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.”

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."

Hero

I think I just found my earthly hero. His name is Greg Mortenson, a man born a year before my father who lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his family and a story I just can't shake. When he was thirty-five and I was still in grade school, in 1993, he tried summiting Pakistan's K2, a peak in the Himalaya second in height only to its renowned neighbor in Nepal, Mt. Everest, yet much more difficult to traverse. An avid climber and trained nurse, he had been asked to be the expedition medic for the trip. His only reason for not completing his summit bid was that he and another teammate risked their own welfare to carry one of their injured expedition members down the mountain.

The state of total exhaustion that the rescue left him in became fodder for the next leg of Mortenson's life journey. As he mistakenly stumbled into the remote Pakistani village of Korphe, the country's last human outpost before unyielding peaks swallowed hospitable landscape, he was taken in by its leader and given the rest he so badly needed. "[That] evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who'd lost his way," relays his biographer David Oliver Relin, in the book he co-authored with Mortenson called Three Cups of Tea. "[The next] morning," Relin continues, "by the time he'd shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots, he'd become a humanitarian who'd found a meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life" (2).

A meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life. Among the many nearly-unbelievable details from Mortenson's biography, this statement to me is the most gripping and amazing. It resonates so intensely with me because deep inside, this is what I want most. The young mountaineer was at a crossroads in his life as he descended the Himalaya's Baltoro glacier back towards humanity. I can identify with the youthful longing for adventure he must have felt at that moment and the uncertainty of what his next step should be. He needed a calling, something far greater than himself that he could devote himself to with reckless abandon, just as he had devoted himself to climbing. And so do I.

Nothing meaningful is ever easily accomplished, however. Mortenson's task proved to be physically, socially, and spiritually demanding, one which required painful endurance and rigid self-discipline to fulfill. Having witnessed children's classes being held without a proper schoolhouse nor a teacher, Mortenson purposed within himself to provide a school for the Korphe village through whatever means it would take. Three years and several nearly-impassable roadblocks later, he returned to carry out his word. That one promise birthed in him a passion not only for the region, but for education for the poorest of the poor, that launched his advocacy for Pakistan.

Mortenson's purpose in Pakistan is to build unbiased schools, especially for impoverished girls, in the country's most needy areas. "It is my vision," he writes in his acknowledgements, "that we will dedicate the next decade to achieving universal literacy and education for all children" (333). Along with providing education, he also seeks to relieve humanitarian needs for displaced internal refugees. One such refugee, left homeless after the 1999 Kargil Conflict between Pakistan and India, petitioned Mortenson as they crouched together underneath a blue tarp that shaded the hot sand and served as a makeshift shelter outside Skardu, the regional capital of Baltistan. "We need food, medicine, and education for our children," the refugee pleaded. "This is our home now. I'm ashamed to ask for so much, but no one else has come" (220).

No one else has come. It's a jarring accusation for those of us sitting in our comfortably coiffed homes half a world away. No one else was so willing to risk his comfort in order to reach out a hand of healing? No one else cares enough to stoop in the sand and listen? It reminds me of Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan: One man, caught by thieves on a fairly busy road and left for dead, was stepped over and around by all of the elite religious leaders of his day because he was considered unclean and unworthy; to touch him in any way would prove uncomfortable. Yet a Samaritan stopped his journeys and knelt down in the dust, soiling his own clothes to care for this strange man, because he had compassion. Scripture says he "showed mercy" to the wounded man and Jesus Himself asks us to "go and do likewise" (Lk 10:27). Mortenson, it seems, has taken Jesus up on His offer.

The reason I can't shake Mortenson's story is because it stirs me to respond. Whether this man is a believer in Jesus or not, his actions are biblically sound. To His servants who cared for the needy and most forgotten, Jesus asserts in Matthew 25: "Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, My brothers, you did it to Me" (25:40). What Jesus applauds, Morteson is doing. What stops me from doing the same? "I am challenged this day to live my life worthy of the call of Christ," I posted to my Skype account just after finishing the book. Indeed, it arouses me in very meaningful ways--ways that may just find me crouched in a hot, dusty corner of Earth pouring out a cup of cold water to a man who "can offer [me] nothing... not even tea" (Mortenson 220).