A Trivial Matter

I was lucky enough to obtain a part-time job in a small factory located in southern Germany last summer. The job lasted for one month.

Several days after I started my job, “July 20” arrived. If I attended the Dafa-promoting activities, I had to buy a ticket for the trip, and I had to lose my wages for one day. The difference wasn’t a small amount for me. Furthermore, I did not know how the foreman would react if I took leave when I had just started the job. I thought about it for a while, but in the end I decided to take leave for to attend the activities.

When I received the paycheck in early August, I noticed that the company had forgotten to account for my leave. I had received an extra day’s pay. I went to the foreman again. After he listened to my explanations, he asked, “What is your hourly pay?” I said, “Ten Euros.” He said with a smile, “Mine is 20 Euros an hour. It is fine, forget about it!” Then, he returned the paycheck to me. I insisted, “Please talk to the people in the office.” He took my paycheck and looked at it again. He said, “The total is only 500 dollars. Forget about it, you are a just poor student…..” I replied, “This is not just an issue of money!” With a puzzled expression on his face, he finally kept my paycheck.

Several days later, when we got off duty and headed home on the same bus, I asked him and another colleague for their signatures to support rescuing Xiong Wei. I did not have any truth-clarification material with me at that time. All I had was the sheet of paper for the petition. Without waiting me to fully finish explanations, he picked up the pen and signed his name. Then, he talked to his colleague in Turkish. This colleague said to me with his thumb up, “Very good!” He signed his name immediately without any hesitation. The foreman told me, “You can bring the materials to the factory if you have any. Let us take a look. You ought to let everybody in the factory sign their names.”

Several days later, the foreman returned my paycheck to me and said, “We don’t want to deduct the money related to your leave. Just come and work for an extra day in your spare time.”

Just as Master Li said, “Humans have great difficulty letting go of attachments. When you can truly discard an attachment you will find that you haven’t lost anything. Learning the Fa is itself a blessing—why would you lose anything? Lecture at the First Conference in North America》 What I actually lost was selfishness!