Dafa's Gentle Mercy Touches My Elderly Mother

My mother's atheism had hardened under 50 years of my Catholic father's neglect but her kindness remained intact. Indeed I was the one who had at times, without really knowing it, been so unkind to her in the past. I knew, soon after reading Zhuan Falun [The main text of Falun Gong] for the first time, that I must make amends. I did this just by visiting her and being pleasant and not bringing up painful memories as I was apt to do before. I was aware that, being so old, she might not live for too many more years.

A thought then came to my mind that it would be so good for her, an accomplished embroidress, to stitch an image of the Falun. Without my actually saying anything she naturally suggested this herself! She was, however a little apologetic and concerned that the failing eyesight, slight tremor and slowness associated with her advanced age might make the finished article disappointing to me. I assured her this would not matter, that every single stitch she made would be good for her and explained a little of the profundity of the emblem she was about to re-produce.

In view of her long held "belief" that a person merely lives, suffers and dies with nothing before or after and for no good reason, she seemed to be as surprised as me that she was able to accept my talk about matters of a different realm. She was immediately very animated and encouraged my daughter to make a detailed and enlarged copy of the Falun from the front of Zhuan Falun. She then transferred the image to the embriodery cloth. It was late, we went to bed and I left with my daughter the next morning. That was one year ago.

This Christmas, a memory came to my mind. I recalled my mother saying that after she and I had a nasty argument one time, I had left the house with the situation unresolved. I had been ashamed when she told me how she'd cried when some flowers delivered shortly afterwards turned out not to be from me. I therefore decided that this year I would have some flower's delivered to her with a traditional New Year message of forgetting old differences and invoking a happier future.

It was while she was ringing me to thank me for those flowers that she updated me on the progress of the embroidery. She said she was almost finished except for the background but warned that there were many 'mistakes'. I said this did not matter and anyway couldn't mistakes be corrected afterwards? With a tone of slight but unmistakable mystery she said, "Oh, it's OK because the mistakes make it look as if it's moving..." and as though admiring the work of another's hand she continued, "I must say, despite the missed stitches, it still looks very beautiful."

I was moved at that moment by an awareness of the Falun's rotation and knew myself to be deeply blessed along with my old mother by Dafa’s gentle mercy.