention to the sermons and gradually felt that the truth that he listened to was really good. He then slowly opened his heart to let the word of God enter in. As recorded in Isaiah 55:8-9, ""For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts."" Truly, " God meant it for good," (Genesis 50:20).
Thank God for His guidance! The four months of co-op passed by very quickly and after my husband returned to Toronto, we went to church as a family. We also started to pray very hard for the Holy Spirit. While we were still truthseeking, I am ashamed to say that I only prayed for the Holy Spirit off and on, until one day when the preacher told me that I need to concentrate when praying for the Holy Spirit. In John 4:24, Jesus said: " God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." Moreover, " the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart," (1 Samuel 16:7). Thank God that a few weeks before baptism, God gave me the precious Holy Spirit when I was praying at home. I was not certain of it at the time and did not give it too much thought. I remember feeling really happy. When we went to church the next day, after prayer, the preacher told me that I received the Holy Spirit. I was happy beyond words and suddenly realized that it was God's love, mercy, and guidance that led my family and me out of Taiwan to immigrate here, to slowly come to know Him, to experience His love step by step, and to carefully count all the grace He gave to us. Thank God for patiently guiding us to when we received the baptism in September of 2002.
Jesus said in John 6:44-45, ""No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me."" In John 6:37, He also said "" All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.""
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