The Eyes of My Heart Being Enlightened

By the Lord’s mercy, I am a brand plucked from the fire! In the flesh, I’m a middle-aged father working as an engineering educator and as a senior principal research scientist developing advanced space products for Boeing Phantom works. I am eternally grateful that the Lord graced me to be under the hearing of faith from the ministry of Witness Lee and the fellowship of the believers in the local churches. My testimony is best described as an inwardly blind man with a heart hungering and thirsting for God.

I was raised in an entirely secular environment, without any formal religious training. When I was a teenager, at a certain point in time I determined in my mind that there was no God. If He were real, where was He? Why did He hide Himself? Why did He not intervene and stop the evil practices in the world? After that, although I declared to deny God in my intellect, deep within, my innermost heart ached to want to believe in God. Although my mind protested, my heart quietly spoke that all I really needed was to find God. From that moment on, I set out on a journey, persistently motivated by the deepest of desires to find Him. For the next number of years, I tried many things to quench the burning desire within to lay hold of God, but to no avail. Neither could I find anyone who could present Him to me in a living way that would transcend my blinded intellect.

Then one day, as a young man, while studying physics at the University of California at Los Angeles, I encountered a group of people who spoke to me of the living God in a way that infused me with something unseen, yet so undeniable. At first, I couldn’t receive what they spoke; believing in myself by that time that there was something else. However, the words they spoke to me were like none I had ever heard before. They left in me an indelible mark that later became a beacon for me to follow during a time of particular darkness and turmoil in my life.

A year later I sought out those people again, wanting to hear more about God. Within a few minutes, they helped me open my heart to the Lord, contact Him with my spirit, and receive His enlightening for the eyes of my innermost heart. They also introduced me to the ministry of Brother Witness Lee. Within a short time, I also became one enjoying the unsearchable riches of Christ and found in this ministry speaking to others about it.

That happened over two decades ago, and since then the joy and delight I experience daily from the Word of God and the ministry of Witness Lee is beyond measure. Unfathomable truths, wonders and mysteries of the living God still continue to be opened to me weekly, even more than ever before. In spite of all the hardships inevitably experienced by all believers in this life, I have found this ministry has always helped me turn to the Lord to receive His super abounding grace and remain with Him and His eternal purpose. Witness Lee’s ministry has helped me to lay hold of those things alluded to by Isaiah and expounded by Paul: “things which the eye has not seen and ear has not heard and which have not come up in man’s heart; things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (Isaiah 64:4; 1 Corinthians 2:9).

James John Day