I am not a Falun Dafa practitioner, but my father is. Though I don’t practice Falun Dafa, I firmly believe that Falun Dafa is a great spiritual practice. I have witnessed how it has saved my family and transformed my father from a bad person into a responsible husband and wonderful dad.
My family was in relatively good financial shape when I was young. My father not only had a full-time job but also ran some small ventures on the side. My friends envied me, as I always had spare money to spend.
But my father was deep into gambling. Whenever mahjong was mentioned, he would forget everything and sit down to play it for an entire day. He would come home and quarrel with my mother if he lost money.
He also enjoyed smoking and often asked me to light up cigarettes for him.
My family fell into total chaos in 1998 when my mother became mentally ill. All of a sudden, she started shouting and speaking nonsense. I was seven at the time.
My father started practicing Falun Dafa that same year.
My father took my mother to visit all the doctors. My family’s savings were soon depleted, but there was still no sign of recovery for my mother. She did many insane things, such as setting fires, attempting suicide, running out of our house for no reason, hitting people, smashing appliances, and so on.
This all came to a head one day when she jumped off the third floor of a building. Her colleagues put together a generous donation, allowing us to take our mother to the hospital for emergency treatment. The doctors said that she had broken her leg and hip.
My family had no money to pay for her operations. After a few sleepless nights, my father decided to take my mother home.
My mother spent all day in bed, while my father worked to support the family. During his lunch break, he would rush home to cook and feed my mother and then rush back to work. In the evening, he helped my mother bathe, applied medicine to her injuries, and fed her dinner.
Thankfully, my father was able to find a folk medicine doctor to set my mother’s bones, because it was much cheaper than the hospital. My mother recovered well.
But her mental disorder remained. Undeterred, my father continued the same routine every day: bathing her, cooking meals, and cleaning. He has done it now for 18 years.
“Aren’t you tired?” I asked him. “Have you ever thought of quitting?”
“It is a responsibility, and the basic requirement for a cultivator [of Falun Dafa],” he answered. “Had I not practiced Falun Dafa and received such strong spiritual support, I might have been unable to continue. It would be so easy to just stop looking for her when she runs away from home.”
As a non-practitioner, I cannot tell what allows Falun Dafa to change a person at the core. But I have observed with my own eyes that my father, due to his belief, has transformed from a person who enjoyed gambling and didn’t care for his family into a person who is responsible, always considerate of others, and well respected at work.
There are millions of people practicing Falun Dafa. Even under the Chinese Communist Party’s complete ban and persecution, they have continued to uphold their belief, and to be honest, kind, and tolerant. They do not compete for personal gain and are willing to make sacrifices for others. They always look within to search for their own faults instead of blaming others. Isn’t that amazing?
So if someone asks me, “What do you think of your Dad practicing Falun Dafa?” I just tell them, “I think that’s wonderful!”
(Clearwisdom)