Have you ever heard a story that you knew needed to be shared?  This past weekend I had the honor and privilege of meeting two friends – Chinese-born women, now American citizens.  As they stood on a stage, each sharing a glimpse of their own personal stories, I was reminded, yet again, why it is so important that we fight for the legitimacy of this election.

Listening to two American citizens who escaped communism in exchange for freedom – specifically for freedom of speech – reminded me why we need to hold our ground, pray without ceasing, and fight with everything within us for the integrity of each and every legal vote!

Sasha Gong is a proud American.  She is a first generation American and as she laughed, also a fourth – she had two great grandfathers who came to America to help build the railroad.  Sasha has deep family roots in education – which include psychologists and even a grandfather who attended Columbia Law School.  She has had the freedom to pursue her own education here in America, earning a Ph.D at Harvard University and teaching at UCLA and George Washington University.  What you wouldn’t know from first meeting her, is that she spent years working in the fields as the country she called home sought to socialize its people and “level” the playing field.

“We are watching socialism unfolding in America.  That’s why I feel the urgency (to tell my story).”

At the age of nine Sasha’s family was accused of being counter revolutionary. She explained the key to socialism so well: In the pursuit of “being fair,” everyone is dragged down.  In order to close the gaps, China closed universities for twelve years, and taught “devotion” in the schools (for those who were allowed to attend).  Even though she was pulled from school at nine, she was allowed to return to high school at sixteen and learned to be a mechanic.

Before she was 18, “some brave people” posted an article on the public war, criticizing the regime as pseudo fascism.  In her passion, she joined the movement and was eventually arrested.  She spent a year in jail, but was later exonerated in 1979.  After Mao Zedong died, universities opened back up; Sasha took the college exams, and earned two degrees before “escaping” her home country.

“This is not my own experience, but my entire generation experienced similar stuff.  Maybe not in jail, but law school, sent to work in countryside – in the name of equality.  When your government enforces equality, you have no equity.”

Sasha has taught at UCLA and George Washington and later went to work as a journalist, now broadcasting every morning with a channel that has 180K followers – in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

While Sasha is not a conservative, she believes in defending the freedom of choice and of speech.  “You feel your freedom of speech is eroding, our first amendment rights are eroding, so fast.  You now can’t say what you want to say.  My issue in this is the first amendment…  This is America.  We all have the right to be wrong.  Government, powerful people or media should never ever, ever, ever be given the power to censor speech; otherwise we are on the way to communism.  That’s what I know.  That’s why I was very alarmed by this.”

“If you elect a president who always speaks correctly and demands that all of us speak correctly, then we are losing our country.  If we don’t have the first amendment, then we don’t have our freedom.  From my experience in China, If you forbid people to say something, you basically forbid them to think of it.  Mine is too precious to be censored.  They are destroying people’s minds.  It’s my duty to remind my fellow Americans of that.”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”  -Ronald Reagan

“We are looking at one generation away and what the school produced.  This is what our school produced.  And as an educator, I am mad at that.”

As Sasha reminds us, this battle for which presidential candidate wins this 2020 election has deep ramifications for our children and our school systems – as any step further away from freedom may create ripples we will have trouble recovering from.

“When I came to the U,S. and we were in China, we imagined the freedom the U.S. Constitution gave to us.  We imagined that.  How are we giving it away so easily?  I cannot believe it!”

I asked Sasha about our vote and the present situation we are in.  “Voting is the fundamental right.  Voting is the only thing that would give our government the mandate.  When you tamper with voting you don’t have a legitimate government.  It is that simple.  Every illegal vote is a dilute to my vote.  Americans are always seen as a beacon of freedom.  What horrid examples we are setting to the whole world.  I am furious of people who did this to American system.”

Voting is so important and getting this vote right is so important!  There are examples of voter fraud all across this nation!  We have to be vigilant!  We MUST fight for the integrity of this election.

Sasha believes we must fight for our freedom of speech with our lives – finding platforms, social media and other media that support our right to speak freely.

“We have been shut up for so long.  We have been afraid for so long.  We should not be afraid.  We should see and think whatever is in our minds.  We (must) encourage our children to do so.  If schools don’t allow our children to do that, I would run for the school board to challenge them.  We must do that.  We must do that locally.  We must do that personally.  If we don’t protect our freedom of speech, we don’t have a country.  It’s that simple!

Emily Wu shares another story of why we have to fight and stay in that place of hope and faith for TRUTH to prevail!

Emily came to this country from China in 1981.  She feels herself very fortunate to have escaped the Chinese regime.  She shares her story in Feather in the Storm.  When she was doing her book promotion in Germany, she was called “Anne Frank of China.”

“It is a very horrible experience under a communist regime.  We cannot let it happen in America.  I have become a U.S. citizen through naturalization.  I escaped China.  Now if America becomes a socialist/communist country, there is no place to escape anymore.  I will not let it happen.  I will do anything I can.  Democracy will prevail in America!”

I asked Emily, who is a strong Catholic, what she would say to our people while we are waiting in this season for an accurate and legal vote count.  “Believe in God.  Pray.  Believe that good will prevail over evil.  Do not concede.  Do not give up and say it will be alright.  It will not be alright.  Once the communist/socialist regime starts, it is only the beginning.  All the violence and riots in the streets, I grew up with that…  School had to be stopped because there was a civil war going on.”

Seventeen of Emily’s family members were lost in death during her years of growing up in China – some by execution, some by suicide because of the hopelessness.  Although no official numbers, up to 45 million starved to death during the famine 1959-1962.  “You will not read about it in a school textbook.  Children are brainwashed.  Children will not know anything about it.”

Emily’s father was a college student in China in the 1940s and came here during the Second World War.  Ningkun Wu worked as an interpreter, coming with the Chinese pilots of the Flying Tigers.  After his military service, he worked on his graduate work at the University of Chicago before returning home in 1951 to the beautiful new communist country – the People’s Republic of China.  There were such high hopes with the Chinese people.  They believed that it would be a democracy, taking notes from the U.S.  Ningkun went home to serve as a professor of English at one of the best universities in the country.  In 1957, he was labeled an “ultrarighttist,” stripped of everything and then sent to prison without sentencing.  It was a labor reform farm, a gulag, like a concentration camp – “persecution of intellectuals for no reason other than they can think.”  One of his crimes was quoting Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death.”

Emily’s whole family suffered intense persecution.  The government demanded that her mother divorce Ningkun or lose her job and become a beggar.  Her mother told her persecutors “you persecuting my husband is like Jesus Christ being put on the cross.  The one who is guilty is not guilty, you are!”  Emily’s mother’s faith is what kept the family together during all those years of persecution and uncertainty.

“(When) you live under the communist regime, there is nothing as a citizen that you can do.  There is not voting, even today.  It has been 70 years since communist take-over; there is no voting.”

“I urge my fellow Americans to appreciate our right to vote.  When the bad things happen, we need to appreciate even more the right to vote…  We need to defend and make sure every legal vote counts.  Every single vote matters!  If you don’t care, if you don’t watch what the bad guys are doing, slowly they are going to take over and then there is no place to go, no escape.”

She encouraged us to not settle and just assume we can count on four years later…  “If we let it go, let them do this to us, to our great democracy, to our constitution – four years later there will not be a chance again.”

What a sobering wake-up as an American – a powerful reminder to not take our right to vote for granted and the urgency to defend the legal vote right now.

I believe the stories Sasha and Emily each have to share remind us of why we need to have our eyes wide open and fight for the integrity in this election process.

Be prayerful, get involved, be a voice and join us as we take communion this Sunday as one act of unison!

There’s power in the mighty name of Jesus
Every war He wages He will win
I’m not backing down from any giant
I know how this story ends
I know how this story ends

I’m gonna see a victory
I’m gonna see a victory
For the battle belongs to You Lord.

-“See a Victory”,  Elevation Worship