My doctors as well as my family thought that I maybe already passed away because my heart and my breathing stopped. Through the mighty power of God, I actually survived and eventually healed of this disease. Thank God, I didn’t think I would be here today. I did not realize that the grace of God is so great that I am able to testify for him today.

In the name of Lord Jesus I testify. Several years ago, I had a very serious illness--lupus.

There is a saying that experience is the best gift, but this education comes at a hefty price. May my testimony glorify God’s name, so that everyone can also be edified.

Our Lord is the Greatest Physician

Around 1994, I started feeling exhausted all the time. This chronic fatigue caused me to suffer frequent infections. I thought my frequent tiredness was because I was working too hard.  I didn’t really pay attention to it. It was not until 1996, when I collapsed. I walked into the hospital but I left it in a wheelchair, and experienced an illness that no one thought that I would survive from.

I did, in fact, survive. Three years ago, my physician actually testified of my case in public. He said, “During all my years of practice, I have never seen anything like this.  I could not but believe that God truly exists.” My doctor also told my husband that we should not thank him, but only God instead. This physician belonged to the Presbyterian faith.

In August, 1996, while I was on my vacation in Europe, my condition started. After about ten hours of flying, I thought I would get some rest when we landed.  After we landed in Switzerland, I wasn’t able to get the needed rest because the scenery around me was so beautiful. I continued to keep myself awake to view the amazing beauty.

Then we traveled to Venice, Italy, we found it was not a clean place. After touring the city, my bones in my arms began to ache. I thought, “Did I get some contagious disease?” One of the tourists on the tour was a pharmacist. He said it was probably arthritis. So I applied some ointment I brought and continued to enjoy the tour.

In France, we attended an evening opera performance. The show ended quite late around 11 pm at night, so I was quite exhausted. But once I got back, I could not sleep the entire night. The tour continued for another ten days before I was finally able to return back to my home inTaiwan.

Once home, I was ready to catch up on my much needed rest. But just as I was about to fall asleep, the phone rang. The school called requesting my immediate presence for a new student orientation. So I rushed back to school to organize the class.

Back then, I had an ambition to always make sure that the class I lead would always be one of the top classes with the top grades. Reflecting on the past, I realize now that it was quite meaningless to live a busy life just to pursue that kind of vain glory. But at the time, I really longed for that kind of reputation. Therefore, I always worked as hard as I could to improve the class.

About half a month later, even though the students were performing well and things at school were going along nicely, I could no longer handle the work. I became weaker and weaker. I was forcing myself to drag this tired body to school every day. I was afraid to ask for leave of absence because if I wasn’t there, who will be able to take good care of my class?

But I couldn’t take it anymore, so I finally went to see my doctor at the hospital. As soon as I got there, my doctor told me to stay at the hospital. On the third day of my stay, I fell unconscious even though my daughter kept urging me to stay awake. The doctors warned my daughter that if I fell asleep, I might lose consciousness. But I was so tired that I fell asleep; I even told my daughter not to bother me.

Apparently a lot of things happened after I fell unconscious on September 23, 1996. It was on a Sabbath day. In the morning of that day, I suddenly stopped breathing and presented no vital signs when the doctor examined me. The doctor immediately alarmed the staff to resuscitate me because it seemed that I was dying. Then she cleared everyone to make room for all the special equipments needed.

Then, I was diagnosed with lupus.  My condition was so serious and required intensive care. But there were no beds left in the ICU. My doctor thought that I was about to die because I had unstable vital signs after the CPR so it would not help to send me to the ICU for further treatment.

But one of our church members had a connection there and so I was allowed to move into a bed at the ICU. Though I was not breathing, my bed was placed right beside a dialysis machine. My doctor also debated whether to discharge my body for burial.

My husband and my daughter began to discuss whether they should make the decision of DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) and let me go. They knew that I had told them in the past that if I were to die, they should just let me go and not bother to revive me. One of my relatives said that I was still quite young (age of 45 at that time) and we should try the best we can to help save my life.

My husband urgently requested all the nearby True Jesus Church area members to start praying for me. I was rolled into the ICU around 12 noon. I had very unstable vital signs for the next three hours. But around 3 pm, miraculously at the same time when the church started praying for me, the nurses in the ICU noticed that my lungs were starting to move/ heart rate started to become normal. So the doctors and nurses in the ICU immediately started treating me. Later on, I also found that my doctor was very pessimistic. He was treating me as if I was a dead corpse. My doctor told my daughter that even if I was regain my consciousness, I would most likely be mentally ill. Given this information, my family was not sure how to face the future.

On the same day after I entered the ICU, around 7:00pm, my family was able to awaken me and I was able to recognize my family. When I came out of my unconsciousness, I looked up and saw all these IV machines around me and around my feet. It wasn’t just one or two machines; there were enough to fill the entire room. I was very surprised to see so many tubes plugged into me.

I couldn’t eat so I had a tube for feeding. I couldn’t breathe so I had a tube for breathing and the ventilator to help me breathe. I couldn’t urinate so there were more catheters for bodily fluids. Other medical equipments controlled the IV’s, the medicine, the breathing, and other functions. All this was quite painful and I didn’t know what to do.

I’ve had surgeries before, and if I had surgery on a certain part of my body, that part of the body would hurt. But this time, my entire body was in pain. I wished for death to release me from all this pain. My hands and my feet could not move; I was simply lying there. I feared that even if I survived, I will still be very painful.

Throughout everything, my husband never lost faith. He came into the ICU room everyday and read the Bible for me, and my sister would sing hymns to me. Because we are Christians, we have joy, and from their countenance, I could not tell how serious my condition was. Two of my students worked in the hospital, and they took turns to visit me and they would cry when they saw me. Then later on, another student who returned from military service came to visit me. He also wept. When I finally looked at myself in the mirror, I saw how I had changed physically and realized why they cried.

From the various visitors, I was able to gather the truth about my physical condition. A message that eventually got to me was that they were getting ready to put me in a casket. This was because I started bleeding from my lungs in the second week of my stay in the ICU, on a Sabbath day. Thank God, after 3 hours of bleeding, it stopped.

However, after that incident, my overall pulmonary functions (ability to breathe) began to degenerate until the sixth week in the ICU, when I lost almost all of my pulmonary function and had to rely on the ventilator completely.

One of my past students was a nurse at the same ICU.  By reading the setting of my ventilator, she knew not many people could survive from receiving full support from the ventilator. Due to the concerns of my worsening pulmonary function, she could not sleep after she left work after midnight.  She called every hour after midnight, to see how I was doing. The nurse on duty was really annoyed by her calls and even upbraided her for calling so many times. Indeed, I was at the edge of death because according to the nurse’s experience, few human bodies could tolerate the full support from the ventilator.

But by the grace of God, I was able to regain my pulmonary functions and to breathe independently without the use of ventilator later on. After 42 days, I was then released from the ICU to the regular ward.

Some of the workers at the regular ward were really surprised to see me.  They were surprised when I first stopped breathing and had to go to the ICU and then again when I returned from the ICU. They thought maybe they were seeing a ghost. So I really thank God that in this kind of situation, I was able to crawl out of the grip of death.

After a while, I felt very bored from staying at the hospital, because I was there for 67 days, almost two and half months. So I requested to be discharged from the hospital.

The doctor warned me that he was not releasing me because I was well but because I insisted on going home. So I was pushed out of the hospital on a wheelchair. But when I got home I couldn’t even stand. I thought I’d just get a walker. It was impossible for me to return to my own home because my home was on the fifth floor and did not have any elevator. So I went back to my mother’s house, which was on the second floor.

How did I go up? I would sit on the lowest step of the stairs.  My younger brother pulled my body up one step and my daughter moved my legs up one step. It took us almost ten to fifteen minutes to move to the second floor. I could only look at the chairs but sit on the floor because my lupus resulted in a stroke which weakened my right hand and my right foot considerably. When I looked at things, I could not see clearly. So when I saw a chair and I went to sit on it, I’d end up sitting on the floor. That was when I realized how insignificant I was. The only thing I could do was to trust in the Lord with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).

We Need to Wait on the Lord

I finally realized how insignificant I was. I couldn’t do anything. If it were not for the Lord keeping me alive, I would not be able to do anything. I was happy to come home from the hospital.

And when I left the hospital, two doctors advised me to return regularly for check-ups. One of them was a rheumatologist (lupus specialist), and the other a neurologist (brain specialist) who was monitoring the effects of my stroke. They were both quite surprised at the progress of my recovery.

My primary care physician originally saw my intial X-rays. He had said that my lungs were one of the worst cases he had ever seen and he wanted to examine them again. Miraculously, when he reviewed my new lung x-rays, he smiled and exclaimed, “This is impossible! It’s a new lung!”  This, again, is really a grace of God.

I also went to see another famous rheumatologist that belonged to the National Taiwan Medical Hospital. It was not easy to getting through to see him when I tried to meet him the first time. I had to have a special referral. But he made an exception for me to see him. He said, “Your condition is too serious. I don’t even know how to heal you. Perhaps your immune system is all confused and it’s attacking itself, or maybe the medicine they gave you at the previous hospital ended up poisoning you system. Regardless, you are facing death and the longest you could live is 1 to 2, 3 or 4 years at the most.” I thought, how can this doctor be so blunt? It took me so much hassle to see him and this was all he could say?

At first I thought, I wouldn’t care too much about it as long as people were praying for me. At the time, I myself couldn’t kneel down or really pray due to my physical condition. But upon hearing the conclusion of this famous doctor, I thought that I should start praying myself, even if I’m sitting. God looks at our heart, so he will still hear my prayer even if I can’t kneel down to pray.

Amazingly, I started to sing spiritual songs after I prayed for twenty some minutes.  After I sang, I returned to praying in tongue. The spiritual song was very clear. It was in Mandarin. I was singing Hallelujah and there was an “Amen” after I finished singing. When I was younger, I often wondered why we had to start the prayer the same way, saying “Hallelujah, praise the lord” as the church encouraged. We could just pray on our own, why should I pray like everybody else when I could speak my own words? Then I realized that praising God with Hallelujah is very natural.

All the things I shied from saying, they came out in spiritual song, and I sang about ten plus times. I even repeated some of them. After each time, I would write down the lyrics, and realized that some of the lyrics were exactly the same. This was quite amazing. After I sang about ten times, the singing stopped.

For the next five years, I did not sing any more spiritual songs and my body did not improve either. I still felt tired. I thought, wasn’t it quite clear that the Lord wanted to heal me according to what the lyrics that were sung in the spiritual song? I remember that I was singing, “The Lord would save, the Lord will heal…” I thought perhaps God was playing a trick on me.

In those days, the bed became my best friend. I loved going to bed, and wouldn’t even bother to fold up my blanket because I slept so often. When I felt quite weak at one point, I complained to my husband, the Lord said he would heal me but why do I not see any improvement?

My husband encouraged me to be patient as it says in Jeremiah 29:11-12.

“For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

This passage tells us to be patient and that we have to wait on the Lord for his plans to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, my body did not seem to recover. Every day, I would pray and my son also fasted and prayed for me many times. This reminded me of God’s promise to Abraham. God told Abraham that he would have a son at his old age of one hundred. Even Sarah laughed at such a promise. So I should not doubt God’s promise. I thought maybe the spiritual songs I sang were like the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.  Maybe I needed to take the first step to cross the red sea, so to speak. Under the encouragement of my husband and children, I did not completely lose hope.

In the beginning of 2001, when my son fasted for me, he felt the Holy Spirit prophecy that I would be healed and that the miracle will be His gift to the Danshui True Jesus Church for their church dedication ceremony.

My husband heard this message and he believed. So he told me in January that he truly believed that I will be fully healed at the Danshui church dedication. I laughed at his simple faith. I thought that I was still taking medication to control my lupus disease. How could I be considered cured, unless I stop taking this medicine altogether?

On the other hand, I had been told by the doctor and all the medical information I read was that since I had been on that medication for five years now, it may be fatal if I were to stop taking the medicine. Nevertheless, I made the decision to stop taking my medicine. I thought, everyone needs to face death at some point or other. If God heals me, I would be fine. If He doesn’t, I am ready to die. If I stopped this medicine, the worst case is that I would not live.

By faith, I started to reduce my intake of the medicine from 6 tablets a day to none at all over a period of time. I stopped completely in February, 2002

In September 2002, I seemed to start regaining my strength. I felt wonderful energy that I didn’t have before and even went out shopping. In June 2003, during the church dedication, I prayed to God to ask for healing. I didn’t realize it, but during the church dedication, I had much more energy.

I was completed healed of my condition. My recovery was confirmed in another subsequent blood test. I no longer had lupus! God is an almighty God, and we have to learn to be patient for His time.

Intercede and Support One Another

I remembered when the news of my serious illness was spread to the church; the elderly fellowship began fasting and prayer during lunchtime on Sabbaths.  Others also began praying for me as well.

Their prayers were very effective. Even though the monitoring machines in the ICU showed I had close to flat lined, their prayers helped me to survive.  Even the doctors thought they were treating a dead corpse.

There was a friend in the school whose mom also worked in the ICU. When this friend who knew my husband saw my condition, he said to my husband, "When your wife first came into the hospital, no one in the hospital wanted to take care of her, thinking she was already dead. But once they heard that she had a strong pulse, they started to surround her and rescue her."  I believe that had not the brothers and sisters at church interceded in prayer for me, I would not be alive today.

I truly feel that if the brothers and sisters in church can intercede and support one another, the prayers and outcome can be very effective.  There was an elderly member at church who prayed and asked God to give her life span to me, since she was already old and I was still young. I was very moved by her love.

I suffered the infirmity from lupus for almost 7 years. I remember all the grace that I had received from church members, the sacrifices my family made for me, my husband’s fighting my illness for many years, my older daughter’s flying back from the US to take care of me, my children’s care of me, and my younger daughter’s decline of an University of California at Davis’ scholarship in order to study at a local college near me, I felt greatly touched and loved.

I feel that the brothers and sisters at church ought to really have love for one another. Like the paralytic in Luke 5 who was healed only because his four caring friends took him to Jesus, even lowering him through the roof so Jesus would heal him. If all of us are willing to carry another person and support one another, then our church will be a strong and fervent church.

Joy is medicine

"The merry heart does good like medicine." (Prov 17:22)

I’m sure we are all very familiar with this passage. The question is whether we can have a merry heart everyday? There is a saying from a king—when you ask people what they worry about; their worries are like a never ending stream flowing into the ocean.

I remembered a sermon that Pr. Ko delivered. When you are able to let go and forgive, as in the case of Joseph, he cried. I listened to this sermon tape twice, which I don’t do very often. A lot of times, we don’t see the plank in our own eyes, but we do see the speck in other people’s eyes. If we could truly forgive others, then we are able to live without enemies. Then our lives would be very joyful.

Sometimes, when we listen to the testimony of others, we don’t feel their pain, because we don’t put ourselves in their shoes. When we clothe ourselves with love, that’s when we experience joy. This is the message in the prayer of St. Francis. Here is an excerpt from his prayer for our mutual encouragement:

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Some people may wonder how I am feeling today. I feel like I’m Peter walking on the sea; I don’t really know when I will sink.

Medically speaking, I should never have lived. I firmly believe that the grace of God is sufficient for me. Please continue to pray for me.

We can be very forgetful, and my husband took a picture of me when I was at my worst condition. Whenever I see that photo now, I am reminded to give all praise and thanks to God.