Chapter 6 The Hill Difficulty
There are good times in the world, and then there are hard and difficult times. In the face of difficult times, Timorous and Mistrust lead back the way they came. That can be you, and it's a struggle that all people of faith face. There are times when I can't see a single word of Scripture. When one of my favorite storks died in a faraway land, I felt so frustrated. Maybe it's the sadness that comes from knowing that there is no one in the world who cares.
Having said goodbye to Formalist and Hypocrisy, Christian met another group of pilgrims at a bend in the road. No sooner had Christian crossed the Hill of Difficulty than he encountered two pilgrims coming the other way. They were named Timorous and Mistrust. Timorous asked himself how he could go forward on this path when he was encountering more and more dangers, so he said he would rather go back to the starting point. Mistrust, on the other hand, said that if he continued on this path, he would see a lion at the end of the road ahead. If he continued on this path, he would end up eating nothing but lion's food. The two men retraced their steps and took a wrong turn on their pilgrimage out of fear of the hardships they might face in the future.
Timosrous and Mistrust (2022)
Unable to turn back to the city of destruction, which would burn with sulphurous fire, Christian had no choice but to continue on his way. He continued up the mountain path, steep and straight, because Timorous and Mistrust had shown him that the path back was the path to destruction. He crawled up the mountain, barely able to keep his hands and knees on the ground. When he reached the top of the mountain, a large tree provided shelter. Christian dozed off under the tree for a while and then fell into a deep sleep. He dropped the scroll in his hand.
Christian in a deep sleep
Then someone appeared to him and woke him up, saying, "Go to the ant, you lazy man, and see what he does and gain wisdom." Hearing this, he jumped up and started to climb, not stopping until he reached the top of the mountain. After a while, he put his hand inside his chest to read the scroll for comfort, but it was gone. He was at a loss as to what to do. Not only could he find comfort in the words written there, but the scroll was also a pass to enter the New Jerusalem. Christian stood there like a dazed man, staring into space.
As he searched his memory, it seemed that he had lost it when he fell into a deep sleep in the shelter of the pass. Christian knelt down on the spot and asked God to forgive him for his foolish behaviour. The journey back to the shelter weighed heavily on Christian's mind. All the way back to the shelter, Christian scoured the ground, wishing the earth would go away, and wiping away tears. He wanted nothing more than to find the scroll that had brought him so much comfort on his journey.
He lamented: "What a foolish man I am, to doze under a tree in broad daylight, and moreover, to doze in the midst of danger and trouble! The owner of the pass had built a shelter under a tree for the pilgrims to rest their souls, but I was in a hurry to take advantage of the shelter to rest my body! What a troubled man I am!" he said.
Pilgrims Resting Under a Tree (2022)
The Stork That My Awakened Spirituality
I try to stay awake, but my flesh often won't let me. Sometimes the words of the Bible just don't come to me, especially when I find myself settling into a life of physical peace. Then there was a stork that woke me up. It was a stork named 'Sanhwang'. The stork was released in Yesan-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, almost 50 years after the last stork lived in the wild in Sengguk-myeon Eumseong-gun, Chungcheongbuk-do, Korea, so it was named after the 'San' in Yesan. The Sanhwang wasn't just any stork - it was a stork with the decisive key that would prove the hypothesis to natural scientists.
The stork that woke me up (2017)
Fast-forward to 2015, when the stork was first released into the wild. Sanhwang, along with nine of his peers, was released into the wild in September at Yesan Stork Park in Chungnam Province. Three months after his release, the stork travelled alone to the waters off the coast of Sinan, Jeollanam-do. I was a natural scientist strapping a radio transmitter to his back to track his movements in real time. He was hunting for food on the tidal flats near Uido, off the coast of Sinan, when he stopped hunting and started flying southward at 9am on 24 November 2015. It was an overcast day with dark clouds in the sky.
That day, it was past 6pm. The call was picked up in the East China Sea, far offshore from the Estuary of the Yangtze River in China. Sanhwang was two years old, and he was his first experience of long-distance migration, so he was following a map imprinted in his genes by his ancestors to the Yangtze River Estuary wintering grounds, some 600 kilometres off the coast of Sinan. About 200 kilometres before the Yangtze Estuary wintering grounds, Sanhwang began to change course. "Oh, this is not right!" I knew something was wrong with the Sanhwang.
At that point, I started receiving real-time data from the National Weather Service. Sure enough, by the time Sanhwang started to change course, it was already raining in Shanghai, China, and dark clouds were rolling in over the East China Sea. Sanhwang began to turn his flight path almost 90 degrees to the left. The direction he chose to take was out into the middle of nowhere, with no islands in sight for him to land on.
Sanhwang flying over the high wave (2015)
And so Sanhwang went, flying and flying and flying over the high waves of the Great Sea of Japan. A day and a half after leaving the waters off Sinan, the beeping began again at Okinoerabu Island, near Okinawa, at the southern tip of the Japanese archipelago. By the time he reached the Island, he had flown nearly 1,007 kilometres without taking a sip of water.
As of 7am on 26 November 2015, we no longer heard any more of his calls. We knew he was alive for the first 12 hours after arriving on the island, but what happened to him after that? I began to have ominous thoughts.
As a natural scientist, I first contacted Japanese stork experts. I then flew to Japan and explained how the stork had flown to Japan in front of Japanese stork experts. After hearing my explanation, the Japanese scientists also contacted the head of the Okinoerabu community organisation to find out the whereabouts of the stork. The local broadcast said, "A stork from Korea has arrived in this island village, and anyone who has seen the stork should report it immediately." This broadcast continued even after the stork's call tone was cut off. A month or so later, a man came forward and confessed that he had found a dead stork on the airport runway with blood on its head and promptly incinerated it. It was a report in Japan's Newspaper Yomiuri that brought this news to my attention.
I sent an email to Office of Okinoerabu Airport to ask if the storks were burned. If they did, it would be illegal burning, which is illegal under the Cultural Property Protection Act, because Japan protects storks as natural monuments and special natural monuments. I filed a complaint against the airport staff who did the illegal burning with the Kagoshima Public Prosecutor's Office in Japan. Really, I wanted to know how Sanhwang adapted on an island I had never been to without dying. Perhaps, if Sanhwang had lived instead of dying, a paper tracing his movements would have been published in one of the world's leading ornithological journals.
A year after my complaint, the competent Kagoshima prosecutor's office sent me a notice of non-prosecution without even investigating the perpetrators of the illegal incineration. I received the notice and thought, 'Is my country even sovereign? ' Normally, the state - the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Agency for Cultural Affairs - would step up to the plate, but in my country, no one stepped up to the plate. I felt so bad, I broke down and cried.
Still, the case left me with a lot of doubts, because the only indication that Sanhwang had been shot to death, rather than illegally incinerated, was found in his death certificate from the airport, which said: 'Sanhwang was on the tarmac when his head was struck by a landing airliner, leaving him lying in a pool of blood, and he was immediately sent to the incinerator'. Of course, the pilot of the passenger plane that day also sent me a record of his sighting of Sanhwang as it was landing. If so, there should have been no marks or traces of the collision on any part of the passenger plane. I asked him to send me a photograph of it. There were no marks on the passenger plane at the point of impact. When the airport's explanation ended with this, I couldn't help but become more suspicious.
By the time Sanhwang appeared on the airport runway, it hadn't eaten for 34 hours and was probably close to exhaustion. There are no rice paddies on Okinoerabu Island, and most of the agricultural land is used to grow sugar cane, so no matter where he looked, he couldn't find any rice paddies to feed on. The only place he could find was in the lush grass around the airstrip, where he would forage for grasshoppers. At that moment, he heard a gunshot in the distance. He jumped up and flew away, but he couldn't get very far - his body was already exhausted.
By then the sun was up, and just before the wheels of the airliner's fuselage skidded down the runway, a second bullet pierced the stork's head. The airport employee who found the downed stork thought it was an unusual bird, and when he noticed the radio transmitter on its back, he must have been terrified. The airport employee's affidavit, which states that he shot it without notifying the authorities, says he "didn't know it was a stork," which is a fair guess.
The Stork at Okinoerabu Airport (2016)
What I wanted to know from the stork and what my predecessors, the scientists, had failed to identify, the stork's death was a time of suffering for me, a suffering that the Bible says "strengthened the hearts of the disciples, exhorting them to remain in this faith, knowing that we must go through many tribulations to enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22) and the Apostle Paul says in Romans (Rom 8:26-27), "The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not even know how to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be uttered." As I continue to walk this pilgrimage with the rest of the storks, I try to recapture my heart.
