The Eternal Chapter
This past February marked the 11-year anniversary of one of my most life-changing events. It spiraled my life into a decade-long whirlwind, filled with unanswered questions and unfinished chapters. How my journey culminated with a simple realization is an astonishing testament to God’s unending story of hope.
My brother and I were close growing up. Although Brian was two years younger he was more of an older brother. He just had a certain confidence that enabled our relationship to flourish in that way. We became the closest during the semester when I began graduate studies at Andrews University, and he was accepted nearby into the esteemed Northwestern University 7-year Honors Program in Medical Education in Chicago. Our family and friends were all pleasantly shocked yet ecstatic at his acceptance. Our reactions were justified because he had walked into his interview in unorthodox interview attire: maroon Dr. Martens boots, a plaid tie and an anti-suit blazer. He believed that he didn’t need to change who he was (outside or inside) just to be accepted at a school, no matter how prestigious.
Life Changer for Brian
A semester before he was due to celebrate the conquest of undergraduate studies, Brian began pondering whether medicine was his true calling. He had been serving fairly regularly at the local Adventist church as their lay youth leader. He found himself neck high in ministry rather than immersed into the campus of Northwestern’s highly rigorous academics–not everyone gets into a program that gives you a straight acceptance to medical school without sitting for the MCAT! Realizing how much would be put in jeopardy, I blasted him more and more eloquent and sisterly advice: 1) Finish your last semester and then, maybe, think about Seminary. 2) Don’t make such a rash decision at a dusty crossroad; wait on the Lord. And my absolutely best one, 3): Take time away from this academic surrounding by being a student missionary overseas.
This last thought was not at all far-fetched. Recently returned from Palau myself, I was preaching from my post-mission high.
I still remember his gentle, consistent reply: “Sis, there is so much to do here in the U.S.; I don’t need to go overseas to find a mission field or a ministry, the person next to me is my mission field.”
Ugh! I would have jumped at the opportunity – what better excuse to travel and thus extract yourself from the stressful environment. It would give you the space you need to objectively assess the situation. Traveling was in our blood. We grew up traveling the country and overseas. When my dad immigrated to the USA, it was his “American Dream” to see the wonders—National Parks, that is—of all 50 States. We trekked many miles in our RV listening to The Heritage Singers, learning each state’s facts as we drove through, topping it off with Alaska and Hawaii by air.
But, say what I wished, my brother would live his own life story. He was bold in what he did and most bold for Christ. Externally it didn’t make any sense to me for him to switch paths at that point; however, even with all the prodding, internally I knew it was the right thing for him. My brother had found peace in his decision and heeded the call to pastoral ministry. He immediately transferred to Andrews University to enroll in the Seminary.
Life Changer for Me
Several years later, we had a surprise announcement for each other. My news was that he was going to be an uncle. His news was that he was going on a mission trip overseas! I didn’t hear where he was going and with whom. I was just so excited at the words “mission” and “overseas” that it was all I could hear. I was so proud to take a bit of the credit for him going, because I knew it would change his life. But I never anticipated that it would change mine the way it did. I was more excited than he because I had recently worked at the Adventist Volunteer Center at the General Conference Secretariat, working with student missionaries and volunteers from all over the world. I was on a buzz for mission service overseas, and now more than ever, because my own brother was finally going to experience it for himself.
At the time, he was working as the Science chair at Garden State Academy in New Jersey and pastoring a local church. The Conference decided to pull a mission team together for El Salvador, which included a group of Garden State Academy students and my brother as a chaperone.
One night during the trip, close to midnight, the phone began to ring. It kept ringing. I was 6 months pregnant and awfully nauseous. I couldn’t keep getting up to listen to the machine. Finally I called my mom to find out what was going on. My uncle answered the phone and then I knew something was terribly wrong. It was about the El Salvador mission trip.
After a week of building an orphanage, the students and chaperones decided to go wading along the beautiful shores of a small town. A spontaneous, roaring riptide swept them up, and without hesitation my brother and a lifeguard went in to rescue them. One by one, each student was brought safely ashore. As the last student was pulled in, he turned to hear my brother’s last cry, “Help me, Jesus!” He had run out of strength stretching his last breath as long as possible.
Senseless Loss
How could a loving God ignore such an earnest plea? How much more earnest could such a plea need to be? Why would God allow the answer to such a plea to be death? Why would He allow the life of such a faithful and bold soldier for Christ to end at the age of 26? For someone so overflowing with advice, at that moment I had none. No answers to a heap of questions.
My mind wrestled for reason and hope. With so many who knew, loved, and passionately admired him, with so many more who heard the astonishing story of service and courage and sacrifice, I ached deep in my heart.
Despair overwhelmed me.
I sank into a flood of anger – a decade worth of anger, tears and sorrow. I hopelessly sought for the peace that my brother had relentlessly lived by. I desperately scrambled to retract any credit for planting the idea of serving a mission overseas. It took me a long time to realize, in the midst of my anguish, that Christ had been gently tapping on my shoulder. Tapping to tell me something that would give me a piece of that peace….
My child Lilian, Brian is not lost. I have not lost him; and you have not lost him either; his life is on pause. You did not send him to his death. He found a reason to live worth dying for. Besides, he did not die. There are so many more pages to add to the chapters of his life.
It has been a long and winding voyage but I have caught a glimpse of the wave of hope and the wave of peace in Him. In the words of a traveler on a similar journey, “So, my life with my brother has been put on pause, . . . but it will be continued in a short while, . . . and this story has no end.” “Jesus said unto her, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die’” (John 11:25, 26).
To be continued in Heaven.
Born and raised in New York, Lilian Han Im grew up wanting to teach children. She and her husband are now homeschooling their own children, Alexis and Austin, in Richmond, California.