Finding a Faith to Live by
The old, well-known hymn by Judson Van de Venter, “All to Jesus, I surrender” is the favourite of many. But few can sing it and mean it as Min-hunge Shieh and Vivi Yuliana Shieh.
Min-hunge came to Australia from Taiwan, a Buddhist country, in 1992, and settled in Canberra as a student at the national university.
Although he’d been raised without a belief in a personal God, Min-hunge says he always believed there must be “Someone out there” who created the things in the world. At university he attended a Christian fellowship meeting and, although he says they made a great impression upon him, those leading out were too controlling, so he stopped attending.
About three years passed when Vivi, a young Chinese girl from Indonesia, came to the university. Although Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country with Christians being just 1 per cent of the population, she had been educated in Christian schools. Her parents had placed her there to avoid racism and the discrimination they thought would be directed toward her for her fairer skin colour and minority religion. From a young age, she says, she’d searched for God.
Eventually Min and Vivi met and began to keep company. One thing led to another, as they say, and they were married in Brisbane on March 5, 1997.
Meeting each other changed the course of their lives, but meeting Jesus was the single most important event in both their lives, Vivi says. “We believed that it was God’s plan for us to be together—two people from two different countries, background and languages.
“It was October 1999. Arriving home from another day’s work, we found a brochure advertising a prophecy lecture series in our mailbox. I told Min-hunge. He just said, ‘Oh yeah,’ so I thought the subject was closed. But the next day he asked me about the brochure, so I made a booking.”
On the night of the seminar, they went to a Sunshine Coast, Queensland, church where the program was being held, but although they’d planned to attend just one session, they stayed for the whole series.
“There we were—strangers in a strange place,” says Vivi, “but our first impression was that the church was very friendly.”
And, as the Bible was opened to them, Vivi and Min-hunge began to change their mind about many things relative to their lifestyle.
But as the seminars ended, they still had many questions unanswered. “I grew up as a Christian,” Vivi recalls. “I knew there was a God; I knew about Jesus. But what I knew was nothing compared with what I learned during the seminar and Bible study.
“It was like God knew our needs. We thought more Bible study would satisfy our hunger for God. We learned again from scratch, from finding the passage in the Bible, reading and understanding the meaning, to proving that the Bible is just and true.
“My husband loves history, and he isn’t an easy person to convince. After learning about the book of Daniel, he checked and compared the story with encyclopedias, history books and other sources. He was amazed at how they all matched.”
Vivi and Min-hunge decided to follow Jesus’ example in everything, and were baptised in May 2000. “Being accepted into the family of Christ was a feeling that one cannot comprehend.”
At the time they owned two shops in a busy shopping centre. But they were now convinced from their study of the Bible that God wanted them to honour Saturday as the Sabbath, His day of rest, but as they were bound by a contract and lease that ran another two years, they were in a quandary.
Vivi recalls, “We’d arrived at the point where we had to choose. Even though we’d not been to the shops on a Saturday since our baptism, the shops were still there. . . . It was like God was saying to us, ‘Don’t be like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall; don’t be like lukewarm water or the colour grey. Be either hot or cold, black or white, but choose now!’
“So we set about selling the businesses. In the meantime, we were setting up another business that would allow us to have Saturday off. But the council was being difficult with our permit application.
“Our plan was to get the new business going first, then sell the shops. But God had another plan. After watching the application process drag on for seven months without result, we finally decided that time was up. God wanted us to choose. It was now or never.
“Although the application wasn’t yet approved, we went ahead and closed one shop and sold the other. Amazingly, that same week we got our approval through council.
“God was in control—we’d prayed, we’d wept, we’d fought—but He only wanted us to surrender. God asked us: ‘Where is your faith? Don’t you trust in Me?’ Sometimes we want everything our own way and think that God will understand. But it doesn’t work like that. Although we lost from a material and financial point of view, we know we were winners in His eyes.”
It’s been two years since that battle, and their business is thriving.
“We haven’t starved, and our bills are paid, praise the Lord,” says Vivi. “Even our health is improving. I haven’t had the flu for the past two years, and Min-hunge no longer has to take tablets. We now have time to do other things that we never imagined we would have time to do before.”
And these days Vivi and Min-hunge are fully involved in the activities of their church. Vivi is an instructor in a creative activities community program run by his church while Min teaches computer at the creative activities group, helping the church in other ways.
Viv and Min have seen how God has blessed them in financial and other ways, and they forthrightly acknowledge His leading in their lives. Among their favourite Bible texts is Matthew 6:33. “The Bible has become our guide, and Jesus is our Saviour and Friend. He says to seek His kingdom and His righteousness first, promising that all the other things will then be given to us as well,” Min says.
“We’re grateful to God for the lives He’s given us, so we love to introduce Jesus to our friends, neighbours and family members. We’re also very grateful for our church family, who accepted us into their family.”
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