My whole life, I have only walked on one single path, and the journey on this path has been a perilous one. Young children were going off to their schools, wearing their uniforms, while I was cutting the grass soaked full of the morning dew. I would look enviously at the students going off to school, often cutting my hands with the sickle in the process. I worked in the farmyards of other people’s houses, while going to school late in the evening. I never forgot the studies that I had learned there. While others went off on their summer holidays, I myself never had such a thing as a holiday.

While others had their one sabbatical year of rest, after every 6 years of work, I never had such a year. If I had even tried to rest just one year, I would have needed to rest all 7 years. While others were traveling on holiday, I could not do such things. When others were feasting and drinking with joy, I could only look from afar with envy. If you think about it, I have truly wasted my whole life – indeed – in accordance with the flesh, I have lived it most foolishly.

However, God made it that I would be born in an impoverished household, and he made it that I would not study like the rest of the people of this world. He made me understand only letters, that is, the continuous and several dozens of readings of the Bible. To someone who did not have a place to live in, he gave me a wife. He put a powerful and tight reign over my mouth. And while I was walking on the road, he gave me his calling. Up until then, I was agonizing over the same question, which had piled up: “Is the work that I am doing in this world acceptable?” However, at that very moment, I fully realized that God was doing the work to prepare me from the day I was born up to those 24 years of my life. In accordance with his guidance, I then became a revivalist.

But just who would give me any recognition? I was led by God, however, to pray in a place that belonged to one dear pastor. He eventually gave me the official invitation to be a revivalist and lead me, in a historical moment, to my first steps of being a preacher. That place was YangGok Methodist Church in the western side of HongSeoung County in the Southern ChungCheong Province. I could not forget how God had used me for his work on that day.

But what has never left my heart, until now, was that I was a worker in a farm, serving the owner of another household. I had learned true love there, and I had learned what it was to have a strong attachment to life. I barely had any seed capital for constructing a church, but I received support by the Holy Spirit. I had come to taste all of His gifts, and I had come to do lifelong work by His power. By the Inspiration of the Five Loaves and Two Fish, I performed my pastoral ministry. Looked upon with jealousy, I was covered in persecution and dishonor, yet I never learned to yield. And this was because the path I was walking on was the path that was promised to me by God.

Some people ignorantly give slander to Berea, stating that it is merely a name stolen from the Bible. They attempt to destroy the church and dishonor it. They make foolish jokes about it. But I, myself, am in tears. If one dishonors the church, how can one go to seek the Lord? What excuse will one make when one goes before him? So even today, as I swallow up all these slanders daily, I am still thankful to God. It has already been so long since I had given my life to die for the Lord. I will die a martyrdom like Stephen. I will die for the truth.

Semuon