Grandma's Sufferings, Blessings from God

A photo of the author's grandmother before her death
A photo of the author's grandmother before her death
By Gui Qi January 18th, 2022

Never having attended a school for a single day, my grandmother had copied the Bible for 27 years.

Born in 1936, she died at the age of 86 on January 9, 2022, without her two sons around her. Having suffered much in the first half of her life, she enjoyed God’s grace for the rest of her life.

Born in an old age valuing boys over girls, she never went to school to study. She got married at the age of 20, but in the following 48 years, her husband was often away from home to earn money till his death. When getting along, they said little, while sometimes they talked much, just quarreling with each other.

Her mother died when she was 24 years old. With worries to do with her marriage and family, becoming ill in 1971, she turned to worship Buddha but was still under the control of the devil in the following eight years, as she lost hearing.

Someone said to her, "Go to believe in Jesus, whether it's good or bad, just for a try." In a state of trying, she was healed nine months later. After she was baptized in Christ, her whole family believed in Jesus.

Never having been to school, after the baptism, she asked her second daughter to read the 27 books of the New Testament word by word for her, while she was 45 years old. In addition to this, thirteen years later, in order to read and transcribe the scriptures by herself, she was tutored by her eldest eight-year-old niece, learning the Chinese Pinyin (Mandarin) and how to look up dictionaries. After a summer, she learned to pronounce initials, finals, and read syllables as a whole as well as how to use dictionaries.

From 2006 to 2016, though all her children and grandchildren were far away in other cities, she was not alone, as she opened a small vegetable garden in the yard, copying the Bible from the New Testament to the Old Testament in cycles. Till the year before her death, she had spent 27 years copying the words of God.

- Translated by Abigail Wu

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