By Zhang Jun
Early in the morning, a ray of sunlight shone into Qianhui’s room, making a pool of light on the floor. Qianhui opened her eyes and stretched out her arms. At that moment, the phone was ringing. Her good friend Lili said on the phone: “Qianhui, I’ll get married next Sunday. So, you must come.”
Hearing the happy news of her friend’s marriage, she felt delighted with it. She thought: The partners Lili looked for before all had good family backgrounds, but she wasn’t satisfied with them. Her present husband’s family must be well off.
On the day when Lili got married, Qianhui got up early and freshened herself up. Then she came to Lili’s new house at about over 10 am. No sooner had she come in than their bridal chamber stunned her speechless. The over 3,551-square-foot house was luxuriously decorated. Costly furniture looked very valuable and the decorating scheme could be nearly described as splendid. It seemed that Lili’s husband must be very well off.
After visiting the new house, she arrived at the wedding. At this time, she was overawed by the air of prosperity. Lili’s marriage was celebrated in the star hotel and officiated by the most famous host in the local place. The wedding cars were a variety of different brands of luxury cars. Seeing all this, Qianhui felt envious and jealous. She couldn’t help but sigh and thought: “Back in the days when in school, I was better than Lili both in grades and appearance. But now I’m inferior to her in everything and still live in an old unremarkable bungalow, much less the wedding. Even if I struggle for a lifetime, I will fail to live such a life.” In this moment she had endless regrets and thought with a sense of loss: “I was so young and simpleminded before and took everything to be simple that I married such an incapable husband. If I got married now, I must look for a partner with a car and a house. Alas!” Feeling helpless, she stood there shaking her head. In order not to be bathed in disappointment, she chatted with several good friends that she hadn’t seen for a long time. Unexpectedly, her friends all flaunted their husbands, jobs, houses, cars, and so on. Hearing these, she became an emotional wreck. In comparison with her friends, she felt as if she were an ugly duckling to nothing. Her self-esteem couldn’t take this and she felt her face was burning. Finally, she couldn’t sit still anymore and then grabbed a bite and left in such a rush.
After returning home, all the scenes of her friend’s wedding kept coming to her mind. She thought, “Now my friends all live a better life. Looking at myself, I have neither money nor a car, and even I can’t live in an apartment.” She put the blame on her husband’s incapacity. She thought, “If my husband had a good family background or could make more money, would I stand comparison with my friends?” With such thoughts, she cast a disapproving eye on everything at home. Especially when seeing her husband, she became extremely angry, often picked him on and lost her temper at him. When seeing Qianhui was not happy, her husband would coax her. Although she didn’t quarrel with him outwardly, she felt too aggrieved. His ordinariness made her feel at a loss about what to do: Must I spend my whole life with him simply and suffer from poverty forever? As she was unable to accept the fact, a few days later she began to pick him on again. Gradually, she found her husband changed. After getting home from work every day, he spent his time playing games on his mobile phone and didn’t want to talk more with her. When seeing that, she became even angrier, thinking: “I already feel wronged to marry you, yet you don’t care for me. This is no way to live!” The more she thought of this the more she felt pained.
Afterward, a relative preached God’s kingdom gospel to Qianhui. She read these God’s words: “Your temperament, caliber, appearance, and stature, your family into which you were born, your job, and your marriage—you in your entirety, even including the color of your hair and your skin, and your time of birth—were all arranged by My hands. I arranged by hand even the things you do and the people you meet every single day….” God’s words made her knew: Everyone’s fate is ruled over and arranged in God’s hands. Our families, jobs and marriage have been long destined by God and we have no choice about them. It is destiny that I could meet, be acquainted and live with my husband. Thinking back to my past, since I didn’t recognize God’s sovereignty, I always complained and was dissatisfied with everything at home that I was living in a particularly painful way. Having understood these, she came before God to pray: “O, God! I’m willing to obey Your orchestrations and arrangements. May You help me and guide me to walk out of misery so that I can get along with my husband.”
From then on, Qianhui’s attitude toward her husband improved and didn’t make trouble out of nothing like before. Having seen that, he also changed his attitude toward her.
One time, Qianhui went to visit her parents. The neighbor happened to meet her and asked, “Hi, Qianhui. It’s been years since I last time to see you. Do you still live in the bungalow where you got married? Don’t you buy an apartment?” She said with a forced smile, “Oh, I haven’t yet.” The neighbor continued, “The youth of today all likes to live in an apartment. They say it is clean and comfortable.” Qianhui avoided her gaze and made an excuse, saying, “My father-in-law has some trouble walking and it’s difficult for him to go upstairs. I think living there is good. About the matter of buying an apartment, we’ll discuss that later.” Then the neighbor said nothing. Qianhui couldn’t help but sigh: “Alas! How could I afford it?” Unconsciously, she started to live in complaints again. She thought that she married a wrong guy. It was because her husband had no ability that she lived so humiliatingly and couldn’t even afford an apartment. In pain, she came before God to pray: “Oh God! Although I know my marriage is preordained by You, when seeing other people live a better life than I, I have some complaints and think it is my husband that can’t give me the life I want to live. I don’t know how to escape from my pain. May You guide me.”
Then on one occasion, Qianhui read these words of God: “These trends arise one after another, and they all carry an evil influence that continually debases mankind, causing people to lose conscience, humanity and reason, weakening their morals and their quality of character ever more, to the extent that we can even say that the majority of people now have no integrity, no humanity, and neither do they have any conscience, much less any reason. So what are these trends? They are trends that you cannot see with the naked eye. When a new trend sweeps through the world, perhaps only a small number of people are on the cutting edge, acting as the trendsetters. They start off doing some new thing, then accepting some kind of idea or some kind of perspective. The majority of people, however, will be continually infected, assimilated, and attracted by this kind of trend in a state of unawareness, until they all unknowingly and involuntarily accept it and become submerged in it and controlled by it. One after another, such trends cause people, who are not of sound body and mind, do not know what the truth is, and cannot differentiate between positive and negative things, to happily accept them as well as the life views and values that come from Satan. They accept what Satan tells them about how to approach life and the way to live that Satan ‘bestows’ on them, and they have neither the strength nor the ability, much less the awareness, to resist.” “Thus, man becomes more and more evil, arrogant, condescending, selfish and malicious. There is no longer any affection between people, no longer any love between family members, no longer any understanding among relatives and friends; human relations have become characterized by violence.”
From God’s words, she understood: Now everyone worships money and material pleasures in this society. The objects of people’s pursuit are houses, cars and superior material life and most people treat these things as their capital for competing with the others. Those who are rich and enjoy expensive material things are superior to the others and everyone will admire and fawn over them; otherwise, they will be despised as incapable. Satan uses our love of vanity and pursuit of high-quality material life and instills some erroneous ways of thinking into our hearts, such as “When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window,” “Money is first,” and so on. These poisons caused that our outlook on life and marital values were distorted. Originally, the marriage was the fact that two people who had an affinity for each other start a family. But in this current age, the marriage which should have brought happiness to us has become a pressure because the evil trends of Satan create too many additional requirements for it. Therefore, the relationship between husband and wife is no longer pure; but instead, it becomes a kind of transaction. If one can satisfy the other one’s demand for material and vanity, their marriage will be barely maintained; otherwise they will avoid and harm each other, and even part ways. This is a consequence of being harmed by the evil trends of Satan. It makes man only live for satisfying his own interest and become more and more self-centered and greedier and make him become less and less humane. There is no longer any understanding, affection and love between people. After knowing these things, Qianhui realized that she was also harmed by the evil trends. Before she attended her friend’s wedding, their life ran smoothly and peacefully. But after she saw that her friends had cars and lived in apartments, compared with her own life, she felt inferior and wasn’t able to hold her head high before her friends. She wanted to live the same life as her friends’, and even live better than they to satisfy her vanity. When her husband failed to do that, she felt wronged to marry him. Therefore, she looked down upon her husband. She, like a grumbler, complained every day that her husband was incapable and that he couldn’t make her live the life she wanted to. This not only harmed herself, but had also brought harm to her husband. Thus, their relationship became ever more distant and their family lost the warmth and harmony of the past.
After understanding this, Qianhui felt sorry to her husband. She also deeply felt that it was Satan that had corrupted her to such degree that she had lost the reason a normal person should have. Without the guidance of God’s words, she would have been fooled by Satan all the time, lived in pain and even her marriage would have been broken. At this point, she remembered another friend: Although her friend’s family condition was average, she and her husband made a down payment on their house so as to go in for showy display when getting married. After marriage, they had to make a living, raise their child and pay their mortgage, knocking themselves out. When they had no money, they would ask their parents for it. If their parents didn’t have money, they would fight and threaten to divorce each other at home. They often brought their grievances before their friends. Wasn’t it the misery caused by following the evil trends and satisfying their vanity? In order to satisfy it, even if they experienced endless bitterness and resignation, they would rather become slaves to our cars and houses. Could it be that this kind of life was a happy life? After understanding this, she felt relief in her heart. She was willing to put aside material enjoyment and get back with her husband.
Later on, Qianhui read more of God’s words: “There is an exceedingly simple way to free oneself from this state, which is to bid farewell to one’s former way of living; to say goodbye to one’s previous goals in life; to summarize and analyze one’s previous lifestyle, view of life, pursuits, desires, and ideals; and then to compare them with God’s will and demands for man, and see whether any of them is consistent with God’s will and demands, whether any of them delivers the right values of life, leads one to a greater understanding of the truth, and allows one to live with humanity and the likeness of a human being. When you repeatedly investigate and carefully dissect the various goals that people pursue in life and their myriad ways of living, you will find not one of them conforms to the Creator’s original intention with which He created humanity. All of them draw people away from the Creator’s sovereignty and care; they are all traps which cause people to become depraved, and which lead them to hell. After you recognize this, your task is to lay aside your old view of life, stay far from various traps, let God take charge of your life and make arrangements for you; it is to try only to submit to God’s orchestrations and guidance, to live without individual choice, and to become a person who worships God.”
Having read these words, she understood the lifestyle of seeking material enjoyment is incorrect and it is one of Satan’s ways of harming man. In the past, she and her husband nearly fell apart because of her wrongful pursuit. Without the guidance of God’s words, she wouldn’t have seen through Satan’s scheme, but only lived in more and more suffering. Thinking of this, she determined to lay aside her wrong views of life and values and no longer follow the evil trends or pursue the enjoyment of material life. But instead, she was willing to obey God’s arrangements in her marriage and family. Although her husband isn’t rich and can’t bring her superior material life to satisfy her vanity, he treats her wholeheartedly and is honest. Even if she made trouble out of nothing, he would be tolerant and patient with her. More importantly, he doesn’t object to Qianhui believing in God. Compared with superior material life, it is the happiest to marry a man considerate to herself. If Qianhui had got married to a wealthy man before and led a good life, her life would have been filled up by revelries and she wouldn’t necessarily have had the opportunity to come before God, listen to the words of the Creator and understand so much of the mystery of the truth, much less known how to distinguish the ways that Satan corrupts man and the evil trends. At that time, she understood: Regardless of poor or rich, only by coming before God and having a right circumstance to believe in God and worship Him can we gain true happiness.
The sun was sinking in the west. Seeing her husband’s working back, she smiled …
