Finding a Love That Will Not Fail

Growing up as a first-generation American-born Chinese, I can’t say I had a particularly happy childhood. Parental approval had to be earned by good grades in school, which wasn’t a problem for my brother or me, but was for my older sister. Cultural differences led to rebellion and physical abuse when she became a teenager, and this escalated until she left home, without explanation to my brother or myself, because she was pregnant.

So despite asking Jesus into my heart around the age of five, I had no real knowledge of Christianity and considered myself an agnostic by the time I reached high school. Though shy and seemingly modest, I became involved in sinful relationships; and by the time I was in college, I bounced from one relationship to another looking for love in a carnal and selfish sort of way but never finding it.

I was living with a fellow in a rocky relationship by the time I graduated from college at the University of Michigan. Since I was planning on attending medical school at New York University, I could see that even this, the most committed of my relationships, was not going to last.

My brother’s graduation from Harvard brought me back east, and babysitting my sister’s two kids kept me in Massachusetts for a week. While there at my parents’ hotel, I noticed a group of people who seemed to be having a good time together by the pool side. One of them looked particularly friendly, so when he came to retrieve a piece of paper that the wind blew my way, I asked what they were studying.

"The Scriptures," he said. God being the furthest thing from my mind at this point, I must have looked baffled. He asked who I thought Jesus Christ was, and I replied, "The Son of God." (That much I knew.)

He proceeded to tell me about how he was saved from a life of sin. He told me of the love of Jesus, who, though He could have called down legions of angels, instead gave Himself up willingly on the cross for our sins. This sounded like the kind of love I’d never known before but was seeking. Here finally was a Man who would never leave me.

But having bought into "women’s lib" and having friends who had had abortions, I asked if he was against abortions. He said he was; and, in response to my further questioning, he asked how those women got pregnant in the first place, since "fornication is a sin."

I guess that convicted me the most, but I didn’t accept his invitation to pray. Instead I took the tract he gave me and later that day read it and prayed, committing my life to Christ.

The next day, he came by and confessed that his "motives were impure" in talking to me, that he’d found me attractive but that he was married. My faith was tested: did this mean everything he said was untrue? Was my new relationship with God invalid? But I decided I wasn’t going to dishonor my commitment to God because of faulty human motives. Although the evangelist never knew it, God had ironically used our human weaknesses for His own purposes.

My new awareness of God’s sovereignty caused me to appreciate my position in life as being God-given, and I felt I had to use my gifts for Him. But having been given new birth and then "orphaned," I then had to search for a church family. After a year of floundering, He provided someone to disciple me in a small town where I spent the summer. That provided much spiritual growth and led me subsequently to a church in New York City that I attended the last three years of medical school. There I met the man who is now my husband, and for two and a half years I learned about sexual restraint. I found that obedience to God’s laws really did lead to His blessings, and I was able to learn about sacrificial love as I had not before.

Now, in addition to using my gifts in the local church and raising two children in a Christian home, I’m motivated by my life experiences to share God’s principles with the patients in my practice, that they too might experience the best of God’s blessings.

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