Words That Changed My Life

Yoshiaki Kinoshita
July 1986
From Chuwa Shimbun

A few years ago I had the opportunity to get to know an elder Korean member. One day he told me, "You only think about your mission, and you forget to love your wife from the bottom of your heart." I was shocked by his words. They clearly pointed out the fact that I did not have love in my heart. I thought that I had been loving my wife, but now I could see that my love was very superficial from God's point of view.

Therefore, I made a condition to pray every night together with my wife in order to find out the standard of love that God desired. We had started family life three and half years earlier, but we had not been blessed with a child. Because of this I was lonely and I keenly felt my limitations. In my mission I had many opportunities to travel to foreign countries and different parts of Japan. As the result of my travels I had lived separately from my wife for about two of those years. I had tended to ascribe my childlessness to external circumstances, always thinking that we would soon be given a child. As time went by, however, I became very impatient to be a father.

My wife and I kept our prayer condition and finally we received word from Heaven: "The more love you give, the more love expands beyond itself; thus, eternity comes about only through love. You must have such deep love that it melts every cell in your body:' Up until that time I had understood love only with my head! And I was far from being the kind of person whose entire body could be melted with love. I did not realize that I was even losing love, as well as my faith, by driving myself too hard in fulfilling my external responsibilities alone.

Father once said, "We must part in the morning with joy and meet in the evening with joy again" In other words, we should care for our spouse with a warm and kind heart all the time. I realized that in this respect, I had to repent.

From that time on, I made a continuous effort to repent about this serious shortcoming in my nature. After about six months my wife conceived, and nine months later she was safely delivered of a son. Heaven had given us a child! But I knew it was a conditional gift only, since I was still lacking in love, judging from the pure standard of Heaven. It was not until after our child was born that I began to comprehend in actuality just how big and how deep heavenly love is.

I recognize that I still have a tendency to forget to love others, and I must always strive to overcome that. It is because I myself am lacking in love that I know I must be obedient to God, the essence of love, until the end.