I have just about 15 minutes to write this little blurb and a couple emails. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to use the internet next either. Well, my first week here has been pretty incredible. Also pretty normal. I’m finding many similarities between the people here and back “home” (wherever that is), in personalities as well as matters of faith. But God is really touching me here, working on me and seeking me out as I seek Him out.
Last weekend I spent 3 days, 2 nights in the bush. We didn’t end up building a church as we’d been told, but we chopped and cleared brush to make space for a church to be built as well as for the village to be extended. The most incredible part was seeing the sky that first night. It was so clear and I could see millions of stars and the white smear of the Milky Way. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. The second night was overcast, so that just made the first night all the more special. We cooked our food over a campfire and got our water from a well. There was no electricity, of course, and there were many thatched huts around, as well as some cinder block buildings. The pastor we were clearing the land for (for his church) said we ought not work in the afternoons—guess it’s African style—so we went to the beach for many hours. Even though I put on sunscreen I still got fried. I look like a lobster now, but I imagine (if I don’t peel) the tan will last for years. :)
Yesterday we had church, which was pretty cool. There was so much dancing and they translated the sermon which was helpful. I felt pretty broken and disconsolate afterwards, just feeling far away from God and like I’m not “on fire” for Jesus as so many are. I decided I didn’t want to participate in any more faith activities with other people yesterday and just tend to my journal and private Bible study. But last night about 8:30 a good friend asked if I’d like to come out and pray and sing with the other handful of visitors. I debated about it and finally—more to get him off my back and just be decisive—I consented. We went around the circle sharing our prayer requests and I just told them everything I’d been feeling lately with my faith and how I want more of the Holy Spirit and want to feel a living spring within me instead of a lake of water that keeps getting recycled over and over until its nutrients are depleted. I also asked them to pray about the anxiety I struggle with.
Then we all took turns sitting in the middle of the circle and having everyone lay their hands on us and pray over us. There were only about 8 of us but it took almost 4 hours by the time it was all said and done. They prayed so many blessed things over me and I felt hope and encouragement welling within me. I was so happy when I went to bed last night, knowing that they really knew me and I was not alone.
Then today I went to the staff worship service and that was just as incredible. It started with about half an hour of dancing—not naturally my thing but I actually liked it—and then there was more praising and a sermon. The sermon was all about getting connected to God and it seemed like the pastor was speaking straight to my soul. He described me SO well, better than I could even put into words when I was sharing last night. And I was crying and afterwards asked him to pray for me and he did. And something just clicked with me about Jesus. Jesus is the one who plugs us into God. We can’t plug ourselves in. Jesus is the precious name by which we are saved. He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him. I know that I don’t have it all figured out, but I feel so much closer today and I feel much more hope and joy inside me. Please, please pray that Satan’s power would be bound and that I would not be hurt by him but would be able to stand strong and fight against him with the armor and power of God.
Well, I have 3 minutes left… better copy this and get it pasted into some emails… I love you guys. Thanks for reading this and please keep the next 2 weeks covered in prayer. God is faithful and I want to know more of Him.
…and it’s been FAR too long since I updated my blog! But classes are finished now, my luggage from the end-of-semester field trip is unpacked, and the savory scent of banana bread is beginning to waft from the mini-oven. Like any cross-section of life, the last month and a half has had its share of trials and blessings. A few highlights were seeing Heejung and her two daughters (all visiting from Germany), making pies for Thanksgiving, catching up with and meeting new Korean friends, becoming a little better at Korean, and of course hiking, though really I haven’t done much of that this winter. Just yesterday I got back from visiting an island in the Southeast with the middle and high school students. My pictures don’t do it justice, but at the time I felt it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I also got to put my hands in the sea water, something I love to do. (When I touch the ocean, I feel I’m touching a bit of every coastline in the world—it makes me feel connected to home and the rest of the world.) And last week I got a whopper of a Christmas package from my Sunday school class in Goshen!
There were a couple weeks where I went through a bit of a dip in culture shock, I think. I felt really impatient with the little boys in my house and was not viewing cultural differences with the respect they deserve. Thanks to the prayers of my small group at church, I feel more patient and positive again. As far as friends go, I’m sad that a couple of the fun, single women from next-door will be leaving our community in just a couple weeks. But as in times past, God is faithful to provide, and a very close friend from my small group will be joining our community at the same time the others leave. I’m really thankful for that.
I’ve been studying Korean quite a bit lately, as well as reading books in preparation for my trip to Mozambique. I can’t believe I’ll be sweating and wearing t-shirts just three weeks from now! It took a while to track down malaria medicine, but a nurse from our church found some and even gave it to me free-of-charge, a $100 value here in Korea! I’ve also been playing piano about every night, practicing some variations of hymns from a new songbook. And I decided yesterday I want to watch a bunch of Korean movies during this vacation, supposedly to practice my Korean listening skills, though I can hardly believe something so entertaining could be educational. ;-)
I don’t have much to share in terms of contemplation from the last couple months. Not because I haven’t been doing any, but because it’s too personal. :-P I’ve been thinking a lot about love and relationships lately and what’s most important for their maintenance and growth, especially in a cross-cultural context. I’ve also been reading /Experiencing God/ by Henry Blackaby and thinking about the stark differences between the way the status quo church initiates and carries out plans and the way of faith and personal relationship in which God calls us to walk. So challenging!
It’s about that time of year to start reflecting on the past twelve months and pondering how to live more fully in the next twelve. Looking at my journal entry from December 30th of last year, it seems my goals for 2010 will be about the same: “I would like to seek and find God more. I would like to trust Him more, pray more, be less afraid of sounding like a goody-goody. I want my faith, or rather the Holy Spirit, to touch more of my physical, practical world. I want to be more faithful—in prayer, and in following the Spirit’s nudge. I want to use my time more wisely. To not waste it on mind-numbing escapes or trivial frivolities. Somehow I want to be more faithful but less religious, or I want to make religion work for me, not me for it. I want to continue to learn new things and become more culturally competent. I want to be a more effective teacher. I want to be diligent in self-educating via books, websites, experiences, conversation, and so on. I want to become more integrated into the community, but I want that to be of my own accord, not because someone says I should. I want to learn a lot of Korean—all aspects of it. I want to share more of myself.” Looking back on 2009, I’d say most of those goals have been met part way but none of them fully by any stretch of the imagination. Here’s to more growth in 2010!
When I was in college, I made a goal to keep my budget as student-like as possible no matter how much money I made in the future. Whatever extra I made, I aimed to give away. That would keep me from getting greedy and at the same time help others. Well, unfortunately, as my earnings have increased, my spending has too. But it’s still a goal.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a full tummy, a warm coat, and a roof to sleep under. It can’t buy peace of mind, but it can buy an education and important medical care. This is the view I want to have of money. An outlook that values money not for the power, comfort, or luxury it can afford, but for the real needs it can meet. When I value it for meeting real needs, I don’t have a desire to collect it but to supply it where it is lacking.
These days, Micah 6:8 has been on my heart: “What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Lately, the “do justice” bit has convicted me and I’ve begun to think that justice starts by redistributing my wealth and possessions among the people I actually know. You’re either thinking, “Wealth? What wealth?” or “Yikes! She sounds like a communist!” Well, wealth is all relative, and let me remind you—I do live on a commune of sorts. :-) Actually, these thoughts didn’t stem from that at all, but from God bringing certain people and needs to my attention, then pointing at my excess and putting it on my heart to share with them. If I’m still in doubt, there’s plenty of Scripture to drive home the point: God will provide for me, and I am to give generously to those in need. I’ve been a little surprised by how close “those” people are to me. They’re in my own family, my circle of friends, among the people I live with, the people I go out to dinner and study groups with, even passengers on the bus I ride. It’s convenient, really.
And they’re the people noticing what kind of person I am and wondering what kind of God I serve. I’m no expert in economics; I just know I have more than what I need while others whom I’m close to have less. I want to share. I want to help bring about the Kingdom of justice.
A whole month of events and thoughts have accumulated since last I blogged, and now the task of articulating it all seems overwhelming.
First off, several of my feelings and perceptions have changed since I came back to Korea. One, I have slightly more flexibility, tolerance, appreciation, and acceptance of cultural differences and peculiarities. I can usually sit through the Wednesday night Bible study and then leave calmly at the end, not rushing out the door with a cry of freedom on my lips or drinking Cokes and eating choco-pies to reward myself. And I’ve noticed that I haven’t sulked in front of the bathroom mirror lately, bitterly complaining to myself about people who neglected to tell me important information or schedule changes. I feel more ownership of my experience this year, and less room to complain. After all, I chose to come back! For all these changes, I am grateful, but there are others that are just a little strange.
I haven’t gone out to sit in nature for a while… since maybe spring? maybe this time last year? Being in restful solitude in nature just no longer appeals to me like it used to. Now it seems less like rejuvenation and more like isolation. I remember when I was talking to my Korean adviser last year, describing the various activities that I was enjoying. He mentioned concern that I must feel lonely being by myself here. I assured him that though I was often alone, I was not often lonely. He told me he saw no difference between “alone” and “lonely;” to him, the two were equivalent. These days, I’m starting to empathize more with his perspective. Maybe this “community” thing is messing with my head. :)
I’m reading a book called /The Geography of Thought/, which details some of the fundamental differences in thought between Asians and Westerners. As you might expect, East Asians tend to see events in a much broader context than do Westerners, who normally zone in on just the event and not all the factors that could be connected to it. Something that bothered me when I went home this summer was that I realized a stark difference between my Korean and American “selves”. What I mean is, I behave, think, and feel quite differently in Korea than I do in the U.S. It especially bugged me that when I went home, my spirituality changed shapes. I reflected on that with Karen when I came back, and she suggested that it’s natural for a person’s spirit to need different things and react differently in different situations, and that it’s normal for us to revert to a less mature version of ourselves when we go back home because our feet naturally search for the old pair of shoes we left at the back door. I appreciated her encouragement, but it still bothered me that I wasn’t consistent across vastly different circumstances. Was I not being real? Which self was genuine and which was a sham? This book I’m reading has essentially confirmed what Karen encouraged me to see before, but it’s added an important component, namely that my longing for consistency across various contexts is Western by nature and not a universal ideal or ambition. In fact, many thoughts that I’ve assumed were human in nature are actually just Western. Asians have long believed that a person’s identity is dependent on context, and that when the context changes, even slightly, then the person changes. And many Asian languages reflect this philosophy, as it’s common for the words “I” and “you” to change depending upon whom one is talking to. I find this notion of natural identity shifting to be reasonable, satisfying, and freeing. Not that I want to condone wishy-washiness, but it just makes sense that our surroundings affect us.
Well, let me tell you what I’ve been up to these days. Despite my low confidence in my ability to learn Korean, I’ve been getting back into languages lately. I ordered the Spanish edition of /Tuesdays with Morrie/, which I’m having fun reading, and a few of my high school students want to learn French, so I’ve become their tutor. Last weekend I bought an Easy French Reader as well as a French dictionary, all the while asking myself, “What are you doing buying French books in Korea?!?” When I found myself lying on my bed grinning after an afternoon of studying Korean, Spanish, and French, I had my answer. Some things you do just because you’re made to do them. Ah, speaking of which, I’ve got a Portuguese dictionary on my shelf and a plane ticket to Mozambique! I’m going to visit there for 3 weeks in January, staying at the mission center I wrote about in a previous entry. I’m pretty excited!!
I’ve also made a couple excursions since coming back to Korea. I visited the House of Sharing, which is where a handful of former sex slaves from the era of Japanese colonization live together and educate the public on this sad period of Korean history. When the Japanese were in the prime of their imperial quest in the early-to-mid 1900s, they forced many Korean women and teenage girls to keep their Japanese soldiers “comfortable,” trafficking them all over Southeast Asia wherever the Japanese army had a presence. Thus, the women were nicknamed “comfort women,” a euphemism that is now considered politically incorrect, as it undermines the brutal and terribly inhumane nature of their work and suffering. They now wish to be called simply ‘harmoni,’ the Korean word for ‘grandma.’ Since the early 1990s, the relatively few harmoni who have gone public with their abuse have protested EVERY WEDNESDAY WITHOUT FAIL at the Japanese embassy in Seoul, demanding that the government apologize for sanctioning said sex slavery during its colonial rule. Japan’s government refuses to acknowledge or make restitution for the scandal, and so the harmoni continue to demonstrate. What’s even sadder in my opinion, is that Koreans themselves don’t support the women. As many foreigners—especially Japanese—visit the House of Sharing and related museum every year as do Koreans. And the neighbors who live next to the House have been known to throw rocks at the harmoni, calling them liars and prostitutes. To visit the House and learn the women’s stories was to feel great anguish for the ugly cruelties they endured, to feel inspired by their resilience and courage, and to feel more than anything, an immeasurable longing for peace and forgiveness. The bitterness still felt so heavy and alive there, and I just wished more than anything that Jesus would take it away and make their hearts light and joyful for whatever days they have left.
On a happier note, I’ve been able to enjoy some hiking in this beautiful fall weather. And last Friday was Karen’s birthday so Juhee and I got together with her in Seoul from Friday to Saturday. We had a great time catching up on life, eating Mexican food, and making up our own mini-orchestra with friends from Karen’s workplace and a variety of instruments.
Well, I need to wrap this up and hit the books again. Thanks for all your prayers, emails, Facebook messages, letters, etc. I enjoy hearing from you, and I rely heavily on your prayers. Hope you have a great October. Take care till next time!
