A Few Things Seen and Heard about Brother Paul Wu
Brother Paul Wu had his first stroke at the age of thirty-five, his kidney transplant in 2005, and his third stroke at the age of sixty. Although this day was hard for our hearts to bear, we thank the Lord for the additional time He gave Brother Wu to be with us. On December 14, 2018, he flew specially from Taipei to Chicago to attend his second son's graduation as well as the memorial meeting for Brother Jim Reetzke. Calculating his flight itinerary, I realized he would miss one of his Taipei dialysis sessions; feeling uneasy, I also flew specially to Chicago, hoping to arrange for him to have dialysis at a Chicago hospital on the spot, but the arrangement did not work out. On Lord's Day, December 16, the two of us returned to Los Angeles on two different flights. By the Lord's leading, his seat was temporarily changed to the first row of first class; just before the plane landed in Los Angeles, because his heart was overburdened, he fell into a coma. The flight attendant discovered it at the very first moment, and it happened that a doctor was seated next to him, who immediately used the plane's cardiac defibrillator to resuscitate him. On the way from the airport to the hospital, he fell into a coma three more times. Thank the Lord for His keeping; after a month of treatment at the UCLA hospital, he was safely discharged. We thank the Lord that He gave him over a year more.
Brother Wu was my spiritual eldest brother and my close friend; the two of us could talk all the way from the earthly Jerusalem to the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation. He came to America at least six times a year, each time mostly arriving at eleven at night, and we would always go to Ten Ren Tea in Cerritos to eat a bowl of plain noodles before going home. He was a man who could tell a story; while those beside him were already roaring with laughter, he would still tell it slowly, unhurried. The funniest story I remember him telling was that once on an international flight, he found his seat surrounded by mothers with infants and children, unbearably noisy. He asked the flight attendant to change seats but could not, so he could only calm his mind and slowly fall asleep. Halfway through the flight, he was suddenly startled awake by the silence all around, and found that the mothers and children next to him had all disappeared. He asked the flight attendant what had happened, and the attendant answered with a wry smile that, because Brother Wu's thunderous snoring had continued without stopping, it had driven them all away.
In the fellowship concerning financial burdens, Brother Wu was quite renowned. As long as he went to fellowship, the churches and saints were willing to pay the price, so it mostly came about naturally. He himself testified that he learned it from Brother Lee. In 1985, when the land for the Linkou large meeting hall was bought, that land price (NT$34 million) was an "astronomical" figure at the time, and the brothers hesitated because their capacity was not big enough. But Brother Lee fellowshipped that the church must go on—like an eagle with two wings, one wing being the small-group meetings and the other being the large meetings—so a large meeting hall was needed. Brother Lee said he could be responsible for half, bringing it into the overseas fellowship, so the brothers in Taiwan agreed. Then Brother Lee called a "service meeting" to fellowship the financial burden with the co-workers, elders, and saints throughout the province. At that meeting, more than a thousand people attended. After the fellowship, immediately, according to the size of each church and the income of the saints, the offering cards were filled out on the spot according to one's heart's desire. After filling them out, Brother Wu thought the meeting could be dismissed, but unexpectedly Brother Lee said the total was to be tallied on the spot, and he led everyone to sing hymns and continued to speak the burden. When all the offering cards had been tallied, the amount actually exceeded the total needed to buy the land, so Brother Lee did not need to go elsewhere to fellowship. Brother Wu testified that he had never seen anyone who could not get by because of offering; everyone who offered only loved the Lord more, and every church that offered increased in number. After the Linkou land was bought in 1985, within two years the church in Taipei grew from three thousand to four thousand. After the Xinji land was secured in 1987, the church in Taipei grew to over five thousand. Brother Wu said that filling out an offering card is quite an art: the one leading must himself set a pattern by faith, must stake it out, and must dare to fellowship. Once, when a certain church in Asia was going to buy a meeting hall, after fellowshipping the burden in a conference he said to all the saints present: today, besides the saints with a burden to offer for buying the meeting hall, when all the saints leave the meeting place, please offer all the money in your pockets—so he also earned the nickname of "high-pressure salesman."
We very much enjoyed hearing him tell the past events of learning to coordinate with Brother Lee. Besides the buying of the Linkou large meeting hall mentioned above, the most wonderful was the process of the church in Taipei bidding for the Xinji Building site in 1987. In 2017, when Brother Wu fellowshipped with us about the bidding thirty years before, he remembered the bid price clearly, and could tell in detail how the fourteen households of illegal structures were persuaded to relocate one by one—showing his extremely strong memory. That piece of land was three hundred ping (one ping is about 36 square feet). On the morning of the bidding there was fellowship, and the price was lowered from the market price of NT$900,000 per ping to NT$800,000 per ping; in the afternoon Brother Lee gathered the brothers again and said it would be better to act within their means, and finally lowered it to NT$570,000 per ping, bidding at a total price of NT$160 million. At this price everyone thought it would be impossible to win the bid, but unexpectedly the church in Taipei won it. Not only did it win the bid, but because Brother Lee said not to borrow money and to have the brothers and sisters stake it out, in the end they staked it out. Later, in negotiating the joint construction, they ran into many situations and negotiated for more than six years; because there was no loan, they also saved seventy or eighty million in interest. Brother Wu said that if there had not first been the offering at Linkou, there would later have been no capacity to take part in the bidding for the Xinji site, nor even, later still, the building of the Xinji Building; seeing the churches and saints being one accord, the Lord's blessing was right there. What man could not do, God enabled them to do.
Of all Brother Paul Wu's virtues, the most outstanding was that he had a broad heart. King Solomon asked for wisdom, and God gave him great understanding and a broad heart. Once, in fellowship with Yucheng, I recalled that in the 1980s I once complained to Brother Lee about a certain brother, saying that this brother was not doing his best in the burden of spreading the ministry and encouraging the saints to attend the winter and summer ministry trainings—and I had evidence. That day Brother Lee looked at me and said twice, "You exhort him, you exhort him." Brother Lee's answer left me utterly ashamed. When I fellowshipped this matter with Yucheng, he said to me, this is a broad heart; we are to love the brother, bear with the brother, cover the brother, and recover the brother.
There was one thing about Brother Wu I least understood: every winter and summer training, he personally went to the ministry station to collect all the registration name tags, and when his health was good, he even handed them out one by one to the attending brothers himself. I said this kind of thing could be done by other brothers; why trouble himself? He answered that some of the registered brothers he did not yet know, and he wanted, through this opportunity of handing out name tags, to meet and get to know them one by one, and to confirm their registration and attendance. Of the churches in Taiwan, he could call over a thousand saints by name, and we jokingly called him the "census bureau" of the churches in Taiwan.
When Brother Lee asked him to serve full-time in the bookroom, Brother Wu, because he had to teach, could not fully agree, so Brother Lee said, then you serve while teaching. Perhaps because of this, he was the only brother who could sleep soundly while Brother Lee was preaching. But his special feature was that, upon waking, he could stand up and prophesy, fully recounting the main points of Brother Lee's fellowship.
After I left Taiwan in 1971, I never returned to Taiwan for the New Year. This January I had a special opportunity to return to Taiwan with my wife and spent a week with Brother Wu. On Lord's Day Yucheng actually drove the two of us personally to attend the New Year blending conference in New Taipei City. At the end of the conference, he introduced to over four thousand saints all the coordinating brothers of the church in New Taipei City, including a group of young newly joined serving ones. His voice was resounding and his spirit was high; one could not tell at all that he was a sick man. Mark 10:15 says, "Truly I say to you, Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child shall by no means enter into it." On one or two occasions in fellowship with Yucheng, he suddenly burst out laughing, carefree, pure, and happy. I said to him, "How is it that your laughter is exactly like my six-year-old granddaughter's?"
Thank the Lord, Brother Wu finished the years and bounds God measured to him, and also left us beautiful memories and a beautiful pattern.