Chapter 1 What Shall I Do?
When I first said I believed in Jesus, I thought of him as a teacher who taught the truths of the world. So I thought he must have had an unusual childhood, so I opened my Bible and found an account of him. There was a time when I read that account and thought the young Jesus was a prodigy. But he was not a prodigy, nor was he a teacher of mankind. He wasn't even a saint in the sense that we usually talk about in religion. He was still the living God, just in a fleshly body like ours for a very short time. John Bunyan began the Pilgrim's Progress with the image of a stranger trembling under the judgment of God.
CHRISTIAN wandered through the wilderness of the world and came to a cave. He decided to spend the night there and unpacked his things. Then he fell asleep and dreamed a dream: a man dressed in ragged clothes was standing outside his home. He had a book in his hand and a heavy burden on his back. The man opened the book and began to read. When he stopped, he was shaking with tears. Later, as if he couldn't take it anymore, he said out loud, "What the hell am I supposed to do?"
What shall I do?(2023)
The book Christian opened was the Bible. What was it in the Bible that made them shudder? Peter 3:10 'The day of the Lord will come as a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, the elements will dissolve with fervent heat, and the earth and the works thereof will be revealed.' As he continued to read, he remembered the heavy burden on his back, and he began to realize that the burden was his sin, for it was filled with all the lies he had told, all the times he had deceived others, all the times he had criticized others and spoken words of curse.
He convinced his wife and children, "If we don't find some way to be saved, I'm going to die, not just myself, but my whole family." His family was very surprised to hear this, not because they believed what he said, but because they thought he was going crazy. Rather, they treated him as if he were insane. With little persuasion from his family, Christian had no choice but to go on the pilgrimage alone.
The days of wandering
I've been caught up in this frustration before. There was a time in high school when I was very lost, wondering why I was put on this earth, and what happens when I die? I didn't believe, as Christian do, that I carried the burden of sin. I had three older sisters above me and two younger brothers below me, and there wasn't much room in the house.
I try to open my old diary, dusty with age, and remember how we lived in a sloping alleyway, with broken cement stairs and houses crammed together on either side of the stairs. One time, I caught my sister in the act of taking out some of my mum's saved clothes and meeting Young man next door of upstairs. I scolded her, and even though we were poor, my parents were very strict with their daughter. My sister was grounded from then on, and I was left with no choice but to keep an eye on her. When she suddenly became blind, and passed away without waking up during an operation to remove a tumour from the posterior lobe of her optic nerve, I felt what life was all about.
Neighbourhood(2021)
After going through this, a friend introduced me to a Bible Baptist church next to my high school, where an American missionary was the pastor. It was while attending the church that I first realised that I was a sinner, and I was baptised. When I first came to faith, I had so many questions about Jesus, rather than the idea that he came to this earth to die for our sins, I had so many questions about him. "How did Mary, Jesus' mother, give birth to Jesus by herself without sleeping with Joseph, his father? I thought it was possible, because as a natural scientist, I know that even in animals, males are born from unfertilised eggs by females alone without mating with males, and I think it's possible, and I look at Jesus with faith now, but back then, rather than faith, the Bible all seemed to me to be full of questions. Of course, back then, I was also very curious about Jesus' childhood, but there's only one place in the Bible where his childhood appears. It's in the temple, in a heated discussion with the rabbis (Luke 2:41-52). It seems clear from this image of Jesus as a child that he was not the Son of God, but merely an extraordinary man.
boy Jesus(2022)
Boyhood
I was preparing for the university entrance examination. I wanted to go to medical school. I was very envious of my friends who went to Seoul National University. I studied hard, but I couldn't get the grades to get into Seoul National University, so I was always anxious. It was almost impossible with my skills, so I prayed to Jesus. The Bible says that if you believe and ask, God will give you everything, but Jesus didn't answer me. I even blamed God, saying, "Why didn't you give me the skills to get into Seoul National University?".
I too have a mother who gave birth to me. She worked to feed me and send me to school. There was a bank next to Mokchok Bridge in Daejeon, and she set up a small shop on the corner next to the bank. It was more of a stall than a store. I think it was like a newspaper stand on the street today. There was a reason it was located next to the bank. Nowadays, people come to the bank in cars, but back then, everyone came to the bank on bicycles. The main purpose of the store was to protect the bicycles from theft. The bank allowed the shop to operate on the condition that it protected the bikes of its customers, so when they parked their bikes on the racks, they would go out and put one number tag on the handlebars, and the other on the customer's hand to do their banking. Even with all this vigilance, every once in a while a bike would get stolen and the customer would be charged the full value of the bike.
In that shop, my father was the bike guard, and my mother had a sewing machine, and her job was to sew the name badges of students and soldiers on cloth glued to window paper. During the back-to-school season, we had a large group order for name badges, and sometimes we would lose sleep trying to meet the delivery deadline. Once, even though it was bedtime, I heard a groan from somewhere without the sound of a sewing machine. When I woke up, my mother had a bandage on her finger, and she was in a lot of pain, applying a red fluid called Mercurochrome. A normal sewing machine is equipped with a presser foot and the sewing machine needle moves, but when engraving a name badge, there is no presser foot. The tips of both index fingers act as presser feet and the sewing machine needle moves up and down with the power of the motor to engrave the name badge. That day, my mother was engraving a name badge after not sleeping for several nights. In the blink of an eye, the sewing machine needle had sewn off my mother's finger.
My father loved his children and his wife just as much. He was the one who set up the name badge shop. Because the bank was next door, he got permission on the condition that he would look after the bikes of the customers who came to the bank, but he didn't get paid by the bank. The only income came from the name badge shop. When the name badge shop was doing well, he started delivering trinkets like soldiers' name badges and rank cards. Nowadays, soldiers and civil servants are pretty clean, but back then, delivery days were marked by ceremonial payments and bribes. Part of the job involved my father's drinking with the delivery inspectors, which became so frequent that one day he turned into an alcoholic.
In my family, no one believed in Jesus. My father would come home drunk, and on days like that, he would turn into a crazy person at some point. Once he started drinking, he was not a normal person. On days when he came in late drunk, he would wake up the rest of the family. I was so scared of my father who had turned into a madman.
Family of Fear(2005)
The Bible says don't get drunk. It means don't allow evil spirits to take control. When my father believed in Jesus and stopped drinking, he had already had a stroke and was bedridden for a long time before he died. After my father died, the demon of alcohol entered my brother's body, and when he drank too much, he acted like a man out of his mind. Eventually, my brother ended his life by committing suicide.
Seeing my family in ruins, I fell into despair, asking, "What on earth am I supposed to do?" After my father died, there was not even a trace of our family business that we had been working on. We were able to survive in poverty, but I could not surrender my soul to the devil like this. I decided to give my mother, sister, and younger siblings the life of our family to God.
Trusting in God's activity at work in me, I find that I now have the Holy Spirit of God - the living, breathing God! There is a new power at work in me now, and I must confess that the life I have been living, being led by the world and living according to my own will, only leads to a dead end in life, whereas those who pay attention to God are drawn to a life that is tremendous and spacious, free and full.
