Settling Down

The day was a warm Sunday in the middle of July. The location, Bill Black's adult Sunday school class at my grandmother's church, Somerset First Baptist. I gulped as I read the title of the lesson for the day: "Settle Down." It had been just over a month since I had come back to Texas from Korea, and this was a subject I had not yet mastered.

We had been talking about Jeremiah for some time in the Sunday school class, and now we had reached one of my favorite passages from the book, chapter 29. It was a letter to the captives of the Children of Israel from the Great I AM. The prophet had been trying to tell the Israelites that what they had been told about their captivity was a lie. Other prophets in Israel had told the people they would only be in Babylon two years, but Jeremiah was adamant that captivity would surely be 70.

"Jeremiah represents either a terrorist or a terrorist-sympathizer," our teacher commented. "These people rejected anything that he said because they thought they knew God and that He dwelt with them."

The Children of Israel truly thought they were in God's will as they prepared to live only briefly in a land not their own; yet God had a different plan for them. "Build houses [in Babylon] and dwell in them," He wrote through Jeremiah. "[P]lant gardens and eat their fruit... [B]e increase there and not diminished (29:5-6)." The LORD surely did assent to restore them to the Promised Land, but they first needed to settle into life as foreigners.

In the Israelites' obedience lay God's purpose: Only after going through captivity would they come to know God in a personal and fulfilling way. "For I know the thoughts I think toward you," reads verse 11, "thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and pray to Me and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart" (Jer 29:12-13). The captivity was designed not to alienate them from God, but to draw their hearts ever closer to Him.

"Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are in your midst deceive you," the LORD continues (Jer. 29:8). "Nor listen to your dreams which you cause to be dreamed... [for] I have not sent them, says the LORD." The Children of Israel had believed a false report about how long they would be in captivity, and now they needed to trust God in His timing to bring them out of it.

As I sat pondering my own unwillingness to trust God, the morning's commentary seemed to pinpoint my secret thoughts: "What unrealistic dreams have you been holding on to?" the margin screamed.

I gulped again. For the last month, I had done just as the Children of Israel had been instructed not to: I had believed the "dreams which you cause to be dreamed." I had listened to the desire to be overseas and because of this had become so disenchanted with living in the States that I refused to buy things like a cell phone, a car, and even an apartment. The conviction stung worse than a mesquite switch to the back of the thighs.

The Israelites' journey was beginning to mirror my own. "Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive," the LORD declared to His people, just as I knew He was speaking to me at that moment. Perhaps being back home would be longer than I had originally thought. My responsibility would now need be to build and not tear down, and pray for the success of the city I am in, "for in its peace, you will have peace" (Jer 29:7).

"In the middle of the summer, I heard an amazing Bible study about settling down," I chatted to a friend a couple of weeks ago via Skype. "I haven't forgotten it."

"What did [the study] define 'settling down' as?" she asked.

"Learning to live in the place God has for you now, even if it's not the place of promise," I wrote. As I typed my response, I knew that confessing it, just as sure as walking it out, would be a leap of faith.

Praying for my Enemies

“Ah, Jenny-pah,” I heard as the recognizable outline of my hagwon’s director came toward me. His long-sleeve Oxford shirt opened wide its arms as his gait stretched to fill the distance between us, each an obvious gesture of relief.

It was nearly 11:30 PM on my last night in Korea and I had been waiting for almost an hour. I rested on the black granite sill of Ramada Hotel’s business sign, the end of Maya Angelou’s childhood saga in my hand. Minutes before, along with a few other stragglers clinging to the coffee shop patio next door, I had been asked to find another place to loiter—so there I was in the cool night air, lingering. And I still had to pack.

“There’s been a misunderstanding between us,” my director assured nervously, his smile full of wavering resolve. “I thought you called to my wife and she told you.”

“No, I gave away my phone today,” I replied. “My friend has it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

By now my director’s hip rested on the same sill, half a meter from mine. From this perch he flopped, haphazardly but confidently, chirping the news. “I went to the tax office today,” he informed me brightly. “You will get your money within one week. Seven business days—so maybe next Tuesday.”

This from the man who quoted the fifteenth of June as my payday, only to have to back out of that promise days past due. This was the same man who stole from my check to pay his debts, and the man who thought it more convenient to lie to the government than be up-front about his business. The injustice of his actions was piling up in front of him. Having nursed a nagging sense of uneasy nausea all weekend, my stomach was still churning at his words.

“Don’t worry about the others,” he was saying now, referencing my co-workers. “You will get paid. You worked the best out of all of them.”

He already hadn’t paid an entire year’s worth of pension money, nor was he prepared to give me the foreigner’s severance package stipulated by Korean law. One poor fiscal choice after another had led to this—a closed school and teachers left to find work across the Pacific. But not only did the school have to suffer; now so did his family. What suddenly made his word his bond now?

Nothing in my heart wanted to ask a just and jealous God to bless the work of a man who would be so irresponsible. I bit my tongue as I said what came next. “Before we go, Mr. Chung, can I pray for you?”

He laughed off the question self-consciously, then consented. “You Christian? Cath-oh-lick? My wife,” he nodded proudly. “She Christian.” He gave me his hand as I bowed my head respectfully.

“Lord Jesus, we lift up Mr. Chung and his family,” I began. “We know that they are going through difficult circumstances—” Circumstances they brought on themselves, I wanted to scream— “but we ask that you would strengthen them. If they have to walk through these consequences, then give them endurance.”

As I prayed, I thought of those that had been caught in sin in the presence of Jesus: Instead of pounding them with religion, He kept showing mercy. I remembered His words to the adulterous woman. “Lord, Your Word says that You told people to go and sin no more.”

I didn’t want forgiveness—I wanted justice. I wanted him to deeply understand his crimes. You have an obligation to be righteous, I wanted to tell him. I wanted to bully him into doing right.

“And, Lord,” my mouth framed, nearly against my own will, “I ask that Mr. Chung would sin no more.”

I felt a little dubious as I finished, somewhat dishonest with my own intentions. My heart betrayed my own thoughts, even as my words had relayed the opposite. I certainly wasn’t worthy of any thanks offered to me.

As I crept up to December’s apartment one last time to finish preparations for the morning, I again cried out to God—this time, for myself. “Lord, I need Your heart for these,” I confessed. “Not my own.” I still harbored feelings of condemnation towards him, but what I needed most was a sense of the Lord’s divine mercy holding back the tide of just deserts.

Only the One without spot or blemish would be so worthy as to cast stones of judgment. If Mr. Chung had been culpable in anything, I was non the less. And yet He says to the guilty, “Then neither do I condemn you. So go, and sin no more.”

Hesitation

The air quietly breathes its freshness into the room as I sit as a guest of my friend December's on a newly-made Moroccan rug. Ruthie, the small house dog, grunts and growls at me from her high place atop the bed where her owner is resting. December's phone tells me it's finally morning: June 21, 2011, by its end the longest Tuesday I'll have ever had. Homecoming Day.

In less than six hours I will be boarding a plane bound for Texas with my one-way ticket in hand, unsure of when the next flight will ferry me back to Asia. Yet, my suitcases remain glued to the floor as if they were impenetrable rock. In less than two years this part of the world, largely unknown to vast populations of the US, has burrowed itself deep in the ressesses of my heart in ways that I never expected, and I quite hesitate to say goodbye.

Here are a select few of those ways:

*I chanced to meet a woman at a thrift store who, despite obvious language barriers, became one of the dearest and closest friends of mine and accepted me with such deep, unconditional love.

*I've been encouraged and strengthened by the ex-pat Christian community through the ministries of Seoul International Baptist Church and its members.

*Through three schools located in two countries, I had the privelege of reaching out and ministering to four major ethnic groups within Asia: Russian, Indian, Thai, and Korean.

*I tried my hand--er, lips--at speaking in four previously foreign languages and successfully carried a tune in two of them.

*I witnessed North Korea's picturesque mountainy landscape and was able to meet a young man who has actually vacationed in that closed country.

*I have been able to earnestly beseech the heart of Father God for the hearts, souls, and lives of dear, dear friends that I have come to greatly cherish halfway around the world.

*I was unexpectedly able to join a girlfriend on her trip to Thailand and might have found the next step of the journey.

About two or three years ago--summer of 2009, if memory serves--I had a dream about two pictures posted on Facebook. One was a picture of dried fish and the other was a shot of bottles of beverages in a grocer's chest refrigerator. In the dream, a close friend of mine commented that there was "a better selection in the Asian markets here."

I was just commenting about her comment when I shot up in bed and marveled loudly, "I just had a dream that I was in Asia!" Within months of that statement, I was.

"I can't believe you're leaving," my friend Josh commented offhand this afternoon as I helped him edit his paper one last time. "We've talked about it and you have good reasons, but I still can't believe it."

Neither can I, Josh. Neither can I.

Terrorist Tourism: Underlined

*May 29, 2011*

After Freedom Bridge, the DMZ tour group headed to another famous marker within the Demilitarized Zone: Tunnel Number Three. This tunnel, no bigger than a crawlspace directly underneath the Line of Demarcation, was found in the early 1970s through a North Korean defector. Later, larger tunnels were also found for a total of four currently known to be in existence. In each of them, coal dust was liberally smeared on the walls to disguise them as abandoned coal mines, though none such mines previously had existed in this part of Korea.

These tunnels were allegedly hewn by the North Korean military to provide access to the south for foot soldiers, giving a thousand men the ability to reach Seoul within an hour. The North staunchly denies any involvement and instead suggests foul play by the South, but the chisel strikes to dig out the rock indicate that the tunnel’s workers must have been facing southward.

Our bus pulled up to another parking lot like the one from our previous stop, only it was a quarter the size and minus misplaced carnival rides. Round, dark buildings intimately surrounded the car park on three sides, nearly hemming in visitors. A thick forest stood at attention to the left of the scene.

In front of the cars was perched a tall “DMZ” monogram, nearly innocuous in its friendly pastels. To the right of the initials rested a sculpture of the world divided in half, with a circle of chiseled humanity holding up each side. The building just in front of the bus housed an indoor educational theater and a small museum. To the right of that lay a platform for carting older guests mine-car style into the tunnel.

A signed gleamed in the mid-morning sun, prompting us forward. “DMZ Pavilion,” an arrow pointed to the left. The rest of the message sat mute in hanguel letters, with no other English accompanying it to unlock its tongue. The tour group, armed with its limited information, shuffled inside.

In the Pavilion, designed like an amply accomodating home theater with tiered captain's chairs and a wall-sized panoramic screen, we listened to a voiced-over seven-minute explanation of the existence of the DMZ. The narrator listed the end of World War II and the subsequent Korean War as the primary cause of Korea's tense buffer zone.

Announcer-like, we heard the man proclaim at the end that even through the tragedy of war, the land was still teeming with natural life. Supported by a grand trumpet, his deep voice rang out, “The DMZ is alive!” Moments later, the floor-to-ceiling screen in front of us parted like the Red Sea and we walked through it to a museum adjacent the theater.

Fascinated, I tried reading every snippet of facts the displays had to offer: Here was documentation about the defector who triggered the search for one tunnel--here, how they suspected the second. Lost in the dusty details of the past, I failed to note when my large, largely white tour group had exited the room and left me alone with a swarm of Chinese tourists.

“I'll be in the tunnel if you have any questions,” the tour guide had said. From everything I had read in the museum, I was expecting little more than a hole in the ground, much like the shaft used to discover caves at Natural Bridge Caverns in Texas. What I met with, however, was a whole lot of concrete.

Across the from the DMZ Pavilion crouched what loked like a quiet amphatheater juxtaposed next to empty railroad track which led into a pitch-black cavern. “Don't go up there,” I remember my tour guide chiding. “We have legs. We can walk.” Yet I still didn't know what it was I was walking to.

If hindsight is twenty-twenty, it doesn't help you until you actually look back--which, that day, was the one direction I never tried. Instead, I followed the path from the rail line along the other side of the parking lot towards the bathrooms and a little park next to a large building. Spying a pathway, I walked further into the greenery and around the structure.

Inside the park, I discovered a stretch of fence not ten yards long, directly in the middle of the grass. It stood to one side of a small concrete ditch which bisected the peaceful scene. A tiny red triangle with letters in both languages fiercely guarded its chain links.

“Oh, it's a mine!” I exclaimed breathlessly as I got close enough to read the letters. To its right, a companion fence with the same little red triangle screamed its warming as it ran out into the dense vegetation. It was definitely time to find that tunnel!

I stumbled into the back entrance to what at first appeared to be a gift shop. Shifting my gaze the right I noticed the beginning of a ramp spiralling downward and a shelf full of yellow hardhats. This looked easier than being lowered into a shaft at Natural Bridge; grabbing a hardhat, I ventured inside.

“It's going to take ten minutes to get down there,” December warned as she came back up, her words tinged with wise realism. As I checked my watch again, I knew she was right. I had spent too much time babysitting mines and empty railway shafts to have any more to devote to Tunnel Number three. Plus, I didn't know how I would heave myself 100 or more meters back up the ramp. Reluctantly, I returned my barely-warm hardhat to itself and headed back outside.

Just before we boarded the bus again, I glanced back at the world split in half. Pleasantly, Korean after Korean stood on both of its sides bracing for a picture, their hands on whichever half they chose. I couldn't help but notice that their presence mimicked the bronze statues which continue to people the sculpture long after the last flesh-and-blood tourist has gone home. They really were holding up the world, I thought, pushing it together with each caress of its smooth surface.

My New Favorite Song

I stared at the lines and squiggly curls in front of me that shone brightly on the wall, their message unwilling to be unlocked. My brain was hard pressed to wrap around the idea that the strange markings represented actual words, let alone the sounds that gave them voice. Below them lay a recognizable alphabet that I could at least identify, if not fully understand.

We had been trading languages all night as a part of Peace Fellowship's worship service that Friday night in Thailand, swapping a song in English for one like this, in indecipherable Thai. Shrugging away an absent English translation, I took a deep breath. I sang, instantly hooked on a catchy tune that was sometimes staccato-fast, and at times more slowly melodic. It mattered less that I could understand what I was singing and more that I knew I was singing whatever it was about and to Jesus. And that I was surrounded by people who were doing nothing but the same.

"It's a simple song," my Thai friend Pi-Rung commented the night I left. It just tells the congregation to come and worship its King.

Hallelujah, praise His Name.

Present a new song.

All the kings unto the LORD

singing hallelujah.

Padre Nuestro

"I have something for you," he said slowly. "But it's in Spanish. It's from Matthew chapter six verse nine."

The thought of the gift itself already caught me off guard, but knowing that it was in such a completely foreign language--in Thailand--surprised me all the more. Amid the rustle of student activity, he slipped off a wide silver band and handed it to me. I fingered the engraving while it was still warm and then, quietly in the middle of class, I began to read.

"Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo," I started, "santificado sea Tu nombre." Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

From beside me, he declared simply, "Amen." Perhaps his class would have to wait.

"Venga a nosotoros Tu reino," I continued. "Hagase Tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo. Danos hoy nuestro pan de cada dia. Perdona nuestros ofendas como tambien nosotros perdamos a los que nos ofenden. No nos dejes caer en la tentación, y liberarnos del mal. Amen."

Thy kingdom come, it reads in English. Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

He looked at me when I had finished. "Jesus didn't teach His disciples how to heal the sick or do miracles or feed five thousand people," he explained. "He taught them how to pray."

So now he was teaching me.

Thai Peace

Sawatnika! That's Thai for hello. I'm currently sitting at an Internet cafe in downtown Bangkok--and it's been a wonderful trip so far. I've seen God provide for my every need and go above and beyond what I envisioned. It says so in Scripture that He provides that way and it is so moving to see it lived out.

I have come to hot, sticky Thailand to check out a ministry opportunity with a friend and help out with it as much as I can. It's an English school called Santisuk that's run just like a church: They teach Scripture and Bible stories using English as the medium. The workers there have taken me in and given me and my friend a place to stay. Holly and I have just been blown away by their acceptance of us, no questions asked.

I have been nothing but encouraged since landing. The woman who picked me up at 2 in the morning Tuesday night prayed that my delayed flight would not be canceled and, two hours after it was scheduled to land, we taxied to the arrival gate. The next day, I waited among other Christian Thai in the still night air for a powerful Hillsong United concert that almost never was. The very next day, I was able to pray over a host of little children gathered quietly at my feet and tell them the story of Samuel annointing King David, symbolically annointing them for the work God has chosen.

I know this trip is from the LORD and I am so richly blessed to be here. I have a new friend named Kong who says I should come back and volunteer. He says that the country has a lot to offer and that, if I were interested, I might be able to come and teach at an international school here as well.

"Thailand," he whispers to me as we walk along the road or sit in his classroom. "Thailand."