A Young Man During WWII

My father was born in Hong Kong in 1929. During his childhood, he lived with his parents. His father (my grandfather) was a carpenter, specializing in building wooden ships. He mostly worked and lived overseas. On Sundays, my father went with his mother and other relatives to church and Sunday school, attending a Methodist church on Hong Kong Island. When he was 11 years old, my father believed in the Lord Jesus and was baptized. He was young and didn’t know much about Christianity and the truth of the Bible, but God’s love did not cease to protect him.

In 1941, when Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese, my father was a teenager. During that time, all the schools were closed, public transportation was stopped, and life was hard. The only means of passenger transportation was by tricycle. My grandfather found a tricycle and let my father offer rides to passengers to earn a small amount of money for their family of three. My father told me: “Carrying passengers demanded lots of physical strength, especially when going uphill. But somehow, each time, after becoming exhausted, I was the one among my fellow tricycle drivers who recovered the most quickly, even though I was the youngest!” I know it was God who gave my father the extra strength to manage his daily heavy workload.

One day, in 1945, during the later days of the war, my father was waiting for a passenger on a street in Causeway Bay. A man got on and said that his destination was a nearby remote hilltop. After arriving—at the very moment when his passenger’s foot stepped off the tricycle onto the ground—my father heard a loud roaring noise. Looking back, he realized it was an air raid! My father described the scene to me as a carpet-style bombing—all streets and buildings were destroyed! He realized that if he had not carried this passenger away from the scene, they could not have escaped and may have been killed. But when my father turned around to ask the passenger for the fare, the man had disappeared! This peculiar experience—which lacked logical reason—was imprinted deeply in my father’s memory. The place was a barren hilltop. Why did this person want to go there? With no trees, boulders, or bench to hide behind, how could this person have just disappeared?

Since I was a child, I have heard my father describe this experience many times. It was only after I believed in the Lord Jesus that I realized it was a miracle! God knew what was going to happen, so He must have sent an angel as a passenger to help my father escape from the bombing disaster to save his life.

Rescued Again

At some point in his life, my father stopped worshiping God. In Hong Kong, during the 1950s and 1960s, people’s lives were very difficult. Parents worked day and night and were still barely able to feed their family. This was the same for our family. I am the youngest son with three older sisters. My father loved me very much and taught me the importance of honesty, courage, hard work, and helping people in need. He spent time exploring outdoor activities with me and encouraged me that I could always overcome difficulties. I thank God for giving me such a good father whom I deeply respected, and I have many fond memories with him. After I came to the United States to study and became a believer in the Lord Jesus, every time I returned to Hong Kong, I would share the gospel with my father. But he did not like it. Even though he had gone to church as a child, he now considered religion as only a means to lead people to do good deeds—and the belief in God and the supernatural as superstition. So, to avoid making our relationship too tense, I could only pray for my father’s salvation.

Then, one Saturday morning in 1998, about 2 a.m., I suddenly woke up from a deep sleep feeling a heaviness of heart, sensing that something unfortunate was about to happen to my relatives in Hong Kong. (I have never had that experience before or after.) I called home, and my mother—with panic in her voice—said she couldn’t talk because my father was about to die. She got off the phone as she was hurrying out to find a doctor. I was shocked! My father had always been in good health and nothing like this had ever happened before. What worried me was not only his life, but also his salvation. I could only reverently pray to God to save my father’s life and grant him His great salvation.

It was difficult waiting two hours before I dared to call home again. My mother told me what had happened. It was 4:45 p.m. on Saturday in Hong Kong. My father suddenly had difficulty breathing, and his face turned pale. She hurried to the nearby medical clinic for help. When she arrived, the doctor—with briefcase in hand—was ready to leave work for the weekend. The doctor agreed to go home with my mother to check on my father. He injected medicine into my father and saved his life. Afterwards, the doctor told my mother: “What your husband just had was acute asthma. Most people who are not treated quickly enough die. You are very lucky. If this had happened five minutes later and I had already gotten off work, then your husband would probably not be alive now.”

My father had never had asthma before, nor has he had it since. We don’t know how this illness suddenly occurred, but I believe my father was not rescued out of luck. This was God’s grace. Through this incident, God reminded me to pray more earnestly for my father’s salvation.

One Last Chance

Because of my father’s long-term smoking, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2002. After radiation and chemotherapy, his health situation got worse in 2003, during the time when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was raging in Hong Kong. I was very worried about my father’s condition and salvation. Later, with permission from my wife and job manager, I went back to Hong Kong to visit my father. The trip would only be for 10 days, and I knew this would be the last chance to see my father and tell him the gospel.

Flying to Hong Kong with a transit to Tokyo, there were only a handful of passengers because of the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong. The first three days back passed very quickly, and I knew there were not many days left. Praying for a chance, I mustered up the courage to invite my father again to believe in Jesus. When I brought it up, at first my father became upset. But God gave me wisdom, so I told him: “Not only do sick patients need to believe in Jesus, but also healthy people—because the Lord Jesus is the true God. I reminded him that, in heaven, there were grandfather and grandma, and his cousins. And I would be there too, in the future. With this, my father’s attitude started to change. I reminded him of the unexplained incident he experienced during WWII and told him that it was actually a miracle from God to save his life. My father seemed to understand and agree, and he asked me how he could believe in Jesus. I took his hands, together with my mother’s hands, and we prayed. My father confessed his sins before God and accepted the Lord Jesus as his personal Savior. After praying, my father was cheerful, full of peace, and had a big, brilliant smile that I will never forget. We were all full of joy!

My oldest sister is a Christian. When she found out that our father had believed in the Lord Jesus, she was so excited she immediately contacted the Methodist church, hoping a baptism could be arranged for our father before I returned to the United States. At that time, my father had limited mobility and needed a wheelchair. The church quickly arranged a special meeting and a young sister to pick us up in her car after she got off from work. This sister was a medical doctor and carefully helped my father get in and out of her car from his wheelchair. The love of the pastor and this sister touched us very much. At the meeting, the pastor took out a yellowed paper. It was the certificate of my father’s baptism more than 60 years before. The church had kept it, and it was not destroyed during WWII! The pastor said: “Your father believed in the Lord Jesus when he was young and has already been baptized. What needs to be done today is not baptism, but conviction.” So, he helped my father profess again his acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. Afterwards, the pastor asked my father what he would like to share with us. My father took the microphone and said calmly: “Today, I believe in Jesus. My intention is not to ask God to heal my illness. I have an eternal home, and I want to return there.”

Conclusion

God’s love and care began when my father accepted Jesus in his youth. Although he left God later in his life, God’s cords of love and kindness did not stop, and they eventually led him back to his heavenly home. As the Bible says: “Thy mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds” (Psalm 36:5, KJV). Praise the Lord!

Alex Fung is a computer engineer and has been a member of First Chinese Baptist Church Los Angeles for over 25 years.