The weight of illness once pressed down on me like a suffocating blanket. Severe hyperthyroidism and ilitis left me barely able to eat or sleep; even a five-minute walk felt like climbing a mountain. In those darkest days, my body weakened, and my spirit teetered on the edge of despair. I thought I had exhausted all solutions—until I remembered my mother.​

She was a devout Christian, and in her final days, she’d taken me to church. Back then, I brushed off her faith as something soft, something for people who couldn’t rely on their own minds. I was a master’s student in finance, steeped in the logic of money and markets. I knew how capital flowed, how it shaped human behavior, and I was convinced: money was the ultimate lever to move the world. Rationality, data, cold calculation—these were my gods. I scoffed at the idea of “divine grace” or “providence”; to me, every event had a measurable cause, every coincidence a hidden pattern waiting to be decoded by AI or supercomputers.​

Yet life has a way of unraveling even the most rigid beliefs. At the time, I was drowning in financial trouble—bills piled high, career prospects dim. I withdrew into myself, too drained to talk to anyone, let alone a stranger. Then I met Pastor Bruce in a shopping mall. It wasn’t a planned encounter; it was a nudge, a quiet intuition I couldn’t ignore. Something in him felt familiar—warm, gentle, like the comfort my mother used to give me. We started talking, and hours slipped by without me noticing.​

That conversation was the crack in my materialist armor. Pastor Bruce didn’t lecture me about faith; he listened. And as we talked, I began to see the lie I’d been living: money was nothing but a carrot dangling above our heads, and we—smart, educated people—were chasing it like mindless robots. I’d spent years studying “human nature” through spreadsheets, yet I’d missed the most basic truth: we are finite beings. We live for decades, not centuries, yet we delude ourselves into thinking we have all the answers, that our rationality can solve every pain, every loss.​

The Bible says, “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Corinthians 3:19). In that moment, those words hit me like a revelation. I’d trusted my intellect to heal my body, my bank account to secure my happiness—but both had failed. It was only when I let go of my “know-it-all” pride, when I opened my heart to the God my mother had loved, that healing began. Not just physical healing—though the pain of hyperthyroidism and ilitis faded—but a spiritual awakening. I woke up to the truth that life isn’t about chasing carrots; it’s about loving God and loving others.​

Now, I ask myself “Who am I?” not as a lost materialist, but as a follower of Christ. I am someone who has seen God’s grace in the darkest valleys, someone who knows that coincidences are often God’s quiet way of drawing us close. I am someone called to wake others up—to tell them that money can’t fill the void, that rationality can’t heal the soul, but that God’s love can.​

The Bible promises, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). That promise became my reality. And now, my prayer is that this reality would reach every corner of the world—that more people would lay down their pursuit of “enough” and find true life in Him. For I am no longer a slave to money or logic. I am a child of God, transformed by grace.