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Learning How to Be in Someone Else's Shoes

October 09, 2013 |   By a Falun Dafa practitioner in Guangzhou, China

(Minghui.org) I had an appointment one morning with a fellow practitioner at a bus station. I arrived at 9:50 with print materials that I'd brought for her. I gave her a call at 10, but she didn't answer. I thought that perhaps she couldn't hear her cellphone if she was still on the bus. I began to get frustrated after waiting for 20 minutes. Why didn't she leave home a little earlier? I happened to have another appointment at 11:00 a.m. that day. The print materials would be pretty heavy to carry to my next appointment.

A sentence in the book Zhuan Falun suddenly appeared in my mind: “The driver indeed drove the car too fast, but how could he possibly hit someone on purpose? Didn’t he do it unintentionally?” I then understood that the fellow practitioner didn't mean to be late and was probably rushing to get here.

I began sending righteous thoughts to eliminate the evil factors that were interfering with her. Soon after, I got her call. She wasn't familiar with the area and had gone to a different location, but was on her way. When she appeared, she was running at full speed. As soon as we finished talking, I hurried to my next appointment and made it just in time - everything worked out just fine.

I found out later that she'd really taken our appointment very seriously and had left home at 8:00 a.m. to give herself plenty of time. However, she'd never been to our meeting place and went instead to a bus stop with a similar name. This gave me an opportunity to cultivate my xinxing. Among all my past experiences of waiting for someone, this was probably the time I did best in passing a self-cultivation test. I used to think others inconsiderate and blame them for wasting my time. However, I didn't realize that they were giving me opportunities to improve.

In a prior experience, I waited for a fellow practitioner for a long time. Bad thoughts kept popping up, such as: “It's such a hot day!" "I have to spend half a day on the round trip!" "I don't know what happened to her." "How could she have me come all this way for nothing?" "I'll never make another appointment with her again.” Eventually, my attitude changed. I thought, “If I stop complaining and just reschedule our appointment without being upset, isn't that an improvement of my heart nature? In that case, I didn't waste my time.” I suddenly felt enlightened to this issue, but it was a pity that I didn't think of sending righteous thoughts to eliminate the evil factors that attempt to keep practitioners from forming one unified body.

I'm a new practitioner and began practicing Falun Dafa in 2008. Over the past few years, I've read other practitioners' experience sharing articles and learned a lot from them. I'm trying now to express my humble understanding and share with my fellow practitioners.