The devil tried to drown her

The devil tried to drown her, but a robed man with an aura of light brought rescue

By Mark Ellis & Vivian Chou, Special to the ASSIST News Service

SOUTHERN CHINA (ANS - February 28, 2016) -- Perhaps it was a rip tide, but Sister Mei also had a vision of a malevolent hand pulling her out to sea.

While she enjoyed the beach in southern China for the first time in her life, she worried about hardships she faced and her prospects for the future. She was divorced — abandoned by her husband. And she was on vacation at Sanya Beach with her boyfriend, a married man.

“I had never seen the ocean before,” she told the U.S. Center for World Mission, currently known as Frontier Ventures. “For some reason, I felt that if I could see the ocean, a lot of my questions could be answered.”

“My husband left me after I gave birth. On the third day, he came to the hospital for the last time. He just disappeared. It really hurt me,” she said. “That’s how I started to take my life in the wrong direction.”

With “no future, no job, no money, no dignity and no identity,” she was approached by a married man and agreed to go to the beach with him. She left her daughter at home with her parents. As she brooded over her “totally hopeless” situation in the water, she lost track of the shore.

Without warning she was startled by what felt like a hand grabbing her ankle. Having grown on the Yangtze River, she was an able swimmer, but she was not prepared for rip tides.

“From the bottom of my heart, my mind, my soul, I cried out, Who can help me?’” she said.

Then she began to be hauled seaward.

“There was a hand holding my ankle dragging me down into the water. I was frightened,” Mei said. “I did everything I could to swim to the shore, but I couldn’t.”

She tried calling for help. That’s when she felt a hand around her throat choking back the words. Someone on her right turned his back to her, oblivious to her peril. Another on the left also turned his back to her.

“I could not make any noise,” Mei said. “My mouth was moving. I was asking for help, but no noise came out from my mouth. The hand was holding me tighter and tighter.”

Now in deeper water, her body began swirling in the torrent. A wave formed over her head. At the crest of the wave in her vision she saw a horrible face.

“The minute I saw that face, I knew it was the devil. I never was taught about the devil, but I knew it was the devil,” she said. “It was huge. It was coming on the top of the wave. It came to me and it said, ‘I’m going to kill you today.’ When I saw that, I knew I was finished. There was no hope. I was dying.”

Photo captions: 1) Sister Mei at the U.S. Center for World Mission (now Frontier Ventures). 2) Mark Ellis.

MORE

About the writers: Mark Ellis is senior correspondent for the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net), and also founder of www.GodReports.com, a website that shares stories, testimonies and videos from the church around the world. He is also co-host for "Windows on the World" with ANS founder, Dan Wooding, on the Holy Spirit Broadcasting Network (http://hsbn.tv). Vivian Chou is a student at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica, California.

** You may republish this or any of our ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net).