A Wasted Ointment—Who Else but Me?
My acquaintance with Brother Wu began through his family. Brother Wu's household had many brothers and sisters, every one of them loving and serving the Lord—truly a family of the faithful and devoted. They looked away unto the Lord, taking the loving of the Lord as their joy and the serving of the Lord as their living, closely following the ministry, with the building up of the church as their goal. His younger sister, Wu Yunlan (吳允蘭), was my schoolmate, simply loving the Lord; when I married, her mother gave me a hand-made prayer cushion, encouraging me to serve the Lord more in prayer. His younger brother, Wu Fuhua (吳復華), was doing his military service in Taichung while I was studying at university; he was one who took the kingdom of God by violence and was a pattern to me. After I came to America, in New Jersey, I served together with his second younger brother, Brother Wu Fulin (吳福臨), and was much perfected. Through these relationships, I gradually began to have contact with Brother Youcheng.
The Lord led in raising up the work for Chinese-speaking students and scholars in New Jersey; in the midst of this, for the propagation of the truth within the mainland, there was the service of the work of converting between the traditional and simplified scripts. From the beginning until now, Brother Youcheng was in it all, supporting and caring.
Brother Youcheng had a keen spiritual discernment and knew the direction of the Spirit's move. Even though the affairs of the book room were many and his service among the churches in Taiwan was crowded with countless matters each day, he still did not shrink from the toil of traveling a thousand miles. From 2003 to 2015, for thirteen long years, year after year he came to New Jersey to support and supply, spending money, strength, and time—something that could never be done without a real burden and seeing concerning the Body of Christ.
In the service of the church, Brother Youcheng bore an exceedingly great responsibility and managed many affairs, yet in the midst of his busyness he was approachable, modest, and pleasant, never giving people the feeling of being beyond reach. Each year, at the winter and summer trainings in North America, in order to help the saints enter into the practice of pray-reading, studying, memorizing, and speaking, so that the Chinese-speaking saints in North America could obtain the outlines with the verses at the training and enter into the pursuit in good time, the brother personally arranged the service of dispensing food: within a limited time he saw to the printing and publishing, carried the materials onto the airplane, and then transported them to the various localities. This kind of thankless service of propagating the truth could never be obtained, however much one sought it, without the brother and the many coordinating in service. Moreover, many difficulties and impossibilities in the service were often resolved in just a few words of the brother's fellowship. This was not only because the brother bore responsibility and was faithful in the service; even more, it was the trust of the many serving ones in the expression of divinity through humanity manifested in the brother.
Because I was in America, on many of the occasions when I saw the brother, it was when the brother had crossed the ocean and hurried over from Taiwan to take part in fellowship; although he was already in America at the hour of evening rest, he still had to deal in fellowship with matters in other places and other time zones. After the fellowship meetings in America ended, paying no regard to the jet lag, he would at once, without resting his stride, hurry back to Taiwan for the fellowship of propagation among the churches there. Brother Chen Shi (陳實), too, in a past winter training, specially gave thanks for the way the co-workers in Taiwan had, over the past several decades, with one accord participated and supported seven times a year in following the ministry. I still remember, in a past perfecting fellowship meeting many years ago, seeing Brother Youcheng inevitably dozing off in the meeting because of jet lag and physical weakness. (He did not sleep easily, for people often sought him out by night from various places, designating him to fellowship, and the difficulties of the churches were continually borne upon his heart.) What was amazing, however, was that the brother could always, upon waking, immediately pick up the central point of the fellowship—not only sharing but strengthening the brother's fellowship—as though even in his sleep he was still one with the brothers in their fellowship. This often became a matter of laughter among us; it showed the brother's entering into the burden of the word—his body, though weak, was watchful in his spirit. One could not but admire him.
Because of the brother's many years of labor in the various services, his body became disordered, and he passed through the suffering of a kidney transplant and dialysis. Since my mother was on dialysis for twenty-six years, I deeply know the physical discomfort and the unsteady, fluctuating emotions of a dialysis patient—often a small thing easily makes one irritable. In contact with the brother I was amazed at the great power of resurrection manifested in his busy round of life: in such a condition he could still serve the Lord, joyfully and gloriously supplying life.
In one fellowship for propagating the Collected Works of Brother Lee, I again saw Brother Youcheng, just recovered from a serious illness, still paying no regard to anything, spending over a thousand U.S. dollars on a plane ticket to fly from Taiwan to the church in Cerritos, California, all for a fellowship of the burden of the ministry lasting little more than ten minutes. It seemed to me that the brother ought to rest and take care of himself so that he might walk a longer road for the Lord; yet that day I truly saw a picture: it was Mary's wasting of the ointment as she broke the alabaster flask; it was the overcoming man-child, the resolve that loved not its soul-life even unto death; and even more, it was the constitution in the brother of one who propagates the ministry, and that assurance of "Who else but me?"
I miss the brother, and my heart aches at the brief departure of this living pattern; I lament the loss to the churches in the matter of fellowship. The Lord has now truly let the brother rest in His bosom. The brother has finished his course. I ask the Lord to comfort and remember his family, and I deeply desire that the spirit that moved the brother would move us doubly; we must still run on in such a course—loving the Lord, loving the church, following the ministry, and building up the Body of Christ.