The way of God’s will
A selection from Hak Ja Han’s Moon Memoir (from p.90)
10 minutes
By God’s hand, on our way to Daegu we met Jeong Seok-cheon, a member of the Holy Lord Church, to which my family had belonged in Cholsan. He was very pleased to see us, and we all felt as if we were meeting long-lost relatives. The Holy Lord Church was the church in which my parents were married, and Jeong Seok-cheon’s mother, Kim Seong-do, was its founder. She was one of many female church leaders in the northern part of Korea whose devotion to Jesus was unparalleled and who had received revelations of what was to come.
The Holy Lord Church had withered due to Japanese persecution, and the Communist Party’s brutal oppression had put an end to it and all churches in the North. Escaping to the South, Jeong Seok-cheon continued to worship God. With scattered Holy Lord Church members who had found each other, he created a prayer group in Daegu. He maintained his ardor to accomplish God’s will and prepared himself to meet the returning Lord. He also worked diligently and had a good livelihood managing mining, rice and oil businesses. Mr. Jeong organized our lodging in Daegu.
My mother made a simple request of him. “When we were in North Korea,” she said, “we received much grace through Mrs. Heo Ho-bin, and there were great works.” Mr. Jeong knew of Rev. Heo, whose con- gregation had prepared food and clothes for Jesus, as well as for the Second Coming Lord. “As the Lord will return to Korea soon,” my mother said to Mr. Jeong, “please, let us pray very hard to welcome him.”
***
One morning, during the Daegu group’s intense prayer, my mother received a revelation from Heaven. God told her that she had to live a life of greater devotion if she wanted to meet the Lord at the Second Advent. “Prayer alone is not enough,” she was told. “You have to eat your food uncooked.” My mother began to subsist on pine needles, which would have been digestible had they been steamed, but she ate them raw, even though they badly damaged her teeth.
My mother had come from a relatively well-to-do family. Her father had owned a large farm, and her mother had a sewing-machine shop, so they were able to pay for my mother and her brother to attend high school. My maternal grandfather always taught my mother, “No matter how hard things may be, you must never be indebted to others.” Abiding by his words, there in Daegu my mother opened a small shop, thinking that it would provide enough money to enable her to re-enroll her only daughter in elementary school.
Daily subsistence of two meals of kimchi broth, raw pine needle tips and peanuts, plus taking care of her shop, exhausted my mother’s physical frame. A normal person would have eased off that discipline, but for my mother, her mind only became clearer. When I saw her serene countenance, while feeling sympathy for her, I could not help but be amazed.
“How can she run a business while consuming so little?” I asked myself. “It is nothing less than a miracle.” My mother maintained a near starvation diet, and her shop did not bring a profit for three months. Most people would have given up, but her faith was deep and, with supreme confidence that she was upholding God’s dream, she persevered unconditionally. She did not compromise with reality. With the Holy Spirit, she created her own reality.
***
No matter her plight, my mother surrendered her mind to her search for Jesus. Now, as I began to mature, she added to that the task of providing her daughter a spiritually safe environment. She wanted me to reach maturity in an environment of internal and external purity, and she considered how to separate me as much as possible from the influence of the secular world.
I was attending Daegu Elementary School in a neighborhood called Bongsan-dong. As time passed, not only my face but also my bearing became attractive. I was good at my studies, so I soon became popular among my friends, and I was well-liked by many adults as well. One afternoon, I was playing alone on the narrow street in front of the shop, with my mother inside. A Buddhist monk walked by, and I caught his eye and he stopped. I returned his gaze, and I remember his piercing eyes. My mother came out and bowed politely to him. Pointing to me, he asked, “Is she your daughter?” Hearing her affirmative answer, his eyes turned warm and deep. As I turned to look at my mother, the holy man spoke.
“You live with only one daughter, but don’t envy someone who has ten sons. Please raise her well. This daughter of yours is going to be married at a young age. Her future husband may be older than she is, but he’ll be a great man with outstanding ability that transcends the sea, the land and the skies.”
My mother took the ascetic’s words seriously. Acting on her intention to rear her only daughter in the most serene and secure surroundings, in 1954 my mother moved us to Jeju Island off the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula, to the town of Seogwipo. She wanted to leave the crowded city streets and allow me to mature in the pristine countryside. We spent our first nine months on Jeju with the family of Jeong Seok-jin, the younger brother of our Holy Lord Church friend, Jeong Seok-cheon.
***
On Jeju, as she had everywhere, my mother led me on the path of sainthood for the Lord, with no thought of worldly matters, and this fit my emerging personality very well. I read biographies of saintly women and devoted myself to the ideal of complete purity in preparation to receive my calling as the Daughter of God. Once settled in Seogwipo, I enrolled in Shinhyo Elementary School as a fifth grader. At the age of 11, while my classmates were running around and playing, I lived a rigorous and strict life of faith. With my grandmother and mother, I devoted myself to prayer, study and worship.
My mother soaked flattened barley in water and added it to radish kimchi for her raw food diet, while I ate millet porridge. Even though weak due to nutritional privation, when she saw farmers working the barley fields, my mother could not resist helping with the plowing. If she saw someone having difficulty carrying a load, she would volunteer to carry it for them. Without her saying a word, people were filled with admiration. “I’ve never met such a thoughtful person,” one village woman would say to another, who would respond, “That’s what I’m saying. I heard she’s a regular churchgoer, but still, she is so different from the others.”
My mother lived the exemplary life of an authentically religious person, always putting her faith into practice by helping others. She studied the Bible and shared with me the teachings of the Holy Lord Church and the Inside-the-Womb Church that Jesus would return as a man in the flesh, just as he had come 2,000 years ago, that he would find his holy bride and hold the marriage supper of the Lamb, as the Bible prophesies, and that all this would take place in Korea. From her I learned the meaning of Jesus’ Second Advent and could imagine it and taste and touch it. And from my mother, I learned the meaning of true discipleship.