It was the summer of 2014 when I was asked whether I wanted to go to Malibu (an island in Canada) with my church to serve the military families. At first, I heard this and thought, "You are asking an eleven-year-old in his last weeks of summer if he wants to go on a trip with his mom to Canada to serve other people? " Of course, I responded with a kind refusal, but my mom found a way to convince me to go.

When we were on the ferry to the island, a thousand thoughts were running through my head, such as "What am I going to do here?" "Am I even going to be useful?" and "Why am I even here?" When we got to the island, I was assigned to the child care. I was actually somewhat excited because my friend said he would help me. The first time I met the kids, I got to know them pretty well. They were all between the ages of four and six. Some of them stayed behaved and a few of them started acting crazy and would even hit and push the other kids.

With those kids, I was very strict, but I still tried to be positive and maintain a smile. After all, they were just innocent kids. In most of the time, I needed to help them with things like laundry and setting tables. Even though it sounded dull, I enjoyed every second of it. One of the things I did in my free time was to play pool. I befriended a few kids there. They were really easy to talk to. Some of the things we talked about were sports, food, video games, and most of all pool.

Even though I was only at Malibu, Canada for one week, I feel like I made spiritual changes in some people's life. You don't have to go above and beyond to make a difference in someone's life. In the end, it all comes down to what way you changed them. It could have been in a spiritual way or a mental way as long as you had a positive effect. So go out and try to make a difference in this world.

I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years,” as people believe; both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence (吊唁) calls on the two families on the same afternoon.

At the first home, the son of the deceased (已故的) woman said to me, “If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “If only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.”

When things don’t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course — keeping Mother at home, and postponing the operation — would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?

There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilty. The first is our pressing need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.

The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence (万能). A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen.

My mother-in-law asked me to climb a mountain in her rural village. We went through tall and weedy expanse of grass, pulling ourselves up with the help of smooth bamboo trees. Weathered gray rocks dotted tracks only visible to an experienced hiker. The view we were rewarded with halfway up the mountain, fixing our eyes upon the colorful pieces of fields and whitewashed homes set against the deep green hills and a sky so blue that it looked digitally polished, was a side benefit of being there.

Our eyes were mostly on the wild eatable plants that grew on the mountainside. We first came upon the wild mountain bamboo, a plant that was the main part in my mother-in-law’s salted bamboo shoots that, once preserved, could be used all year long in cooking. Along the way, we also encountered another precious wild food — fiddlehead ferns (蕨菜). Those delicate leaves, when stir-fired, were a tasty treat. Once I had purchased fiddleheads at a market in the US. Yet there we were, picking this prized vegetable on our own, with only our labor as the cost.

What we had collected that afternoon looked the same as any other wild mountain bamboo shoots and fiddlehead ferns I had seen before in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. And yet, they felt different to me because I had used my own hands to help pick them and carry them back down the mountain. Spending time and energy gathering these wild plants gave me a deeper appreciation for the food that ends up on the dinner table.

“Many generations have kept this natural lifestyle. We depend on the mountains for our life,” my mother-in-law says. Those mountains and rivers supporting her life aren’t some abstract concept. They are right there, outside her door and within her rural village. Once I saw them through her angle that afternoon, I realized they are closer to me than I ever imagined.