Growing Up In America As A Korean American Christian
When I received my first call to serve as a pastor of a church, and was preparing to move out of my parent’s home as a college graduate, I remember feeling a strong sense of fear and anxiety. While there was some excitement about the notion of moving out and figuring things out on my own, my mind was primarily occupied with thoughts of fear and doubt as I looked ahead at my future and realized how full of uncertainty it was. As I sat simmering in these thoughts, my mother, as if she could read my mind explained to me that stressing out over the future was a waste of energy. And as though she had saved this story for such an occasion as this, my mother proceeded to tell me the story of how it was God’s guidance that got our family through one of its most challenging seasons.
When I was four years old my parents made the decision to move from Korea to the United States of America. Leaving behind a life of familiarity and comfort my parents decided, for a number of different reasons, to raise my sister and me in America. And despite a rocky start in the new country (a time in which God’s presence was felt many times), our lives had finally started to settle down. And before long my sister and I quickly became more comfortable speaking English rather than Korean, we belonged to both a school and church community, and for the most part had fully transitioned into life as a Korean-American. Yet it felt like as soon as we had settled down that another challenged loomed in our future.
Several years after settling down we started having trouble with our residency status, and after several months of phone calls, meetings, letters, prayer, and receiving all sorts of different anecdotal advice it seemed as though our time in America might come to an unexpected end. Despite all of the promises that were made beforehand, the allegedly fail-proof process that was supposed to allow us to obtain our permanent residency, and the fact that my sister and I were now practically illiterate in Korean it looked as though we were going to have to move back to Korea. And for the second time in my parent’s life it looked as though they were going to have to start their lives all over again.
It was in the midst of these stressful times that my mom woke up for her usual morning devotion and presented our family’s situation to God. In the face of a situation that made absolutely no sense at all, she asked God to show her the solution to the family dilemma. And she felt God urge her to the 23rdchapter of Psalms. Not initially knowing the contents of this iconic chapter, my mother quickly flipped to the passage and was disappointed to find that it was a passage she was already familiar with. However, she read through the passage hoping to find some sort of hidden code that could get her out of this situation, yet she found none. She proceeded to read through the passage several more times, each time failing to see the “hidden message” she was so sure God had hidden within the famous passage. Yet after about ten times of reading through the chapter, what she discovered wasn’t a secret message, but an inexplicable feeling of peace. After repeating the phrase “The Lord is my shepherd” nearly a dozen times, she was able to understand the implication of those words. God was her shepherd, and he was in control. He would be with her when she walked through the valley of the shadow of death and she wouldn’t fear evil. He would guide her to green pastures and still waters, and he would restore her soul.
After understanding God’s message for her, my mom came to the realization that all of this worrying was meaningless given who was supposed to be in charge of the situation. She realized that the reason she felt like she was helpless was because she was trying to take control of a situation that was inherently out of her control, and relinquishing that control to God left her with a sense of peace she had not even initially asked for.
Ultimately, we were able to figure things out, and through several meetings that were possible only through God’s providence, our family was able to retain residency and eventually went on to become naturalized as citizens. And through a surprisingly vulnerable moment, I was able to discover the true essence of a phrase that for me had simply devolved into a Christian cliché, and recognize it for the victorious phrase that it was: “The Lord is my shepherd”.
Recently graduated from Andrews University with a degree in Theology and is currently serving as the youth pastor at RoC Fellowship in Portland, Oregon.