Chapter 3 Wicket Gate
In fact, I've never been a fan of stepping through a narrow door. Maybe it's a case of letting go of the world, but I couldn't help it if it was the way to the City of Zion. I laid down all my storks, which I considered most precious. Just as Christian walked through the wicket gate and stood on the hill of the cross, I realize that I'm on a spiritual journey aboard the ship that God made from the beginning, the Earth.
When Christian realised that the moral town was a town of secular people, he was guided by the evangelist to the wicket gate. How long did he walk? Finally, Christian reached the wicket gate. Without hesitation, Christian knocked on the wicket gate and Good-Will opened the door and asked, "Who are you looking for?" "Yes, I'm on my way to Mount Zion from the city of destruction. Do you accept sinners like me?" said the Christian, and with all his heart, Good- Will read the Bible (John 6:37): "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never cast out".
At the Wicket Gate(2022)
Good-Will tugged him back through the gate and said, "Come inside. Some distance from this gate is Beelzebub's citadel, where he shoots arrows at pilgrims who pass through this gate to try to stop them. But don't worry, you can now take the narrow but straight path you see ahead. It was paved by the forefathers of our faith.
Look ahead. Do you see the narrow road that stretches out in front of you? That is the road you must take from now on, the road that was made by your ancestors, by many prophets, by Christ and his disciples, a road that is as straight as if it had been marked with a ruler, and that is the road you must take from now on." "This burden I am carrying is so heavy, is there any way I can get rid of it?" "Although your burden is heavy, bear it until you reach the place of salvation. When you get there, your burden will fall off your back by itself." So Christian fastened his belt and said goodbye to Good-will.
Christian being guided by Goodwill to Mount Zion( 2022)
The stork through the narrow gate
On my life's pilgrimage, I was a natural scientist trying to restore the extinct stork in my country. I flew all the way to the Amur River in Russia to collect the last bird of the species (Oriental Stork) that still exists in nature, and after 15 years of hard work in the laboratory of the university where I was a professor, I succeeded in breeding it. In 2015, we released the first 10 storks back into the wild in Korea. After that, I retired from the university, and the storks fell into the hands of the head of a local government organisation, where they have been indiscriminately released year after year.
The general majority thinks that releasing storks into the wild will restore them, so now, year after year, storks are being released into the wild because that's what they think. I try to tell them that they shouldn't do that, but they never listen to me. The majority is not always the right way to go. If we just release storks without biodiversity restoration, our land will not recover, and before long, these storks won't even live out their lives and will disappear again.
I feel so sorry for the storks I brought in from Russia, bred and released into the wild. I wish I could help them, but as the majority thinks, I must lay down my stork burden.
If there is one political system that modern humans have discovered that is the best, it is probably democracy. As post-modern humans, we have come to accept the view that the majority is always right, quite naturally, because of the principles of democracy. However, majority thinking does not apply to everything. When Copernicus published his theory that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, no one believed him. In retrospect, the majority thinking at that time was proven wrong. The same is true for stork restoration in Korea. Stork restoration is a research project, and many people don't see it that way, which is why it's so difficult. I live with the fear that the storks will be sacrificed.
I was not here when the storks were breeding and living in large numbers in my country, and I could find very few records of how they were breeding and living in my country. What's more, I didn't know where those storks went when they finished breeding in nature. As a natural scientist, I tried to find out where Korean storks came from in the past, and where they went after living in the land of the rising sun. And as a natural scientist, I set up a hypothesis.
"Before the Korean people lived on the Korean Peninsula, they breed in the marshes along the Amur River in Russia. They found a beautiful wetland in an eastern country, and one or two started to settle down. The storks flew to the villages where the people were cultivating, nested on the trees where the houses were, built nests and lived to breed, and then flew south with their grown-up chicks. Perhaps the Yangtze River in China was their wintering ground. After the winter, of course, they would fly back to the Korean peninsula to breed and live. They may have lived like this for thousands of years. One day, however, people began clearing farmland and spraying pesticides to increase agricultural production, and their meat-oriented diet contaminated farmland with livestock manure. In addition, the storks' nests were destroyed in the flames of bombing during the Korean War. In less than 100 years, the storks have disappeared from this land where they have lived for thousands of years."
The Nest of Korean Stork (2019)
When I decided to do Stork Reintroduction, it was because I wanted to prove my theory to a large group of people, and it is the duty of a scientist to leave a record for the next researcher. But it was a narrow gate for me, and a lonely pilgrimage.
The escaped stork
It was the spring of 2014. A two-year-old female stork escaped from the stork farm I was managing (Cheongwon-gun, Chungcheongbuk-do), and I called her "Miho", after the river there. Rather than escaping, Miho may have opened the door slightly while her keepers were feeding her. Seven months later, in the winter, I received a report that it had been spotted in Hadong, Gyeongnam Province. The caller saw a ring to its leg and told me. In the early spring of the following year, it returned to Baekgok-river in Jincheon, Chungcheongbuk-do, not far from the aviary. Jincheon, Chungcheongbuk-do was one of the stork's former breeding grounds in Korea. If my hypothesis was correct, they were trying to breed there. It was a day in May. Miho lasted less than three months there before she disappeared due to pesticide poisoning, and her whereabouts are no longer known. How did I know it was pesticide poisoning? It was farming season, and I noticed that the neighbours were spraying herbicides nearby, calling them grass killers, and the grass had already turned yellow where Miho had flown, and there were empty pesticide bottles lying around.
To me, this became Noah's Ark: when God judged the earth with water, the first thing Noah did was send a raven outside to see if the water had receded. Noah's trial led to a dove. When Noah saw the dove come back with an olive leaf in its beak, he knew that the water had receded from the face of the earth. The escaped Miho let him know that it was not yet time to let my storks out. Noah's Ark was an event in which God judged the earth with water, but people have made the earth a place where even storks have no place to set foot due to the pollution of pesticides, herbicides, and livestock wastewater. Shortly after this happened, a professor of ornithology said to me, "Professor Park, it's a pity that you are having such a hard time restoring storks in Korea, because only God can do it. Please, I hope you succeed." Hearing this, I set out on my pilgrimage again, wishing to leave everything to God.
The sound of silence
As a natural scientist, the first time I listened to a bat's ultrasound with the help of a bat detector, I was thrilled with my research because I was hearing sounds that I hadn't heard with my own ears in my entire life. Bats use ultrasound to find food and distinguish obstacles. Even vampire bats, which I did my PhD on, communicate with each other by sending and receiving ultrasonic waves, and the first time I heard them with an ultrasonic detector, they sounded to me like an orchestra playing.
As a moth flapped its wings in the distance and approached, the echoes quickly changed pitch, rising and falling by nearly an octave. With its sound, the bat was looking at a world that seemed to be a series of discriminating movements, like people dancing in the middle of the night with strobes on, frozen in time by the flickering light. "Ah, God made these sounds in the beginning!" I thought, long before people even inhabited this earth. The Bible says: "All that God has prepared for those who love him has not been seen by the eye, nor heard by the ear, nor has it entered the heart of man" (1 Corinthians 2:9).
The Silence in the Dark (2015)
The Earth, the planet we live on, revolves around the sun at nearly 30 kilometres per second. That's over 100,000 kilometres per hour, and the sound it makes is an ultrasonic squeal, hundreds of thousands of times louder than a bat's ultrasound. It's a good thing too, because if we couldn't hear it, there wouldn't be a single human being alive on this planet. Inside the cochlea of the human ear is a very thin basilar membrane that vibrates with frequency. When stretched out, the basilar membrane is less than 3cm across. The entrance to the cochlea detects low frequencies and the tip of the cochlea only detects high frequencies (sounds above 20,000 hertz are called ultrasound). Ultrasonic waves from a bat or the earth's rotation certainly exist in this universe, but these sounds, which are beyond the limits of basement membrane vibration, are inaudible and were designed and created by God from the beginning.
The Earth Spaceship
In the beginning, God created the plants and animals on a spacecraft called the Earth, and He created the first passenger, Adam. Then, many of the passengers on the spacecraft ignored the invisible God and made their own idols and worshipped them as their gods. That wasn't all; they fell into Satan's deception called sin and died. From then on, God decided to mould the lives of those who love Him after the life of His Son. His Son sits in the front row cockpit of these passengers He has restored (Romans 8:28-29).The pilot of this ship is God, and the one holding the controls to His right is His only begotten Son, Jesus.
Having just walked through the wicket gate, the Christian is on board a spaceship called Earth. A flight attendant showed him to a seat marked with a cross and took the heavy burden Christian had been carrying on his back. Christian couldn't have been happier to be rid of the burden of sin that had been weighing him down, and he cried out in joy: "It is because you came in the flesh and suffered like us that I have rest, and because you chose death for yourself that I have life." A second crew member approached him, and he kindly removed Christian's dirty clothes and gave him new ones. Christian remembered the Bible (Zech. 3:4), 'And the Lord commanded those who stood before him to take off their filthy garments; and he said to Joshua, I have taken away your iniquity, and I will put on you a beautiful garment'. The apostle Paul also says in Ephesians (4:22-24), 'This is how we put off the old man and put on the new man'. The third crew member approached Christian and placed a seal on his forehead, then handed him a scroll that was tightly sealed. He told Christian to open this scroll often during this space journey. Christian remembered the words (Eph. 1:13), 'In him you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in him you also believed, and were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.' He took out the scroll from time to time as he travelled on this earthly spacecraft. A whopping 8 billion people were on board.
Earth Spaceship (2021)
