Here, on the shores of Sokcho, we now come to the end of our Fellowship.

Well, our time in South Korea is nearly at an end. It's precisely midnight on Saturday night, the 20th of December, as I write this. In five-and-a-half hours, our friends Jenny and Rachel will meet us outside our building to drive us to the Sokcho intercity bus terminal for the 6 am bus to Gangneung (the closest big city), and from there we will take an 8 am bus to Incheon Airport for a 2 pm flight back to O'Hare Airport (via Tokyo).

Our last week has been hectic but wonderful, full of goodbye dinners and parties and gifts from our students. I'm sure Aubrey will soon post all the wonderful pictures she's taken. Right now, however, we're just reflecting on the end of a major part of our lives. We've been married for less than four years, but two of those years have been spent in South Korea. This experience has changed us profoundly. We will truly miss this country, this culture, and the many friends we have made here. As I told our friends after our final goodbye party this evening, a part of who we now are is who they have helped us become. We will carry our memories of them with us for the rest of our lives.

Now we're looking forward to the next chapter of our lives in the US. We don't know what God has in store for us, but we know the great things He did for us here in the Land of Morning Calm. And we are profoundly grateful.

Paul's new blog.

Yes, I finally have a place for my big mouth to call home: http://www.onethoughtafteranother.blogspot.com.

Just FYI.

Tyranny on the Left Coast

This is my official take on the behavior of opponents of Proposition 8 (the California ballot provision that amended the state constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage) after the election, if you're interested in reading it.

Psalm 52

We've been packing our home up over the past several days, and when you do that you find all kinds of interesting things. For about 15 months, from spring 2007 to late summer 2008, I was part of a local writer's group made up of several other foreign teachers called WAK (Writer's Association of Korea). (Aubrey came to the meetings from time to time, but not often. I don't know why. She's a really freaking good writer. But I digress.)

While going through papers on our bookshelf, I found a cache of WAK materials that I'd forgotten I'd kept. One of them was an autobiographical essay I'd written about my feelings about my brother, Jeffrey's, death. Given my recent blogging about having faith in God, I thought I'd add Psalm 52 to the blog today, to give the talk about faith a kind of emotional symmetry. (Be warned, though: it's a bit long, and a bit raw, emotionally and linguistically. I wrote it for a non-churchgoing audience, and it expressed the feelings I'd had about Jeffrey's death 13 years ago.)

Psalm 52

Why do you boast of evil, you mighty man?
Why do you boast all day long, you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God?
Your tongue plots destruction; it is like a sharpened razor, you who practice deceit.
You love evil rather than good, falsehood rather than speaking the truth.
You love every harmful word, O you deceitful tongue!
Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin:
He will snatch you up and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living.
The righteous will see and fear; they will laugh at him, saying,
"Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold
but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!"
But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God;
I trust in God's unfailing love forever and ever.
I will praise you forever for what you have done;
In your name I will hope, for your name is good.
I will praise you in the presence of your saints.
-- Psalm 52: 1-9 (NIV)

One of the truly ambivalent benefits of a serious Christian faith is its answer to the problem of suffering, which is the source of both amazing comfort and bitter questions and recriminations against God. A religion that claims an absolutely good, all-powerful, and personal being as its raison d'etre has a lot to answer for when things go wrong, after all. When we are suffering -- physically, emotionally, or spiritually -- Christian doctrine tells us that there is an omnipotent, loving God there for us. That is a very consoling thought. The King of the universe, the Author of time and space and everything that we call "reality" is personally concerned, and personally moved, by all of our individual pains? Well, that makes it easier to bear up under them. But then, if God is so powerful and He cares so much, why doesn't He help? Why doesn't He fix the situation? Or, even better, why didn't He make it so that we never had to deal with it in the first place? Wouldn't that be more loving? Every serious person of faith has to answer these questions at some point. For me, that point came on November 5, 1995.

I was sixteen and in my sophomore year at Central Catholic High School. Freshman year had been pretty typical: I made some friends; I made some mistakes; I had fun. Sophomore year promised to be more fun with (hopefully) fewer mistakes. I had a car now -- a beat-up '85 Dodge Aries that I'd bought off my cousin -- and that was a passport to a lot of new things for my friends and me. And my little brother, Jeffrey, was finally out of the hospital. Now my family and I could relax a little more.

Jeffrey had gone into the hospital for exploratory neurosurgery. He had epilepsy, and his seizures had become very intense and violent lately. He'd gone to Children's Hospital in Boston to see if the parts of his brain that caused his seizures could be safely removed. Something went wrong during the surgery, however. (To this day, we don't know what actually happened.) Jeffrey went into septic shock -- a condition where the body responds as if it has a massive, system-wide infection. That response usually kills the patient. (During a normal infection, the blood vessels near the source of the infection dilate to allow white blood cells to leak into the surrounding tissue to fight it. In septic shock, or sepsis, this happens throughout the entire body. The body swells up to two or three times its normal size, the lungs become sodden and useless, and the organs can't get enough oxygen because there isn't enough blood to bring it to them.) Death from sepsis is usually quick and painful. Jeffrey was given a 3% chance to live.

Fortunately, however, he was at Boston Children's Hospital, one of the two or three best hospitals for children in the world. They had several experimental devices and machines to keep him alive, and the medical staff was second to none. Jeffrey beat the odds and recovered. He spent a month in the ICU and another month in a rehab facility to fully regain his motor skills before he came home in early October. We were so relieved. We knew (well, not my father, who was an atheist -- by my mother and I knew) that God had smiled on us. We knew we'd dodged a bullet and the worst was over.

We were wrong.

November 5 was a Sunday. I remember that because we were supposed to go to church. Jeffrey usually got up early, but sometimes he didn't and we'd have to wake him up. He hadn't gotten up in time, so my mother went in to wake him up. I was laying in bed, enjoying those last few minutes of rest where you're not sleeping but you feel absolutely no obligation to get up. My mother's scream after she entered Jeffrey's room did nothing to change my attitude.

That may sound calloused, but you need to understand -- my mother, good Italian that she is, tends towards the melodramatic. She screams when she drops a pot on the floor (even if it's empty). She screams if she's riding in a car with my father or me and we get closer than the requisite two car lengths she deems an appropriate following distance. She screams for a lot of reasons, few of which were worth rousing myself from the blissful post-slumber rest I was enjoying that morning. Then I heard her call my father.

"Howard! Get in here!"

Now, this didn't necessarily indicate a real problem, either, but it seemed to warrant a little more attention, which I dutifully gave it. Maybe Jeffrey had ripped up his sheets or taken all his clothes out of his drawers -- things he'd been known to do before.

Then I heard my father's voice.

"Oh no! Jeffrey!"

My father's voice, like my own, is not as well equipped for expressing the full range of human emotions as are those of other people (such as my mother or brother, Jon), so it can be hard sometimes to tell what we're feeling without seeing our faces. This was certainly not one of those times. I don't think I can properly express the shock, grief, and despair that I heard in my father's voice at that moment. All I can say is that I've never heard him speak in that tone or with that kind of expression before or since. And I knew that something was very, very wrong.

I jumped out of bed and walked quickly down the twenty-foot hallway between our rooms. And I saw what had made my mother scream. There in his bed lay Jeffrey, cold and blue, a peaceful expression on his face. He'd been dead for hours.

The next several hours were pretty surreal. I remember my father dragging Jeffrey's body (or "Jeffrey" as I preferred to think of it at the time) off the bed and rapidly administering CPR. I remember thick, black blood oozing out of Jeffrey's nose as my father pushed down on his chest, repeatedly trying to force life back into his body. My good friend, John, had slept over the night before, and he called the paramedics. (John had shit luck, sleeping over that night. It's a good thing he did, since I don't think anyone in my family was in a state to speak as calmly to the paramedics as he did. But that was the first time he'd ever experienced one of Jeffrey's frequent medical emergencies, and it was the worst one he could have seen. Jeffrey regularly suffered full-on grand mal seizures, some of which had required hospitalization. Another good friend of mine, Dave, had had the bad luck of sleeping over on a few such occasions, so he would have been a little more familiar with the whole scenario. John, alas, was not.)

The paramedics quickly removed Jeffrey and rushed him to the hospital. One medic stayed behind (I forget why; I only remember talking with him after his colleagues had left) and I asked him if he thought my brother would live. It's obvious now that he knew Jeffrey was dead and he also knew that I didn't want to believe that, so he just told me that he wasn't sure, but that the congealed black blood leaking from Jeffrey's nose wasn't a good sign. The only words of his that registered with me were "I'm not sure," though. I rode with my family to the hospital, clinging desperately to the futile hope that Jeffrey might beat the odds again and live.

C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, compared his confidence in the goodness and providence of God after his wife's death to a mountain climber's confidence in his rope once he as real need of it. It's one thing to say that your rope is strong enough to hold your weight; it's quite another to put all your weight onto it when it's the only thing keeping you from falling hundreds of feet to your death. When that happens, you find out whether you really trust the strength of your rope. Like Lewis, I realized that I didn't really believe my rope was as strong as I'd thought I did. I learned how dangerously easy it is to talk about how good God is when you're not suffering very much. When nothing in your life's gone to shit, the idea that God is in control and has a plan that includes your life makes a lot of sense.

When something in your life goes wrong, however -- really, terribly wrong -- you finally grasp the awful weight behind those simple words: "I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth." I believe in this God? But there must be some mistake. This God just let my brother die. Surely the "maker of heaven and earth" could have done something, couldn't He?

We had so many people wanting to share our grief. Jeffrey was very well-liked in the community, which added to the outpouring of attention that usually follows the sudden death of an 11-year old boy in a town as safe as Salem, New Hampshire was. People from church were the worst. Not that they were obnoxious or self-righteous. Far from it. They were some of the most gracious, wonderful, and helpful people who came to us. But many of them kept saying that God had "a plan" and that I just had to trust him. Didn't they know that I knew that? But what kind of fucked up plan doesn't make a place for a perfectly innocent boy whose family had thought he was lost and had just gotten used to the wonderful idea of having him back?

Or, at least, those were my silent thoughts. To others I talked about how I knew that God had a plan and I fully trusted Him. It was bullshit, of course, but I felt like that was what I should say. I didn't share my real thoughts with anyone, even to God in prayer. (How impertinent to speak to God like that!) I found it hard to pray without cursing at Him or blaming him, though, so I didn't pray much. This was especially tough for me, however, because my prayers had been my biggest source of sustenance during Jeffrey's ordeal in the hospital. It was the only way I'd managed to not dissolve into a frantic, raging, helpless mess as I watched his body deteriorate into a distended, swollen, unrecognizable thing in the hospital. Without my prayers, I began to feel my bitterness and hopelessness rise up to engulf me. So I went downstairs to my private studying area in the basement and I did what I'd heard of other people doing in similar situations (and had mocked them for doing it): I opened my bible to a random passage and began to read. As it happened, the passage I'd opened to was psalm 52.

Psalm 52 is an imprecatory psalm. It's a prayer asking God to curse and kill someone. It's attributed to King David, and is one of the few psalms with a specific narrative reference: "Against Doeg, the Edomite." As the story goes, David, the secretly anointed heir to the throne of Israel, was being hunted by the deranged King Saul. Saul had once been David's greatest benefactor, but had become increasingly paranoid as David's war exploits made him the most popular man in the kingdom. Although David repeatedly pledged his loyalty to Saul, the king tried to kill him and David was forced to flee.

He fled so quickly, in fact, that he took no food or weapons with him. The first place he ran to was Nob, a village of priests whom he asked for food and a weapon. He lied when asked about his purpose, saying he was on a top-secret mission for the king. Against their better judgment, the priests gave David the food and weapon he needed and he went on his way. Doeg, one of the priests' assistants, realized David was lying and ran off to inform Saul, who rushed to Nob with his personal retinue to catch David. He was furious when he learned that David had escaped, and ordered the priests killed for conspiring against him. The only man willing to carry out his order, however, was Doeg, who dutifully murdered 85 priests. Abiathar, son of the head priest, escaped, however, and told David about what had happened. David, consumed with grief and anger at his role in the deaths of the priests, vowed vengeance against Doeg and composed a cursing prayer to God (psalm 52) to kill him.

That's the story behind psalm 52. Not a very likely source of comfort or inspiration, but it provided me with both. I felt a tremendous sense of relief and release that I hadn't realized I needed so badly. I realized at that moment that it was okay to be angry with God. He's big enough to take it. I'd been treating Him the way that my hagwon owner tells me to treat certain spoiled bratty students who aren't used to being disciplined at home. ("Don't yell at Him. He's sensitive.") But what good is a God you can't yell at? "What is this? What are you doing? Why have you hurt me this badly?" Good questions, all. "Why the fuck is this happening to me?" Even better. Rage, as the Croatian theologian, Miroslav Volf, says in his excellent book on Christianity and conflict, Exclusion and Embrace, belongs before God. If I have a problem with something that is not at all in my or anyone else's control, I need to take my questions to the source, just like an angry customer with car troubles on the phone wanting to talk with "Mr. Toyota." If I don't do that, if I feel like I can't do it or like such questions are impertinent, what does that say about what I believe?

So I let myself get angry. Over the next several weeks I yelled and questioned. Above all, I asked why. Why did this happen? What did Jeffrey do, what did we do, to deserve this? How could this be justified? And in the end, I felt the razor sharpness of the double-edged sword of faith: at some point, you have to believe. That's the nature of the game. There is a lot of room for discussion and reasoning, but at a certain point the whole thing is about trust in a person. The absurd image that came into my mind was from the film Aladdin, where Aladdin, before helping the princess onto his flying carpet, asks her, "Do you trust me?" Corny, to be sure, but it cuts to the heart of the issue. If she doesn't trust him, there's no magic ride -- the journey ends right there. If I don't trust God, there's no journey of faith -- no magic, no life. It all ends. That was the question I felt myself being asked: "Do you trust me?" Even in my anger and hurt and confusion over Jeffrey's death, even without all my questions answered, I realized that my answer was "Yes."

It reminded me a little bit of God's answers to Job at the end of the book of Job. He never actually tells Job what he'd spent 30-odd chapters demanding to know, which was why he'd suffered so much when he'd done nothing wrong. Instead God essentially says, "I'm God and you're not. I know why this happened to you, and I'm in control. Even if I don't tell you why it happened, do you trust me to know what's best?" Job did. I realized that I had to, too. I needed to emulate David's attitude in psalm 52, not only in how he began his prayer, but also in how he ended it: I trust in God's unfailing love forever and ever ... in your name I will hope, for your name is good.

A very Black Friday in Long Island

This is the scene outside of the Wal-Mart in Long Island, hours after a savage mob of shoppers had freaking trampled a Wal-Mart maintainence worker to death because he wasn't opening the crash doors outside the door fast enough. At 5 am. As you'll notice, dozens of shoppers are lined up behind the crime scene tape. What the f*#%? What the hell is wrong with the people there? A man was killed, and all they can think about is getting good deals.

According to the report, the selfish, murdering reprobates who had just killed a man -- or stepped over his crushed body without comment in their rush to get deals -- refused to leave the store when employees said they were closing the store due to their colleague's death. "I've been here since Thursday morning!" one shopper reportedly said, as she kept shopping through employees' orders for her to leave the store.

Has Long Island become another front line for the Third World-ization of America that's proceeding apace and no one said anything about it? Is this what we have to look forward to in the "new" America? What a terrible, horrible thing if it's true. This single event is terrible enough without it possibly doubling as a preview of coming attractions.

Pondering the future while standing on one foot

A couple months ago, I informed all our faithful readers that Aubrey and I will be heading back to the US at the end of December. After two really enjoyable and life-changing years in Korea, the thing that motivated us to really want to head back to the US was the prospect of my working at Emmaus Ministries. (Well, that's actually more true for me. Aubrey really missed home and wanted to go back, but I was okay staying in Korea for another year or two, especially with the economy in free-fall.)

I worked at Emmaus for a year-and-a-half before I went to grad school, and it was the one place I really wanted to work. In early September, John Green, the executive director of Emmaus, emailed me to let me know about a development (i.e. fundraising and PR) position they were creating at Emmaus. I wasn't guaranteed a job there, of course, but in order to have a chance at it, Aubrey and I would have to commit to heading back to Chicago, which we did. I interviewed for the position (multiple times) and, at long last, received a conditional offer for the position from Emmaus (dependent on their financial situation at the end of 2008, which, as a nonprofit, was up in the air). Although it wasn't a definite thing, I was encouraged. I'd have to wait for January to find out, but I'd be applying for other jobs in the meantime and, if things went as I hoped they would, I'd start work for Emmaus in January.

Yesterday I found out that things had changed. Emmaus's financial situation has considerably worsened, and John Green and Emmaus's Board of Directors decided that something needed to be done. So they changed the parameters of the job I'd applied for, rescinded the conditional offer they'd made to me, and gave the new position to another of the final candidates on the list for the original position, to start December 1st. I was obviously surprised and disappointed when I got the message from John, but he and I talked about it and I understand and respect their reasons for making the changes. (If you haven't already checked out Emmaus, you really should. They do great work for a group of people literally no one else in the area specifically targets or helps. They could really use your help. Look them up: www.streets.org.)

During my waiting for Emmaus, I'd also been in discussions with people at the Archdiocese of Chicago to possibly become the director of their local grantmaking operations (a really cool position with the potential to do some great things). The day before I found out about the Emmaus position falling through, I learned that the position at the Archdiocese had just fallen through and wouldn't be available after all. Over the past couple days, what had looked like a fairly hopeful job future for me in America has evaporated into a batch of uncertainty.

At first, of course, I was worried and nervous. Things are not good for jobseekers in the US right now, and given the foolish policies people in the federal government seem poised to pursue over the next 18 months, they will probably get considerably worse before they get better. Our friends here want us to stay, and a part of us also wants to stay. It would be great to get to know the couples we've met here a lot better, and there is real job security in teaching English (if you're good at it, which I'm told we are). We could stay here for a bit longer and save more money (at the end of the year we'll have about $12,000 on hand, after having paid off close to $30,000 in student loans and credit card bills over the past two years). The parts of us that crave safety and security are telling us, very loudly, that we should stay.

But we are not going to stay.

We've really enjoyed out time here. We've made friendships that we will cherish for the rest of our lives, and we've learned things about the world and ourselves that would have been difficult -- if not impossible -- to learn if we'd stayed in America, or even left after one year. Over the past few months, however, we've become fairly certain that what God wants for us right now is to head back to America. The timing of the announcement of the position at Emmaus seemed providential at the time, and further prayer and reflection have confirmed for us that we're correct in deciding to go home. Parting from our friends here will indeed be sweet sorrow, but we're pretty sure that it's the right thing to do.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I called my folks and two close friends last night to seek their advice about what we should do. My parents said they'd support us in whatever we chose. (They're cool like that.) My friends advised me to follow what we thought was God's will in the subject. As one of my friends said, "You say you're pretty sure that God wants you to go back. I think you have your answer about what to do. Now you just have to do it."

His advice reminded me of a story about the famous ancient rabbi, Hillel (who died about the time Christ was born), who was challenged by a student to recite the Torah while standing on one foot. Rabbi Hillel stood on one foot and said, "What is hateful to thee, do it not to thy brother. This is the whole of the Torah. All else is commentary. Go and do likewise." I feel like right now I could stand on one foot and sum up our situation similarly: "If you're sure God wants you to do something, you need to do it. This is the whole of good living. All other things are details. Go and do it." It may not feel like the most secure route at the moment, but we're pretty sure it will prove to be the best for us. As C.S. Lewis said, sometimes, "the longest way 'round is the shortest way home."

We'll arrive in Chicago on December 21. Our plan is to spend Christmas in Chicago and then head out to New Hampshire to see my folks for New Years. After that, we'll see what happens. I'm applying to several jobs right now, although I haven't heard anything back. If any of you have any need of, or know people who may have need of, a person with excellent writing and people skills and an interest in grantwriting, PR or marketing work, copy editing, or really just anything that pays money and involves thinking and communicating, I'd really appreciate it if you could pass my name on. Thank you very much for your help in advance, and have a happy Thanksgiving.

All filled up.

After great consideration, Paul and I determined that we had better visit the dentist before leaving Korea. I hadn't been in about three years and Paul hadn't been in about twelve. We figured it'd be good to get our routine cleanings taken care of here while we still have health insurance.

But oh, the years had not been kind. Paul found out he had eight (or was it ten?!) cavities, and I found out that I had five plus a very rare thing called an internal resorption (or pink spot, as the dentist called it here). Basically one of my teeth had, through no fault of my own, rotted from the inside and was now completely dead. The dentist told me I'd need a root canal--AAAAAAAAAARGH! The very thought made me shudder. I'm only 28, I thought. Why are my teeth failing me now?

So, over the past month, Paul and I have made oh so many visits to the dentist. Between the two of us, we've showed up to the dentist's office and sat in her chair sixteen times. We paid the dentist up front and just kept on going in to have the cavities filled, one by one. It was a bit of a pain, but luckily we live a 15-minute walk away from the place, and our dentist is very very nice.

Today I had my last cavity filled, and I'm exceedingly happy that I don't have to go to the dentist again (at least until I get my next cleaning!) I think the dentist was happy too that she wouldn't have to deal with any foreigners for a while.