By Yang Mei, China
In 2007 I suddenly fell ill with chronic renal failure. When they heard the news, my Christian mother and sister-in-law, and some Catholic friends all came to preach the gospel to me. They told me that as long as I turned to the Lord, 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 kind of psychological crutch, and I was a dignified state school teacher, a person who was well-educated and cultured, so there was no way I’d start believing in God. As such, I turned them down and began 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 still hadn’t improved. 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, that curing illness was a process that takes time.