I was born in 1917 as the second son of Lin Bao Heng (林葆恒), a graduate of Columbia University in New York, when he was serving as Chinese vice consul in Manila, Philippine Islands.
My mother, Pan Cheng Kun (潘承崑), had in her childhood attended a Christian school in Suzhou (蘇州), Jiangsu (江蘇).An American missionary, Miss Pyle (潘爾), taught her how to pray, a habit she neglected for many years until she was married and gave birth to my older brother Paul and me. The trials of married life drove her to her knees. One day I ran a high fever and was rushed to a hospital. My worried mother knelt in prayer and promised God that if He healed me, she would bring me up as a preacher. Before the doctor had diagnosed my case, I recovered instantly. Since that day Mother drilled into my head that I belonged to God and would become a preacher.
In 1919 my father was transferred to Vancouver, B.C., Canada, where he served as Chinese consul. Mother, Paul, and I joined him in 1921, and from 1922 to 1925 we both attended the Magee School and went to the Baptist church in that city.
In 1925 we returned to Shanghai, then went to Surabaya (泗水), Java (爪哇), where Father served as Chinese consul. There Paul and I attended a private school run by an English lady, and learned to speak Malay, and also to walk on bare feet like the Javanese children.
In 1927, when Chiang Kai Shek (蔣介石) came to power, and with the collapse of the Northern Warlord regime (北洋政府)in Peking [Beijing], Father lost his official position under the defunct Peking regime. We moved back to Shanghai where Paul and I attended a school run by British schoolmasters in the British Settlement (英國租界). There we learned to sing Auld Lang Syne and Good King Wenceslas.
In 1930 we moved to Peking where Paul and I attended the Peking American School. I began in the sixth grade, taught by Miss Moore (摩爾), the principal. One day she let the pupils say what they wanted to be after they grew up. When I said I was going to be a preacher, all were surprised, and after that I was regarded as an odd fellow.
On Sundays Mother took us to the Methodist Church where we made friends with Pastor and Mrs. Fred Pyke (白克夫婦), whose children, James, Louise, and Ruth were my schoolmates.
In 1932 when Father moved to Hankou (漢口)to work in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Mother joined him and left me to stay with the Pykes in Peking. In Hankou there was no Methodist church, so Mother visited different churches in the city. One day a Seventh-day Adventist missionary came to solicit for Ingathering. Father bought a subscription for the Signs of the Timesmonthly and conversed with him in English.
Thereafter a Bible worker, Miss Abbie F. Dunn (鄧福恩), visited my parents and invited Mother to attend the Hankou Seventh-day Adventist Church, where she was impressed by the reciting of the Ten Commandments by the church members. She recalled an instance when her younger sister’s husband, a lawyer, questioned her regarding the rules of the Christian faith. When she said that Christians lived by the Ten Commandments, he then asked her, “Which ten?” She tried her best to recall them, but all she could repeat were nine precepts. The brother-in-law smiled and remarked, “You have been a Christian for ten years, and can’t even recite the Decalogue correctly!” Mother was chagrined. Now in the Adventist church the emphasis on the Ten Commandments convinced her that they taught the truth.
During summer vacation I went to be with my parents in Hankou, and Mother explained to me the Sabbath doctrine. When I returned to Peking, the Pykes learned of my new belief, they tried to dissuade me. Meanwhile Miss Abbie Dunn wrote to Miss Lucy Andrus (安路錫), another Bible worker in Peking, who came to my school one day, introduced herself and invited me to study the Bible with her. Thus began a tussle which put me in a strait —– to keep or not to keep the seventh-daySabbath. In 1934 my mother came back to Peking and we attended the Adventist church together.
When I graduated from high school in 1935, Paul was studying in Park College near Kansas City, Missouri. One day he was killed while speeding on a motorcycle, and that left me the only son in our family. Relatives tried to dissuade me from my intention to study for the ministry, stating that I should strive for a more lucrative vocation in order to bear the family’s financial burdens in the future, for preachers in China were poorly paid.
The Lord arranged for me to attend the China Training Institute (中華三育研究社) in Qiaotouzhen (橋頭鎮), an Adventist junior college, where I majored in Bible. I happened to be the only ministerial student who paid my own tuition. All my classmates were beneficiaries of a scholarship set up to encourage young people to train for the ministry. Any student who could afford to pay tuition took the pre-medical, the business, or the normal [educational] course. Only those who could not afford an education applied for the ministerial scholarship. In this respect I was again an “odd fellow.”
When the War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, the school closed down. I went to Hong Kong, where I received funds from my parents to enable me to obtain passage to Pacific Union College, and to continue to study for the ministry. During the dreary war years my parents were safe in the northwestern city of Lanzhou (蘭州), which was never occupied by the Japanese troops. However, it was badly hit in a big air raid. All buildings around the house where my parents stayed were razed, but their one lone structure remained standing amid the rubble —– a mute witness to God’s loving watch care.
The first summer in the United States I spent canvassing in Chinatown, San Francisco. Otherwise I worked in the college cafeteria, the machine shop, the bindery, or in the forest cutting cordwood, paying my way through in four years.
After my graduation in 1941 I studied at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Takoma Park, [Maryland near Washington, D.C.], where I also canvassed for a living during my spare time. In the winter I worked in Danville, Virginia, as a colporteur. I began working on my Master’s thesis, which was a study of the “Today” in Hebrews 3:13 and its connection with the “Sabbatismos” of Hebrews 4:9. I did not complete it until 1946, when I received my degree. To acquaint myself with the use of Psalm 95 (where the “Today” occurs) in Jewish liturgy, I attended the services of a synagogue and befriended its rabbi.
In the fall of 1942 I was called to teach Chinese at Pacific Union College. In 1943 I resigned and went to Honolulu to spend a year as a colporteur. I set a few sales records, and gave Bible studies to a Japanese family and won them to the Sabbath truth.
In 1944 I was called to prepare Chinese Bible correspondence lessons at the Voice of Prophecy for overseas Chinese. Lacking Chinese type, I printed the lessons by hand and had them duplicated by offset. After peace was restored, I returned to Shanghai with a group of missionaries in December 1946, and worked with Milton Lee (李嗣貴) in the Radio Department of the China Division.
In December 1948 the civil war in China was reaching a decision in favor of the Communists. The liberation of Shanghai was imminent. By then most of our missionaries had withdrawn to Hong Kong, where a provisional China Division headquarters was set up. The Radio Department moved to Canton [Guangzhou], and functioned for six months, then moved to Hong Kong in June 1949. I was appointed editor of the Hong Kong edition of the Chinese Signs of the Times.
In December 1949 the provisional office of the China Division turned over all duties to the Chinese staff in Shanghai, and I returned to Shanghai as Division secretary. Hsu Hwa(徐華) was Division president and S. J. Lee (李承璋) was Division treasurer.
The Korean War broke out in June 1950. As American GIs fighting under the United Nations flag drove into North Korea, Chinese volunteer troops marched across the border to push them back. Meanwhile the US seventh fleet was ordered to patrol the Taiwan Strait to block any attempt by the Red Army to liberate Taiwan. China and the United States were at war. In the eyes of the Chinese government, the Seventh-day Adventist mission was essentially an American organization, its assets were frozen in December 1950. In time, it wholly disintegrated. Politically active elements among our workers got the upper hand, and the China Division officers were replaced by more suitable persons. That was December 1951.
From 1952 to 1954, some of us who were discharged got together and set up a home industry to make slide rules for a living. At the same time we translated The Desire of Agesinto Chinese. The other volumes of the Conflict series were eventually also translated. A group of young people of the Shanghai Seventh-day AdventistChurch cut the stencils and mimeographed copies of these books and distributed them. [In 1951 only six books of Ellen White were translated into Chinese. They were Steps to Christ, Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing,Experiences and Views of Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing, Testimonies, volume 9, and Education.]
In 1954, I quit making slide rules and for a living I compiled a book on servicing X-ray machines, then wrote a condensation of Amateur Telescope Making for the astronomy enthusiasts.
In April 1958, I was arrested on an alleged crime of engaging in counterrevolutionary activities, and in April 1960 I was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment and three years of deprivation of political rights. That meant that after my fifteen years of imprisonment I had no rights of citizenship and had to continue work as an ex-convict on a state farm. I was sent to labor in a state farm for water conservancy project, where I pushed wheelbarrows, operated a power winch, and served successively as X-ray technician, power-station switch operator and tractor electrician on a State farm. In all these years I received humane treatment and at times I could so arrange my work as to keep the Sabbath fairly well.
My children came to visit me a few times, and on one occasion I baptized my son Roger (德泉) in a moat. It has been said that I baptized some souls in prison, but that is not true. It was possible then only to tell others of the truth. As traveling was a hardship my wife was not able to come and visit me. During all those years God arranged for a rich aunt to supply most of the needs of my family. She entrusted her funds to my mother when she left China, asking her to assist needy friends and relatives.
On March 28, 1991, I was fully exonerated. by the Supreme People’s Court in Shanghai. In retrospect, I praise God for His providential care in making all things work out for the good of all concerned. First, the years of trial have revealed many flaws in my character, stressing my need to overcome them. I can honestly say, “It is good that I have been afflicted; that I might learn Thy statues.” Second, He who sees the ends from the beginning put me in “cold storage” to tide over the perilous years of the Cultural Revolution when the whole nation went berserk. A labor camp warden observed that I was in an “air-raid shelter.”
Only after many years did I realize that God had protected me from virtual disaster, for a political tornado struck our home in 1966. My father passed away in 1959, leaving behind my mother, my wife, my son and four daughters to brave the storm. If the Lord had not also miraculously preserved them in those trying years, they would not have come through alive.
Our oldest daughter, Flora (德源), kept Sabbath during her middle school years. The school accused her of truancy and gave her a lot of trouble. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards from her school made our home among the first batch to be attacked when they launched a citywide offensive on the bourgeoisie. Our house became one of their strongholds. On the Sabbath, they came and created a scene with their war drums. All my books were being piled in our alley and burned. A tiny voice spoke to my mother, “You must go to Tianjin (天津) to see your aunt.” My mother was then seventy-two years old. So God had arranged a youthful niece to accompany her. There she remained until the most dangerous time was over.
Meanwhile my wife Clara Yeh (葉遲生) was beaten, her long hair cropped, and was forced to stand in the street as a public spectacle. The words of 1 Corinthians 10:13 came to her mind, “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” My wife’s spirit and energy was strengthened because of these words. I am sure she scored high in the sight of God. Because He allowed her to pass through the most severe trial and temptation, even though at one point she was a little wavering. But claiming on the grace of God, she stood fast. As for my mother and me, God knew that we might not be able to endure the trials, therefore, He placed us in the shelter to avoid the conflict.
Another story to show the success of my wife. With the help of God she made her best to educate our five children and raised them in the fear of the Lord. Under the socialist government, each of them was able to keep the Sabbath at work and in school. One thing that’s needful to be emphasized is that it was the grace of God that enabled them to be successful in their witnessing for Him.
After my prison term was over, I was transferred from the State farm to a coalmining company in Huainan (淮南), Anhui (安徽),to translate technical literature. There I worked for five years, earned regular wages and enjoyed Sabbath privileges. Now in retirement, I receive a pension and live in Shanghai, serving as one of the pastors in Mu En Tang (沐恩堂).
As I review the past, the most precious remembrance is the example of Mother’s prayer life. It was her prayer which dedicated my life to God. After that, when in Peking she spent time on the porch praying and singing praises to God. One day my aunt invited her to a movie, Mother declined, having sensed in prayer that the scenes in the movies were sinful. Since then her example has taught me also to keep close to God in prayer and praise. Yes, we all need to pray more fervently as the end draws near. [Editor’s note: This article, My Own Story, was written in 1993. Pastor David Lin was born on February 15, 1917 and rested in the Lord on February 10, 2011, five days before his 94thbirthday in Loma Linda, California, USA. On Sabbath afternoon, January 24, 1948, he was ordained to the gospel ministry. Five weeks later, on Wednesday, March 3, 1948, Miss Clara Yeh became the bride of Pastor David Lin, radio secretary for the China Division. The very pretty wedding was solemnized in the chapel at the China Division headquarters. Miss Yeh, formerly the head of admission office of the Northwest China Sanitarium and Hospital in Lanzhou (蘭州), had for some months been serving as office secretary for the Ministerial Association. (The China Division Reporter, March 1948, p. 16; April 1948, p. 8.) For more information of Pastor David Lin’s life story, and the Adventist work in China, the readers may read the interview of Pastor David Lin by Editor W. G. Johnsson, which was published in the Adventist Reviewof September 5, and September 12, 1991.]