(Clearwisdom.net) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations did a lot of work to suppress Falun Dafa practitioners during the Olympic Games in Beijing. In order to show their efforts of controlling practitioners, the cadres in a township government in our county planned to gather the practitioners in one village to run a brainwashing session. However, no practitioners showed up to that session. So with no other choice, the cadres found five former practitioners who had stopped practicing Dafa when the persecution started in 1999, and brought them to the village committee office. They supplied them with food and drinks on top of a daily allowance of 30 yuan for each person. The township government cadres told those from higher levels that these five people were still practicing Dafa. In the end, the five people were given more than 1,000 yuan each for staying at the village committee office for over a month.
I encountered a cadre whose wife had practiced Falun Dafa before the persecution, but stopped when the persecution began. She went to live with their daughter in Beijing recently, but his supervisor talked to him and asked him to bring his wife back home. He said to his supervisor, "My wife stopped practicing a long time ago, why do you still want to bother her?" Later, when he met me, he told me angrily, "How terrible the Party is! They still look for my wife even though she no longer practices Dafa." I said, "Do you think this just happened randomly? They would treat her as a practitioner regardless of whether she practices or not." He said, "True. I should just tell her to continue the practice since it makes no difference to the Party anyway."
One woman from a rural area had started practicing Dafa not long before the persecution began in 1999, and stopped doing so afterwards. She and her husband had been working in Beijing prior to the Olympics, but her township government cadres went to look for her at her residence in Beijing with the help of the Beijing police. They asked her if she had ever practiced Falun Dafa. She admitted she had and told them that Falun Dafa helped her recover from a certain disease. The township cadres brought her back to her hometown against her will. She felt that as long as her name was still on the government's list, she should just start practicing again. So she did. She now studies the Fa and does the exercises every day, even though there are some people watching her.
Later, I learned that the CCP organizations watched everyone recorded as being a Dafa practitioner before the persecution started on July 20, 1999, whether they are still practicing or not. This information enlightened me to the principle that our merciful Master doesn't give up on any practitioners, including those of the 100 million practitioners before the persecution, who stopped practicing when the persecution started.
"...and I want to save each person. As long as someone has learned the Fa, I want to save him, I don't want to abandon those people." ("Teaching the Fa at the 2004 Chicago Conference")
Former practitioners were part of the whole body of practitioners and saved by Master from hell. Master resolved practitioners' problems from their past and gave them everything they would need for cultivation. Although they stopped practicing, and may have been afraid of resuming cultivation, our merciful Master has been taking care of them all along. The incidents mentioned above are opportunities provided by Master for former practitioners to return to the path of cultivation.
Master told us:
"You folks can't just go and abandon a person without trying hard enough. No matter what kind of mistakes someone has made, or what kind of a person he is, I still want to give him a chance." (Teaching the Fa at the 2004 Chicago Conference)
I think we should go and look for each former practitioner and encourage them to return to Dafa cultivation.
