What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life? | The Church of Almighty God

Xiaoping

This is an age when people care very much about physical attractiveness and a good looking body. With a beautiful face and a slim figure, I turned heads no matter what kind of clothes I wore. People around me often praised me and envied that I had both a great figure and a great face, and my husband was also very kind to me. Because of this, I was especially confident. No matter where I went, I walked with my head held high and my back straight. I displayed myself to receive praise from others. In my heart I believed: As long as a woman has a graceful figure and a pretty face, she could rewrite her own life.

However, unexpectedly, after having a child, I began to put on weight. Gradually, my husband began to dislike me, and he said I had a chubby stomach and fat legs. Some people also joked sarcastically at me, saying that I even put on weight when I drank water, and that I was so fat that I was out of shape. Listening to these words, I felt especially awful. My face burned as if I was slapped. When I had used to go out, people praised my beauty, but now they all ridiculed me. It was as if I fell from heaven to hell. The drastic contrast seriously damaged my pride, and I felt so painful inside.

📖 Finding God Is True Happiness (Part 2) | The Church of Almighty God

Wang Kai

After praying, I read some of God’s words: “‘Money makes the mare go’ is the philosophy of Satan and it prevails among every human society. You could say that it is a trend because it has been imparted to everyone and is now affixed in their heart. People went from not accepting this saying to growing used to it so that when they came into contact with real life, they gradually gave tacit approval to it, acknowledged its existence and finally, they gave it their own seal of approval. Is this right? (Yes.) Isn’t this process that of Satan corrupting man?” (“God Himself, the Unique V” in Continuation of The Word Appears in the Flesh). “With man’s demand for ever increasing amounts of money, people unknowingly came to love money, love gain and love enjoyment more and more. So did people come to view money as more important? When people view money as more important, they unknowingly neglect their reputation, their renown, prestige, and integrity; they neglect all these things, don’t they? When you engage in business, you see someone else taking different approaches and using various means to swindle people and get rich. Although the money earned is ill-gotten gains, they get richer and richer.

📖 Finding God Is True Happiness (Part 1) | The Church of Almighty God

Finding God Is True Happiness (Part 1) | The Church of Almighty God

Wang Kai

My father is just an ordinary elementary school teacher, and during my childhood I lived with him in the dormitory that the school provides for its staff. We lived a simple and frugal life, as most people did in that era of hardships. The thing I remember most is playing with the other teachers’ kids in the school grounds after school. One of the kids was from a much wealthier family (his mother worked in the Bureau of Finance). Every day we played until it was almost dark and then he would make a bowl of instant noodles, take out a piece of fried donut, and eat it all with gusto. We other kids just stood by and looked on hungrily as the lovely smell wafted over and made us drool. Every time this happened, my frustrated stomach would rumble loudly, which always made me feel embarrassed and at a loss about what to do. At that time I resented the fact that I was from a poor household and that my father had no talents—he couldn’t even afford a packet of instant noodles…. I resented my father, but I also made a promise to myself that I was going to make a lot of money and have a lifestyle that others would envy. From that time on I had no interest in studying, and all I could think about was leaving school, getting a job and relying on my own hard work to improve my life. However, my father insisted that I go to senior high school but I was adamant about not wanting to study. I wanted to leave school and go out to work instead because I was sure that this was the only way that I would find happiness and prosperity quickly enough.

📖 A Brief Talk About the Source of the World’s Darkness and Evil | The Church of Almighty God

Yang Le    Wuhai City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

When I was still at school, my father grew sick and passed away. After he died, uncles on both sides of the family who had often been helped by my father not only did not take care of us—my mother who had no source of income, my two sisters and I—but, on the contrary, did everything they could to make a profit off of us, even fighting with us for the little legacy my father had left behind. In the face of my relatives’ indifference and all the things they did that I never could have expected, I felt such extreme pain and couldn’t help but hate the utter lack of conscience and the heartlessness that these relatives displayed, at the same time also gaining a sense of the fickleness of human nature. After that, whenever I saw some occurrence in society of family members fighting each other over money, or people robbing and murdering over money, I would often lament that the world today was too full of darkness, that people’s hearts really were sinister and the world really was too fickle. At that time, I thought the reason why the world was so full of darkness was because people today had turned bad, that they no longer had any conscience and that there were too many evil people in the world. Afterward, only through eating and drinking the words of God did I realize that what I had thought had only just scratched the surface, and was not the source of the world’s darkness and evil. From God’s words I saw clearly the real source of darkness and evil in the world.

📖 The Only Way to Avoid Disaster | The Church of Almighty God

Chaotuo    Xiaogan City, Hubei Province

Ever since the Sichuan earthquake, I have always been fearful and worried that I might someday be struck by disaster. Particularly as I’ve seen disasters escalating, and earthquakes becoming more frequent, my fear of impending doom has become even more pronounced. As a result, I spend whole days pondering what precautions I should take to protect myself should an earthquake hit.

One day, at lunch, the sister of my host family turned on the TV as usual, and the newscaster just happened to be talking about earthquake safety measures. In the event of an earthquake, you should quickly run outdoors into an open space to avoid being injured by a falling building. If you cannot evacuate in time, you should hide under a bed, table or in a corner…. After hearing this, I felt as though I found a life-saving solution, and quickly committed these precautionary measures to memory, so I could save my own life in case an earthquake hit.

📖 My Life Principles Left Me Damaged | The Church of Almighty God

Changkai    Benxi City, Liaoning Province

The common phrase “All lay loads on the willing horse” is one with which I am all too personally familiar. My husband and I were all particularly guileless people: When it came to matters that involved our own personal benefit or loss, we weren’t the type to haggle and fuss with others. Where we could be forbearing we were forbearing, where we could be accommodating we also did our best to be accommodating. As a result, we often found ourselves cheated and abused by others. It really seemed that in life, “All lay loads on the willing horse”—if you have too much kindness in your heart, if you’re too accommodating and modest in your affairs, you’re very liable to be cheated. With these thoughts in mind, I resolved to not subject myself to all this abuse and live in frustration anymore: In future matters and in dealings with others, I vow not to be too accommodating. Even after I accepted Almighty God’s work, I still applied this principle in conducting my behavior and interactions with others.

At one point, I was working with a sister in fulfilling our duties. This sister often pointed out my inadequacies and shortcomings; I had the feeling that she was holding me down in every way. At first I thought: It’s not easy to be on your own away from home, try to use some forbearance. Later, however, after the sister proved to be unrelenting in her criticisms, I finally thought back to that phrase “All lay loads on the willing horse.” It occurred to me that the sister must have recognized I was too kind and therefore an easy target and decided to make things hard on me by nitpicking over petty and inconsequential matters. I decided I wasn’t going to accommodate or forbear her behavior any longer, so I summoned all of the fishwife energy suppressed inside me and let loose an apoplectic tirade, stopping only when the sister didn’t dare to utter another word.