Yesterday was my birthday! Friends, allow me to take a break from my previous line of thoughts. I had been discussing the problem of sin. I promise I would pick up the issue on sin next week. Instead, I would like to write about the other main character in my previous posts – my beloved father. I wrote about him in my posts “Upbringing” and “Am I a bad person”.
As written in my previous posts, I admired my father when I was little. I prayed for him to believe in Jesus ever since I decided to become a Christian. Given his strong unbelieving attitude, and his confidence in his being a good person, it had seemed to me that it was almost impossible to bring him to God. I knew I would grief for the rest of my life if my father would die without believing in Jesus.
My father passed away in October of 2020. Did he believe in Jesus before leaving?
He got into hospital in 2019. I flew to Hong Kong and in the hospital, I asked him to pray with me to accept Jesus as his savior. To my surprise, he agreed! He prayed with me and said “Amen” in the end. He survived that time and lived with one of my sisters afterwards. Gradually, he was reluctant to admit he believed in Jesus.
At the summer of 2020, I visited him in my sister’s house. During the following few weeks, I played chess with him, I urged him to write about his life story and sat beside him while he wrote, and I ate dim sum with him at weekends. One night he fell in my sister’s house and got into a hospital. There a pastor in the hospital preached to him, and he prayed with the pastor and confirmed his belief in Jesus. The day before he left, he agreed to be baptized by the pastor. He breathed his last breath when me, my wife, and all his daughters arrived at the hospital. He was nighty years old.
God’s blessing on my father and me is clear to me. God showed me that my father had invited Jesus to be his savior. One day when I leave this earth, I will joyfully meet my healthy, smart, and handsome father in heaven.
