Searching for the meaning of life- How can we live out a meaningful and valuable life?——Eastern Lightning

Searching for the meaning of life- How can we live out a meaningful and valuable life?

  What do we live for? Some people live for food and clothes, some for children, some for status, some for reputation, some for money…...We are busy with our life until the end of our life. We take nothing away with us but only regrets. How should we live then? The classic documentary of The Church of Almighty God leads us to seek the mystery of life.

Searching for the meaning of life- How can we live out a meaningful and valuable life?

Stepping Onto the Right Path of Life

Tandang

  Since childhood, I had been influenced by the socially circulated viewpoints of “Making money is the absolute principle” and “No pain, no gain.” I thought that as long as I worked hard and made a fortune, I would gain status in society, and would live a life with dignity and integrity. Under the rule of this view, I had persistently been striving hard for money and fame. Furthermore, I was competitive by nature and hated to lose in whatever I did. So, along my life’s journey, I indeed suffered a lot.

  When I got married, my family was in a poor financial situation, and it went even heavily indebted after the births of my two sons. However, this didn’t discourage me. Instead, I discussed hopefully with my husband how to make money. In the beginning, we found that breeding the seedlings of sweet potatoes was a profitable business, so we bought books and materials to study that, and tried to breed the seedlings with scientific technology. Several years later, we did earn some money, but hard labor left me with many illnesses. Even so, in order to be someone of importance and to change my home for the better, I, who was born ambitious, didn’t back off. When we noticed some people around us became rich by raising pigs, we immediately followed. We bought diverse materials on pig farming, and began to learn scientific methods of it. After the first piglets were purchased, we carefully produced the feed, observed and fed them, and did the cleaning, completely as the materials instructed. I put all my energy into raising pigs, and became a pig breeder through and through. Another several years passed. I found that despite my painstaking care and efforts, our pigs were always not so fattened up as others’ at the time of sale. Besides, the market was down. So for those years, we made little money and were barely able to make ends meet. Thus I gradually felt that pig farming was not a lucrative investment. Yet people of the same trade with me built their houses, ate and dressed well, and enjoyed abundant material comforts. This bothered me immensely: We all raise pigs, but why are my pigs always thinner than theirs? We are faced with the same market condition, but why did they all make a profit except for me?

  Once, I went to a store to buy feed for my pigs nearly ready for sale. There, I met one of my peers. We bought the last batch of piglets together, and his practice later resolved my puzzlement and showed me the trick of the trade. The growth of pigs can be divided into three stages: the first, middle, and last stage, each of which goes with corresponding feed. And there is a big difference between the toxic residues of pig feeds in the first and last stage. In accordance with the rules, pigs in the last growing stage shall never be fed with the first stage feed, lest the toxic substances contained in it be absorbed by human bodies. At that time, according to the growth time and maturity of that batch of pigs, they should be fed with the last stage feed. However, my peer said to the seller, “I’d like the first stage pig feed.” This bewildered me, and I hurriedly said to him, “No, no. Your pigs need the last stage feed now. You had it wrong.” Hearing my words, my peer gave me a smile and said, “You look smart, but why are you so naive? Pigs fed with the first stage feed grow fatter. So we all use the first stage feed. It’s something known to every pig breeder. Only if fed with the first stage feed will pigs grow fast, and we can thus make more money. Making Money is the absolute principle.” His words brought me to my senses: It’s no wonder that they always make more money than me, though we all raise pigs. So the trick lies here. However, the first stage feed contains lots of drugs. If the pigs nearly ready for sale are fed with that, won’t the drug residues remain within the meat? If such meat is put on the market, won’t it be harming people’s health? This is doing evil. How dare they do that? But I then thought, “They have made such a good profit that way. How come I didn’t know the trick before? If I continue with my own way, I will earn much less than them….” “Hey, which kind of feed do you want?” Just when I was struggling in mind, the seller cried out at me, which interrupted my musings. Looking at the first stage feed in my peer’s van, I felt uneasy. Nonetheless, when I thought of how my peers had made handsome profits whereas I didn’t earn much money despite my assiduous efforts over these years, just acting as a foil in the trade, I was somewhat unwilling to reconcile myself to that. They can do such things; why must I be that rigid? After the hesitation, I replied to the seller, “I want the first stage feed.” Just like this, I crossed the moral baseline for the first time.

  Although I carried the first stage feed back home, I still felt disturbed and afraid inwardly. Every time I fed the pigs, a feeling of reproach would well up in my heart, and I felt as if I was harming others and that my practice was really immoral. But when I saw the fast growing pigs, my uneasiness within turned to happiness. Soon, the pigs became fully grown and were ready for sale. This time it turned out as I wished. The profit was really a lot higher than before. As such, I was even more certain of the law for survival “Making money is the absolute principle.” I followed the hidden rule of this market, no longer fed pigs with the last stage feed, and thereby became a black-hearted pig farmer. At that point, money lessened the guilt and uneasiness in my conscience.

  One year, the market prices of pork were quite good, so I raised more than twenty piglets in attempt to make a big profit that year. Just when the pigs were thriving, a plague struck. It was so fierce, and I was caught totally off guard. Within a few days, several pigs died one after another, and some others looked ill. In the face of the dead pigs and the other sick ones, I felt scared, fearing that I might lose both capital and interest this time. I was extremely distressed, and couldn’t help but look to the sky and sigh deeply, “Heavens! Why is this so? I’ve raised pigs for years, and there’re seldom good market prices like this year’s. Why do my pigs suffer from such severe illness? Why am I so unfortunate? Why is my life so difficult?” In helplessness, I could do nothing but get rid of the dead pigs. At that time, I was already depressed and deflated, without any strength at all, and could by no means cheer up. A peer learned of my situation and then introduced to me a man who specially bought dead and sick pigs. When that man came, however, he gave a very low price for each pig. Anyway, that was better than those pigs dying for nothing. So I sold all the sick pigs to him. When I asked what those sick pigs were meant for, he only gave me an ambiguous answer. With that, I had a bad feeing and wanted to figure it out all along. So, later I asked my peer the same question, and he told me, “Those pigs will be made into minced meat, and it will then be sold to those who are in the business of Rougamo and meat stuffing.” The news was a hard blow to me indeed. Isn’t that harming people blatantly? The pigs have been so seriously ill. Can their meat be edible? For that little bit of money, how many people will be harmed? Isn’t it something wicked? Isn’t it doing evil? The more I thought about it, the more I felt frightened. I made up my mind to never sell sick pigs again to harm people. A few days later, another pig turned critically ill. I thought, “This time I mustn’t call that man who buys sick and dead pigs. Since the pig is dying, just let it die.” However, looking at the white fat pig, thinking of how much money and energy I had spent on it, I began to waver in my resolution: If the pig dies for nothing, won’t I suffer quite a big loss? Where will I get money for my two sons’ school fees? On the other hand, even if I sell it to that man, I won’t gain any profits, but just suffer fewer losses. But he will harm others if he buys my sick pig. What should I do? I mulled it over, tentative and halting. Just at that moment, a thought flashed through my mind: Anyway, it’s not me who sells the meat to people who are in the meat stuffing business. Since I don’t profit from this, whatever he does will be his own business and have nothing to do with me. At the thought of this, I picked up my phone and made a call to him. That man came soon and took away the sick pig. Though uneasy, I made an excuse to justify myself: I’m forced to do so, for the sake of survival.

  Just like this, I had been working and struggling for a better life. However, years later, I was still what I used to be, and my family’s living standard didn’t improve a lot. My wish to be an important person fell through, and my desire to be highly regarded by others was also shattered. At that point, I, who never admitted defeat, felt perplexed about my future: Why do I still not get what I want after so many years of striving? I even felt such a life was too hard and tiring…. Just when I was in distress and despair, Almighty God’s gospel of the last days came to me.

  In 2012, I accepted Almighty God’s work of the last days. In Almighty God’s words I found the answer why I had been struggling in misery all those years. Almighty God says, “One exhausts a lifetime’s worth of energy fighting against fate, spends all of one’s time bustling about trying to feed one’s family and shuttling back and forth between wealth and status. The things that people treasure are family, money, and fame; they view these as the most valuable things in life. All people complain about their fates, yet still they push to the back of their minds the questions that it is most imperative to examine and understand: why man is alive, how man should live, what the value and meaning of life is. All of their lives, however many years that may be, they just rush about seeking fame and fortune, until their youth has fled, until they become gray and wrinkled; until they see that fame and fortune cannot stop one’s slide toward senility, that money cannot fill the emptiness of the heart; until they understand that no one is exempt from the law of birth, aging, sickness, and death, that no one can escape what fate has in store” (“God Himself, the Unique III” in Continuation of The Word Appears in the Flesh). After reading God’s words, I nodded repeatedly: God’s words are so right! This exactly is the real situation of man’s life. In retrospect, I had been shuttling back and forth between fame and fortune, and I also established my outlook on life and values according to that. I believed that money was everything, and thereby had been fighting for it. However, what did I receive in the end? Nothing but endless misery and the exhaustion of body and mind. It was not until then that I realized my sufferings resulted neither from God’s ordination nor from my being born unlucky; rather, it was the path I took that determined my life in constant misery. I had no obedience to the Creator’s arrangement, and always attempted to change my fate and live a life of an important person by earning more money. My erroneous outlook upon life doomed me to live in endless suffering. Then I thought of people around me. Every one of them were always keeping up with the Joneses, but what did they get eventually? They all complained that life was too painful and tiring. Indeed, God’s words gave a faithful depiction of man’s life. Then I went on to read.

Stepping Onto the Right Path of Life

  Almighty God says, “… the ideas that social trends bring about for people, the way they cause people to conduct themselves in the world, the life goals and outlook that they bring about in people. These are very important; they can control and influence man’s state of mind. … But 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. Their whole family engages in the same business as you, but they enjoy life more than you do, and you feel bad, saying: ‘Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I earn as much as they do? I must think of a way to get more money, to make my business prosper.’ You then ponder this through. … However, under the urge to make a profit, your thinking undergoes a gradual transformation. During this transformation, your principles of conduct also begin to change. When you first cheat someone, when you first defraud someone, you have your reservations, saying ‘This is the last time I cheat someone and I will not do it again. I cannot cheat people. Cheating people will only earn retribution and bring disaster upon me! This is the last time I cheat someone and I will not do it again.’ When you first deceive someone, your heart has some scruples; this is the function of man’s conscience—to have scruples and to reproach you, so that it feels unnatural when you cheat someone. But after you have successfully deceived someone you see that you now have more money than you did before, and you think this method can be very beneficial for you. Despite the dull ache in your heart, you still feel like congratulating yourself on your ‘success,’ and you feel a little pleased with yourself. For the first time, you approve of your own behavior and approve of your own deception. Afterward, once man has been contaminated by this cheating, it is the same as someone who gets involved in gambling and then becomes a gambler. In unawareness, he approves of his cheating behavior and accepts it. In unawareness, he takes cheating to be a legitimate commercial behavior, and takes cheating to be the most useful means for his survival and his life; he thinks that by doing this he can get rich quick. At the beginning of this process people cannot accept this type of behavior, they look down on this behavior and this way of going about things, until they try it out and experiment with it in their own way, personally and firsthand, and then their hearts begin to gradually transform. So what is this transformation? It is an approval and admission of this trend, an admission and approval of this type of idea instilled in you by the social trend. … This change puts you further and further from God, and you become more and more in conformity with Satan, more and more similar to it” (“God Himself, the Unique VI” in Continuation of The Word Appears in the Flesh).

  The revelation in God’s words woke me up. All those years, I had been living by the satanic philosophy “Making money is the absolute principle,” and had spared no effort to make money. At that time, I had finally understood that Satan uses this fallacy to seduce man into esteeming money, and mislead them into believing that the more money they make, the better they will enjoy and the higher they will rank than others. Indoctrinated with this thought, man gradually attaches no importance to the ways and means of earning money; what counts most in their hearts is to get rich so as to be looked up to and endorsed by others. Consequently, they start to follow the trend of this world, betraying their conscience and stopping at nothing to make money. Not only do they not consider such life shameful, but instead they think those who rely on honest and legal ways to make money cannot survive in this world, and deem such people incompetent. As time goes on, man grows accustomed to such evil trend. The Satan’s rule of survival “Making money is the absolute principle” brings about a fundamental change in man’s thoughts, so that man has lost their conscience, humanity and moral sense, becoming increasingly selfish and mean, greedy and malicious. They fall under the spell of money and get ever more snared in it. In fact, I was such a person myself, wasn’t I? Just for money and gain, I betrayed my conscience and abandoned the moral baseline: feeding the pigs nearly ready for sale with the first stage feed and selling the sick pigs, making huge profits and protecting my own interests at the cost of others’ health. As such, I fell into the trap set by Satan and degenerated step by step. I then recalled that people were all enticed and deceived by the evil trend of Satan. For the sake of money, they wiped out the morality and humanity, ignoring the life of others. For the sake of money, they used various means of deception to damage people’s body and mind, harming each other. For example, in order to make a tidy profit, people added all kinds of additives and toxic substances, which would cause serious threat to health, to the food of man. More specifically, they added toxic substances to rice, flour, oil, milk powder, and so on, and used the growth stimulator forchlorfenuron, coloring agents for vegetables and fruits. Furthermore, they used feeds produced with scientific technology in raising pigs, chickens, fish, and so on. As a result, people who ate those things were subjected to diverse strange diseases and cancers, suffering devastating affliction physically and mentally. It’s true that people made their fortunes by betraying their conscience and taking a whole variety of measures, that they ate and enjoyed better, obtained the high regard of others, and that their backs straightened and their words became weighty. However, their hearts went black, and they lost humanity, cheating and harming each other, living like demons without any human likeness. Man had been unable to extricate themselves from this situation. And if things continued the way they were going, man would only end up ravaging one another, murdering in cold blood and seeking their own destruction. The more I thought, the more I became frightened. I prayed to God in my heart, “Oh God! I give You thanks for Your salvation to me, or I would even be unaware of what an evil world I’m living in. I don’t want to be teased by Satan any more, nor get more entrenched in the mire of sin. I wish to receive Your salvation and to be a true person.”

  Later, I started working in a factory to support our family and ceased to only seek fortunes. To my surprise, when I gave up pursuing such things and began to work in a down-to-earth manner, I felt very relaxed and the misery in my heart was gone. Besides, thanks to the frequent meetings with my brothers and sisters and our fellowship about God’s words, I gained some knowledge of God’s work of saving man, as well as some discernment of the evil of this world. I could see through many things in daily life, and knew how to practice and deal with them. I felt this was precisely the life man should live. Without Almighty God’s words, no one could manage to resist the seduction of fame, gain, and money. Only God possesses the authority and power to grant man a life with freedom and relieve us from the bondage of Satan’s influence.

  At the end of that year, my boss gave me my pay slip and asked me to see if there was any mistake. I read it over and over, checking it carefully, and finally I was certain that my boss paid me an extra 400 yuan. Looking at the extra 400 yuan, I was churned up inside: The 400 yuan is not what I deserve, but I really need money as my two sons are still in school. Since my boss has given it to me as my salary, why don’t I take it? What’s more, he will not take any notice even if I take it. But on second thought, I realized that was not after God’s heart. If I did that, I would not only act like an unbeliever, but fail to stand testimony for God. At that time, I thought of God’s words, “Human nature remains unchanged. What is in their hearts is not in accordance with My will—it is not what I need. What I detest the most is man’s stubbornness and recidivism, but what force would there be provoking them to continue being a stranger to Me, to always keep a distance, to never act in accordance to My will before Me and oppose Me behind My back instead? Is this their loyalty? Is this their love for Me? Why can’t they repent and be born again?” (“The Twenty-seventh Utterance” of God’s Utterances to the Entire Universe in The Word Appears in the Flesh). God’s words of judgment pierced my heart and left me ashamed all at once. I felt as if God was right by my side, observing my words and deeds. Then I remembered that I once prayed to God and made a resolution to start anew. At this point, however, confronted with the temptation of money, I fell into my old ways once again. No, I could not act as Satan’s tool or the slave of money any more for the interests of my flesh, nor do anything that opposed and shamed God. However much God bestowed upon me, that was how much I should enjoy. Though it was merely 400 yuan, it could be seen as a temptation and test of me in the spiritual realm. Therefore, I made an explanation to my boss and returned the extra money to him. With the rest of the money that I deserved, I left the factory relaxed.

  That I forsook the flesh and practiced the truth was all the result achieved by God’s words on me. It was the guidance of God’s words that allowed me to be an upright person. Moreover, I saw that God is at our sides whatever circumstances we are in, and that He will surely use His words and work to lead us step by step to walk out of the camp of Satan, to break free from Satan’s shackles and become free. Just as Almighty God says, “If people experience until the day comes when their outlook on life and the significance and the basis of their existence have entirely changed, when they have been altered to their very bones, and have become someone else, won’t this be incredible? This is a great change, an earth-shattering change. Only when you are disinterested in the fame and fortune, status, money, pleasure, and luxuries of the world, and can easily forgo them, will you have the likeness of a human being. Those who will ultimately be made complete are a group such as this; they live for the truth, live for God, and live for that which is just. This is the likeness of a human being” (“You Must Know That There Are Similarities and Differences in People’s Natures” in Records of Christ’s Talks With Leaders and Workers of the Church).

  The End.

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