I was born in a little town in the east of Fujian Province in 1966. My grandfather was a very capable man. Throughout his life he had built three tri-level wooden houses, something very few could accomplish at that time. He was also quite notorious for his bad temper. I remember I used to shiver when I came to greet him. It is not hard to imagine what kind of life my grandmother had to endure. Well, two months before I was born, she hanged herself on a crossbeam in one of the tri-level houses. I used to live in fear day and night: during the day I was afraid to see my grandfather's face and during the night I was afraid to run into my grandmother's spirit.

My father was quite the opposite: he was extremely mild-tempered. During the Cultural Revolution, my father naturally became the oppressed and was made to settle down on a farm. Due to family problems and social pressure, my taciturn father finally picked the path to complete silence: death. He didn't use a rope this time, but DDVP. At that time I was about seven-years-old and my brother was two years my junior.

In the next two years my mother single-handedly brought us up. Fearing that I might be too poor to get married when I grew up, she adopted a little girl from a neighboring village and raised her as child bride. It was hard to find somebody else in town as persevering as my mother was. She loved us very much, but at that particular historical moment as it was, the only way for her to show love was to spank us, and it was not until I grew up later on did I really start to appreciate such love.

My mother was married again and so I had a stepfather. Our relationship was pretty bad, so bad that I often thought about death. Because both my grandmother and my father committed suicide, I often asked myself: "Am I going to be the third one in my family?"

I also tried to be strong and learned to hold my tears. I even learned to laugh even at the most difficult moment. This kind of laughter scared some of my friends a couple of times. I believed that to cry was to show weakness but the world had no room for mercy.

Because of my family background, my only hope was to study hard and some day to walk out the door and never come back. I often reminded myself to completely rely on myself as opposed to the heavens and the earth. I picked mathematics as my major, mainly because mathematics was suitable for individual research and I didn't have to work with other people.

In 1983, I was enrolled in the math department of the Xiamen University. During my college life, I set up Mathematics Forum, a student periodical. I also published quite a few articles on it. At that time only three or four other publications in the entire country bore similar characteristics. When I went back to visit the University in 1994, I saw that the publication was still alive.

I graduated from the University in 1987, and two years later I was admitted into the graduate program of the math department of Beijing Normal College. During my graduate study, I published a few articles in some of the international magazines. After I received my master's degree, I began to work in the computation center of China's Scientific Institute. In a year or so, I wrote six or seven technical articles. I was full of ambition and I had a strong sense of self-esteem in the field of mathematics. Gradually however, I ran into complicated human interactions, about which I grew frustrated. I became anxious pretty much about everything and I couldn't maintain a good relationship with my boss. As a result I started to think about going abroad. I remember my TOEFL scores were over 660 points. I also received financial aid offerings from many schools in five different countries. Finally I picked the pure math department of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

At the same time I had also been searching for the significance of life. I believed that our goal of life was to climb as much as we could toward the top of the food chain. I also believed that human beings were destined to suffer and the best we could do was to seek pleasure in bitterness. Nevertheless, when I occasionally lied on the sand beach staring at the magnificent sea and the endless sky, I couldn't help but think about some of the unknown or uncontrollable elements in life, which led me to also believe that the vast universe had to have a sovereign master behind it.

Occasionally I had thought about abandoning the dusty world altogether by becoming a monk. But every time I went to a temple, I had to kill my idea. I failed to reconcile myself to defeat in life. If the purpose of life was to pursue the end of life, then life itself would lose its own significance. What I enjoyed the most at that time was to get together with a couple of my best friends boasting, criticizing the corrupted society and its deteriorating moral standard. Our conclusion was always unanimous: all social problems were there because there were so few good citizens like us. In retrospect, I felt really ashamed of ourselves. We were like a bunch of blind people attempting to help other people out of the labyrinth. Jesus said, "They are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit." (Mt. 15:14)

Everybody dreamed about going abroad. When I first stepped out of my homeland and onto the soil of Canada, I was full of ambition again, marking that moment as the end of suffering and the beginning of happiness. In less than two months, however, all the problems I had experienced in China came back to me again one after another. Moreover there was now a new problem: my social status was greatly discounted. Although I was by no means rich in China, I had a master's degree after all and I worked in the famed Scientific Institute. Seeing all kinds of people on the streets of Beijing flowing by, I could at least be proud of myself. Occasionally I was able to chat about ideology or politics. In Canada, however, the financial aid I got was less than the government-sponsored relief fund for the poor despite the fact I was a Ph.D. student. Overseas students were making efforts looking for jobs or fighting for survivals. The social status pitfall I suffered threw me once again back to the issue about the value of life: Are we really destined to struggle in the endless efforts? I questioned myself: What are you really up to?

Gradually I had heard quite a bit about Christians after I came to Canada. My first impression was that these Canadians believed in God because they ate too much and ran out of things to do. After some serious thinking, however, I started to believe that there had to be something much more than that because the Bible was widely considered the basis of western civilization.

I attended one of the Chinese fellowship gatherings on campus. I didn't like it at all, because I was told for the first time in my life that I was a lost sheep and that I had sins. I turned a cold eye at those people. I thought they were a bit crazy. If they had told me I looked ugly, I wouldn't have been offended because I had been through those jokes in Beijing. If they had said I was not a capable man, I wouldn't have minded either because everybody was limited. But I couldn't take it when I was told I had sins. I had strong self-consciousness and I had been upright throughout my life. Self-righteousness was pretty much the only thing I could still be proud of. I said to myself: If I have sins, then your sins must be much worse than mine.

There was something else I couldn't understand: Why was it that believers only were admitted into the kingdom of God? I felt God lacked justice. I remember one of my favorite questions was this: Suppose a man spent 80 years of his time murdering other people and doing all evil deeds; then ten seconds before he died he repented and believed in God. Would he be admitted into heaven? If he could still enter heaven, then I wouldn't mind going to hell! I said this because I never really believed there was hell after all. It was not until I believed in the Lord did I become really scared about what I said. "Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched." (Mark. 9:48)

I also heard news that one of the proactive Christians among overseas students did something really shameful. Such negative testimony weakened my trust in Christians. I believed they were all hypocrites. It was not until I believed in the Lord did I begin to see that they were but false Christians. Those who came from Mainland China must have had a lot of experience dealing with truth and falsehood.

Still later I attended some of the Bible study sessions in the English-speaking fellowship. My main purpose was to get to know the Bible a bit better from literary point of view. At the same time I hoped I might have the opportunity to practice my oral English.

One day I couldn't stand it and I raised the issue to Luke, the leader of the Fellowship. He replied that he knew some of them were merely trying to use him, but that he would still want to love them. I felt these Christians were a bit dumb, for smart people would never want to be taken advantage of.

What I was puzzled the most was these Christians revealed in their daily life a special kind of peace and joy, which was something I had never seen and something I had been trying to pursue in vain.

I asked myself one day: "Maybe God really exists?" I was shocked by my own question. As soon as I raised the question of God's existence as a realistic possibility as opposed to a philosophical issue, I started to realize the seriousness of the issue. If there was really a sovereign God in the universe, and if all had been created by this God, then all the significance and purpose of human existence would be completely different than I had thought.

From then on, I started to seriously read the Bible.

What took me off guard the most was the fulfillment of the many Biblical prophecies. An example was the prophecy about the City of Tyre in Ezekiel 26:3-21. According to archaeological findings, every single word of the prophecy had been fulfilled. Other examples included the prophecies about the Palestinians and the Israelites in Leviticus 26:31-34 and Ezekiel 36:33-35, some of which were not fulfilled till the 20^th century.

Another convincing point was that in the past two thousand years nobody was able to deny the fact that Jesus was raised from death.

After learning all these, I finally believed that the Bible was correct. What remained as an obstacle was the narration of God's creation of the earth and human beings in the book of Genesis. We had long been taught that evolution was science in the true sense of the word. And I firmly believed that if the Bible was the truth, then it was not supposed to contradict in any way with science. So I read Darwin's The Origin and his autobiography, from which I discovered three things that I had never heard of: (1) Darwin was a Christian; (2) Darwin had serious doubt about his own theory. In 1860 he said: "The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known graduations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder", meaning that human eyes were something his theory failed to explain, and the mere mention of this fact would give him a cold shudder. (3) Darwin also attributed the earliest forms of life to God's creation, and evolutionism was based on these earliest forms of life.

After further analysis, it is not hard to find some of the self-contradictions in Darwin's theories. He recognized the existence of God, but he also claimed that man existed through evolution. The Bible clearly tells us: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27) Even to this day, the subject of human eyes remains a tough obstacle for evolutionism. It can be said, therefore, that evolutionism is by no means science. It is merely a hypothesis.

During that time I also read extensively, both Christian books and anti-Christian books. Three of these books helped me the most: Pending Judgment by W. McDonald, Science Returns to God by John H. Jauncey, and Creation and Time: A Biblical and Scientific Perspective on the Creation-date Controversy by Hugh Ross. These three books provided fine analyses on the scientific and historical aspects of the Bible.

By then I had completely accepted the truthfulness of the Bible. The only remaining question I had was whether the Bible was really the words of God. Perhaps it was compiled by a group of extremely intelligent people with unbelievable capabilities in the course of thousands of years? Perhaps these people started out with a fine ideology of trying to make everybody good? Perhaps the Bible wasn't really from some almighty divine being? If so, what we believed in would be in vain after all.

Then I began to pray, asking the Lord to reveal to me directly so that I could believe in Him. A few months had elapsed. During that time I felt pretty low every day and yet I spent most of my spare time reading the Bible. My Canadian friends, Luke and Ralph, also prayed for me. They encouraged me with the verse of Matthew 7:7: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. They also ensured me that the Lord would reveal to me in His special way as long as I maintained a humble heart.

One day, an idea occurred to me: "Isn't the fact that Luke and Ralph are around me a clear revelation by itself?" I was a bit puzzled, not knowing if this was only my own fantasy or a true revelation from God. I prayed: "Oh Lord, I believe this is your revelation to me, but this is only a spiritual revelation. Could you make a step further and give me a physical revelation or something tangible? If you do that, then I will completely believe in you."

So I went to purchase a lottery ticket with a jackpot of one million dollars. I prayed: "Oh Lord, I'd like to believe in you, because you are the Almighty God. But if you allow me to hit the jackpot, then I will completely believe in you. In addition, I will spend the million dollars on your noble cause in China and I will bring one million Chinese people to you." I prayed every day. I didn't feel this was absurd because I intended to spend the money on serving the Lord as opposed on myself. However, the Lord didn't give me any revelation.

One evening in the early August of 1996, I got a call from Luke at around 9:30. He asked me if we would like to go to a Labor Day weekend retreat near Pittsburgh in the United States at the end of August. We had heard about the Retreat a few months back, but we had not reacted to it because we would have had to submit 80 US dollars as registration fee for the Retreat, plus 60 US dollars for US visa application, and our financial situation was by no means promising at all. Luke, however, said that somebody had made a donation and he could cover our registration cost. He asked that we make the decision on the same night because he would go on vacation the next day. So we decided to go.

On August 30, seven of us rode Luke's van and attended the Retreat. Shortly after we set out, we saw two stripes of cloud hanging in the sky on our left side, forming a huge cross. Everybody in the van saw it.

We arrived at our destination at around 9pm. I got up at about 6am the next day. There was heavy fog and visibility was about 10 to 15 feet. When I walked out of the cabin, however, I immediately saw a cross standing on my left-hand side. I stood there staring at it. Flashing by my mind was the other cross we saw on our way here. The two crosses came together in my mind and words failed to describe what I had felt.

Pastor Su took the center stage for the first morning. He started out introducing himself. He said he grew up in a Christian family and he was considered a very good Christian when he was little because he very actively participated in all kinds of church activities. He sang well and he prayed real loud too. But he had never really had any special feeling. Sometimes he even questioned if he really loved the Lord. This was the first time I had ever heard a Christian having doubts about his own faith. I was a bit amused too, for it was rare that this pastor was telling the truth.

Then Pastor Su changed subject, saying that Jesus Christ was not only our Lord, but He was our savior. Then I kept repeating the two words, lord and savior, in my mind and I was at a loss trying to figure out the difference between the two. I became a bit impatient and started to regret having made the meaningless yet costly trip here at all. In the end I had to comfort myself that the site at least featured beautiful scenery and was at least good for sightseeing.

Then Pastor Su changed his subject again, this time from Savior to sins. I don't remember what he said any more, but every word of him seemed to be hammering my heart causing a lot of heartaches. Before I knew it, I began to cry. At once countless ideas flooded my mind. I only remember three of them. (1) For the first time in my life I truly realized that I was a sinner. My biggest sin was to walk away from the Lord and be my own lord and demand the Lord to follow me. (2) I finally understood why one could be saved if he truly repented and believed because if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (II Corinthians 5:17) (3) I finally gave myself away to the Lord one hundred percent, saying: "Oh Lord, if you wish that I become ill because you want to use me, so be it. If you wish that I die because you want to use me, so be it."

I had never cried like that before and it took away my last bit of unbelief. What remained in me was complete belief. At the same time, I felt a kind of joy you can never understand unless you have a chance to taste the joy yourself. Thanks to the Lord for giving me such wonderful experience.

I spent the next two days anxiously waiting for the call of the Lord. Then on the evening of September 1, following the final lecture at the Retreat hosted by Professor Huang, I raised my hand to make my belief known to the public.

The next morning, I gave my testimony. What I said at the session was similar to what I wrote above.

Coming back from the Retreat, my wife Tian-mei and I were baptized at the Grandview Baptist Church on November 3. Luke was the chairman for the ceremony. In the past three months or so, the Lord had given us abundant grace. I cry more often now; I cry because of God's abundant love; I cry because of my worthlessness; and I cry because of my friends and relatives who still live in darkness. The amazing grace our Heavenly Father demonstrated to me in last night's car accident urges me to treasure every moment of my life. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. (II Corinthians 5:15)

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