By a Western practitioner

(Clearwisdom.net)

Greetings, dear Master!

Greetings, dear fellow practitioners!

Over this last year, I've become even more aware that how well the French Minghui (Clearwisdom) website is doing is related to my own cultivation in the sense that I woke up to my responsibility toward Clartes et Sagesse/French Minghui.

I've been a translator for French Minghui for more than four years. In fact, I started translating about eight months after my introduction to Dafa and after attending my first large Fa conference in Ottawa in May 2001. So many of the articles I've translated have been stepping-stones in my growing understanding of Dafa and Fa rectification. Moreover, because I live in Western Canada, I'm very isolated from French practitioners, so French Minghui has been my connection to Dafa in my native language.

Last October, I started to look at the Clartes et Sagesse website with the question: Is CES/French Minghui fulfilling its role? The answer at that time was, "Not very well." In the past, I never relied on French Minghui to keep me up to date with Dafa and Fa rectification, because it lagged so much behind, and last October, especially, it had so few articles per day that it was not providing a clear picture--the website was at a real low. However, I didn't know what I could do to help since I have limited technical skills.

I was wondering why French Minghui was so slow and lagged so much behind compared to Clearwisdom. In fact, it was very much like myself and even my local Dafa environment, which is on an island where time is a bit slower. Nevertheless, I knew that German Minghui was doing well with about the same number of practitioners as French Minghui. I started to read French Yuanming (Clear Harmony, a European Dafa website) and found it very dynamic and up to date even though I knew that website was run by very few practitioners. At one point, in my opinion, French Yuanming was leading the way among the French Dafa websites. I felt very sad because in my understanding Master has selected Minghui to be the guide and Minghui should play that role. In fact, as a team member of Minghui, it meant that I was not doing very well.

In the past, CES readers were mostly unknown to me with the exception of some French practitioners in Quebec. Other than our CES team, I could only imagine who the French practitioner CES readers might be.

However, there was another turning point that helped me to speed up. In May I went to Paris with my daughter for the first time, and we stayed with the editor of French Yuanming. We discussed the two websites and how French Yuanming managed to stay up to date and be so dynamic for its readers. I realized there was selfishness in my passivity toward CES problems. Because I relied on Clearwisdom for my own cultivation, I had not given too much thought to monolingual French practitioners or the French public, who rely only on CES.

When I was in Paris, I met some French practitioners. They were working very hard on Fa rectification and on their own cultivation. THEY are reading CES regularly and, in turn, they are the ones clarifying the truth to the French people. In fact, if French Minghui is not dynamic, up-to-date and providing clear directions, how can French practitioners progress well in their cultivation and follow Fa rectification? Minghui has such a grand responsibility! As a practitioner working on Minghui, I have to be up to that great opportunity. In fact, I was amazed at how well they were doing with so little at their disposal, especially in comparison to North American practitioners. And this is not taking into account other readers, such as the French government officials, NGO's and the general public that visits French Minghui.

Then one day, as we were returning home on a Paris bus, I was looking outside at the beautiful architecture and at the large crowds on the street. Suddenly, something was shown to me. I saw that most of the people that were walking around the moment before were lying dead on the street and on the sidewalk. I think what was shown to me was a possibility, not a fact of the future. Most of these people can be saved if we clarify the truth to them, but they rely on us in order to be saved. For me this meant there was a lot of work to be done in France to save people. Of course, this is not only Minghui work, but all truth clarification work. Since then, French practitioners have been very busy holding many truth clarification events, which is wonderful. Since then, French Minghui has made much progress, too. The most urgent problems have been solved.

I'm not as passive anymore but actively working with other team members to identify areas where we can improve CES. My progress is still slow, as there is still sluggishness lingering in myself, so I need to be more diligent.

Another important area is communication within the team, especially since translation is very solitary work. Fortunately, over a year ago, our team started a weekly Fa study using alternative communication tools. This has proven to be very good for creating unity and a Dafa field within the team and a solid foundation for CES.

Posting date: 12/18/2005
Original article date: 12/18/2005
Category: Cultivation in Persecution
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/12/7/116001.html

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