trust, the final frontier
On August 14, 1984, the day after the closing of the 23rd Summer Olympics in the City of Angels, I experienced two overwhelming losses that changed the course of my life. I grew up in a Christian home and had accepted Christ as my Savior just a few years before, so Jesus was real to me and I believed that I was a child of the Heavenly Father. When my dad fell ill the earlier part of that year I prayed, fully believing that God listened to my prayers and would heal my dad. Even as my doubt grew as I watched my dad’s health rapidly decline, I continued to pray. Surely, God who is so good will intervene and heal him. Won’t He? Will He? Isn’t that the best possible thing a loving God would do? No. No. No. I couldn’t understand how and why God gave up on us — unless, He just didn’t care. That summer, I lost my earthly father to liver cancer and my Heavenly Father to an unbearable sense of betrayal.
When the college doors opened, I catapulted myself out of everything familiar (and familial) in sunny L.A. toward the new frontier — Greenwich Village, New York, the self-proclaimed liberal intellectual & creative center of the universe (a claim I was unaware of at the time). I felt very much at home — my home, my world, my way. Any remnant of nostalgia or sentimentality toward my familiar and religious past was drowned out by the screams of the new and radically different. Amidst my new community, I grew to adopt a hostile view of Christianity — as a convenient tool of oppression for imperialism; as Marx deemed it, the “opium of the masses” (an ineffective one at that since I certainly felt the pain of my father’s loss!).
I reclaimed Sundays for myself to follow the rituals of the secular world (laundry, cleaning, lazy brunches with friends, grocery shopping, homework, etc.). All the while engulfing mouthfuls of this secular life, an amorphous blob of uncertainty and void began to grow inside me. Even as I experienced the most beautiful artworks and places of the world, gained love and respect of my peers and professors, and was being creatively and intellectually challenged by my environment, the blob kept nagging…what do I do with “this,” what’s it all for?
When I came home for summers and holidays, I participated in the Sunday family ritual of going to church with my heart turned off and my good-daughter face on for the sake of my mom’s sense of peace, albeit false. So even when I reluctantly returned home after graduating, I continued that ritual. Regardless of the history of destruction of cultures and peoples committed in the name of God, since Jesus did have some timeless lessons of love to teach us, I didn’t object too much to the sermons, nor to the invitation to teach Sunday School, as expected of a Korean elder’s daughter. After all, I had my thinking cap tightly on, able to separate truth from Christian gibberish. I’d keep my opinions to myself and let the kids choose to believe the biblical narratives and how God may intervene in their lives today — or not. I just wouldn’t steer them one way or the other. But when my conscience (read Holy Spirit) got the better of my illogic, I decided to quit the charade and stop harming the poor little souls whom I genuinely loved. My heart was humbled and ready to respond to the reach of God’s loving hand in the form of the new children’s ministry pastor who invited me to go through a one-to-one discipleship with her.
On the very first session of the discipleship that lasted six months, God’s potent Word* shot straight into my wound, fusing 14 years into a split-second, reawakening my heart to the night I first believed! The only difference was the thick layer of my anger, bitterness and rejection of Him in between which He then sliced through with equal swiftness to reveal to me that He had been faithfully paving the path of my return on that day! Thus began my return journey — I sought God with all my heart through His Word, prayer, books, and classes. My eyes were finally open to begin to see the depth of His infinite Being, His unfathomable grace and mercy, and His unending love and knowledge of His creation — me! The more I knew and experienced God’s presence, the deeper my love grew with greater certainty that I am known and called by name by my Eternal Father. I felt restored and experienced joy and peace like never before. My heart became softer toward the things of God and was often moved to tears by seeing His love unfold in my life and in the lives of others. A heart that was once so hardened that no amount of compassion, joy, nor pain could squeeze one drop of tear was now squishy and warm and even a virtual poke would cause a leak.
But I still struggled with praying for the terminally ill. Why couldn’t I trust Him to consistently show love and mercy? What does trusting Him to be good in all circumstances look like? Despite my hardened heart, I noticed that I grieved over the loss of my dad at every funeral I attended, even if they had no connection to my dad. This was a stone yet unturned — I had not arrived at a truthful understanding of how the God I know now was consistent during the time of my dad’s illness and eventual death. My Father, in His faithfulness, spoke to me through gentle words of a compassionate pastor in a fiction I was reading. He confirmed in my heart that He spared my dad and us from further suffering by taking him to Himself then and that was actually a blessing. At that moment, I was overwhelmed and awed by just how infinitely deep was His mercy and grace that patiently waited for me to arrive at this truth, 21 years later.
God completely restored my broken trust in Him and gave me a chance to celebrate the life of my dad last July, when our church family grieved the loss of a beloved brother, Chip Anderson. I was compelled to attend his funeral service and felt ready. The service was beautiful and full of life even in the midst of the profound sense of loss. As his life was being celebrated for the blessing that he had been to so many, I also celebrated my dad’s life — a man who had, like many Koreans of his generation, experienced the worst of oppression and civil war that left him to struggle to provide for his family of six through poverty and immigration to a foreign land, through it all, modeling integrity and faithfulness as a man of God, especially in his later years as an elder. My eyes were opened to all the blessings of God in my dad’s shortened life that I could not see 21 years ago — God paving the way for us to come to the U.S. for all of us to be educated and live comfortably, allowing my sister to marry so early so that our dad could experience the joy of walking his daughter down the aisle and holding his first grandchildren in his arms.
Just one month shy of the 21st anniversary of my two greatest losses, my trust in my Heavenly Father was fully restored and I feel more alive than ever! Praise God with all of my being!
* "Yet to all who received Him, to all who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”
– John 1:12
“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”
– 1 John 5:11-13
Young Mi is a freelance graphic designer who revels in new discoveries about God and His creativity reflected in His creation. She has been attending Mosaic since 2002.
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