【视频】《小人物大故事》第314期：叶高芳牧师谈「情牵半世纪，真爱行天下」
王澤麟基金會（Jason Wang Foundation）主办的云端访谈节目《小人物大故事》总第314期，于美西时间11月2日晚7时在线上举行。国际真爱家庭协会会长叶高芳牧师担任本期嘉宾，以「情牵半世纪，真爱行天下」为题，分享他走上家庭事工五十多年的生命历程。节目由梁枫姊妹主持，与叶牧师同工二十多年的丁玉花姊妹作开场祷告。
叶高芳牧师拥有化工学士、道学硕士、神学硕士学位与家庭协谈、协谈心理学双博士学位，并有哈佛博士后资历，是知名的家庭教育与协谈专家。他曾创立亚洲首个器官捐赠中心及协会，历任主任牧师、台北家庭协谈中心主任、医院社福部门主管与基督书院校长，自1972年起推动家庭事工，著书十余本。他与妻子李怀恩师母于1972年结婚，育有一子，夫妇五十多年来常共同服侍各项讲座。
谈到为何一生投入家庭事工，叶牧师坦言，自己并不是来自完整的家庭：他九岁时才第一次见到父亲，自小在缺少父亲陪伴的环境里长大，常独自蹲在家门口，看着邻居的叔叔下班走回家，心里想着「什么时候我爸爸也会像这样走回来」。他说，正因为亲身经历过家庭的缺憾，他把帮助家庭看作一生的使命。
他信主的经历也与家人有关。高二那年，他患急性风湿性关节炎住院三周，先信主的大哥每天提早一个小时到医院，喂他吃早餐，背他到医院花园的水池边读圣经、唱诗歌、为他祷告。出院前三天，他主动对哥哥说：「下个礼拜请你带我去教会，我要跟你信耶稣。」此后母亲与兄弟姐妹相继信主，他感慨这正是「一人得救，全家蒙福」。
大学时他就读中原大学化工系，原打算毕业后设厂改善家计，教授甚至许诺五年内让他出任厂长；但大三那年在一场布道会中，他立志全职服侍，婉谢了教授的好意，对方只回了一句「浪费人才」。多年后，李怀恩师母还常拿这句话问他有没有后悔，他的回答始终是没有。神学院毕业后，他认定这个时代最需要的就是家庭事工，从此一头栽进去，至今已五十多年。
服侍中最低潮的一段，是他出任华人爱家协会会长近五年后，因坚持「直接接触人、帮助家庭」的路线、而非把机构变成出版翻译单位，与授权的美国机构理念分歧，最终被迫离开。他说，那是他五十六年服侍中最感羞辱的时刻。低谷中，师母写给他一张卡片：「亲爱的高芳，我很了解这段日子对你是很不容易的，但我深信，现在的逆境是化了妆的机会。」这张卡片他保留了二十六年，至今压在办公室书桌的玻璃下。他后来在国际真爱家庭协会成立二十五周年时说：「当年如果没有离开爱家协会，就没有今天的真爱家庭协会。」如今国际真爱家庭协会在世界各地设有十个分会，服侍涵盖年长者、婚姻家庭、单亲家庭与青少年。
叶牧师也不讳言自己在婚姻里跌过的跤。新婚之初，他一头栽进协谈工作，每天接四五个个案，回到家只想闭口休息；师母却等了他九个钟头，只想跟他说说话。师母郑重警告他，若再这样下去，「我们会赔上我们的婚姻」，甚至说要祷告求神改变他的服侍。他这才醒悟：关心别人的家庭，并不等于关心自己的家庭；从此他立志，先在自己的婚姻里活出他所教导的。
亲子关系上，他讲起儿子25岁结婚前一晚的家庭礼拜：他问儿子「这二十五年来，爸爸有没有伤害过你」，儿子说起七八岁生日那天，小朋友抢走他樱桃蛋糕上的三颗樱桃，他气得不依不饶，疲惫的父亲当众拿塑胶勺子象征性地打了他的屁股，勺子竟然打断。儿子记住的是：「你不但没有帮我讲话，还在众人面前修理我。」父子当晚拥抱和好；令他感恩的是，儿子始终称他为「好朋友」，后来也走上全职服侍的路。
谈到现代家庭的困境，叶牧师以五句话总结他数十年辅导生涯的观察：现代人生活快速化、追求快乐物质化、寻求满足个人化、沟通工具化、人际关系非人化，渐渐把人当作东西。他说：「你如果心中没有神，你的眼中就容易没有人。」他把人的爱比作电池，终有用完的一天；唯有连结于神的爱，才有永不枯竭的源头。
对年轻一代的助人工作者，他强调，能帮助人的程度，不在于学了多少理论与技巧，而在于你是一个怎样的人：「生命影响生命，家庭影响家庭。」节目尾声，他送给观众两句话：「家不是收藏财富的仓库，家是要享受亲情的居所」；「没有任何的成功，可以弥补家庭的失败；也没有任何的成就，可比美家庭的幸福。」
本期节目视频由王澤麟基金會提供，GSM 在官方频道发布。关联：《小人物·大故事》第314期：叶高芳牧师谈婚姻与家庭，11月2日晚美西7点线上免费开讲
（来源：王澤麟基金會）
[Video] Your Story Time Episode 314: Pastor Yeh Kao-Fang on "Half a Century of Love, True Love for the World"
Episode 314 of "Your Story Time," the online interview program presented by the Jason Wang Foundation, was held online at 7 p.m. Pacific Time on November 2. Dr. Yeh Kao-Fang, president of the International True Love Family Association, was the featured guest. Speaking on the theme "Half a Century of Love, True Love for the World," he shared the story of his more than five decades in family ministry. The program was hosted by Liang Feng, and Yu-Hua Ding, who has served alongside Pastor Yeh for more than twenty years, gave the opening prayer.
Pastor Yeh holds a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, master's degrees in divinity and theology, and dual doctorates in family counseling and counseling psychology, followed by postdoctoral work at Harvard. A well-known expert in family education and counseling, he founded Asia's first organ donation center and association, and has served as a senior pastor, director of the Taipei Family Counseling Center, head of a hospital social welfare department, and president of a Christian college. He has promoted family ministry since 1972 and authored more than ten books. He and his wife, Huai-En Li, married in 1972 and have one son; for more than five decades the couple has often served together at speaking engagements.
Asked why he devoted his life to family ministry, Pastor Yeh said candidly that he did not come from an intact family: he was nine years old when he first met his father, and he grew up without a father's presence. As a boy he often crouched alone at his front door, watching a neighbor come home from work, wondering, "When will my dad walk home like that?" It was precisely because he had lived through a family's brokenness, he said, that helping families became his life's mission.
His coming to faith was also bound up with family. In his second year of high school, he spent three weeks in hospital with acute rheumatic arthritis. His elder brother, who had become a Christian first, arrived an hour early every day to feed him breakfast, carry him on his back to the hospital garden pond, read the Bible, sing hymns and pray for him. Three days before his discharge, the young Yeh told his brother: "Next week, please take me to church. I want to believe in Jesus, like you." His mother and siblings later came to faith as well — "one person saved, the whole family blessed," as he put it.
At Chung Yuan Christian University he studied chemical engineering, planning to set up a factory and improve his family's circumstances; a professor even promised to make him a plant manager within five years. But in his junior year, at an evangelistic meeting, he resolved to enter full-time ministry and declined the professor's offer; the professor's only reply was, "What a waste of talent." For years afterward, his wife would ask him, half in jest, whether he regretted the decision. His answer never changed. After seminary, convinced that family ministry was what the age needed most, he threw himself into it — and has never left it in more than fifty years.
The lowest point of his ministry came after nearly five years as president of the Chinese family association authorized by the U.S.-based Focus on the Family. Insisting that the work should "meet people directly and help families" rather than turn the organization into a publishing and translation outfit, he clashed with the parent organization's expectations and was forced out — the most humiliating moment, he said, of his fifty-six years of service. In that valley, his wife wrote him a card: "Dear Kao-Fang, I know these days have not been easy for you, but I firmly believe that this adversity is an opportunity in disguise." He has kept that card for twenty-six years; it still lies under the glass of his office desk. Speaking at the International True Love Family Association's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in May this year, he said: "If I had not left the family association back then, there would be no True Love Family Association today." The association now has ten chapters around the world, serving seniors, marriages and families, single-parent households and youth.
Pastor Yeh was equally frank about his own failures in marriage. In the early years of their marriage he plunged into counseling work, seeing four or five clients a day and coming home wanting only silence; his wife, meanwhile, had waited nine hours just to talk with him. She warned him solemnly that if things went on this way, "we will pay with our marriage," and said she would pray for God to change his ministry. It was then that he realized: caring for other people's families is not the same as caring for his own. From that day, he resolved to live out in his own marriage what he taught others.
As a father, he recalled the family worship on the night before his son's wedding at age twenty-five. He asked his son: "In these twenty-five years, has Dad ever hurt you?" The son brought up his seventh or eighth birthday: a friend snatched the three cherries from his cherry cake, the boy refused to let it go, and his tired father, in front of everyone, tapped his bottom with a plastic punch spoon as a token gesture — and the spoon snapped. What the son remembered was this: "Not only did you not speak up for me, you disciplined me in front of everyone." Father and son embraced and were reconciled that night. What Pastor Yeh treasures is that his son has always called him "a good friend" — and in time followed him into full-time ministry.
On the troubles of modern families, Pastor Yeh summed up decades of counseling in five phrases: modern life is lived at high speed; happiness is pursued through material things; satisfaction is sought individually; communication has become a matter of tools; and human relationships have become dehumanized, with people treated as objects. "If there is no God in your heart," he said, "there will easily be no people in your eyes." Human love, he said, is like a battery that one day runs out; only love connected to God's love has an inexhaustible source.
To younger workers entering the helping professions, he stressed that how much you can help others depends not on how much theory and technique you have learned, but on the kind of person you are: "Life influences life; family influences family." He closed with two sentences for the audience: "A home is not a warehouse for storing wealth; a home is a dwelling for enjoying family love"; and "No success can make up for failure in the home, and no achievement can compare with the happiness of a family."
The video of this episode was provided by the Jason Wang Foundation and released by GSM on its official channel. Related: Your Story Time Episode 314: Pastor Yeh Kao-Fang on Marriage and Family, Free Online November 2 at 7 p.m. PT
(Source: Jason Wang Foundation)
来源：王澤麟基金會
发布：GSM·美国（发布链接）
图片来源：《小人物大故事》第314期官方海报，主办方王澤麟基金會（Jason Wang Foundation）提供。 / Official poster for Your Story Time Episode 314, courtesy of the Jason Wang Foundation.
GSM Global · 本篇英文版 English edition of this story
