A Letter to My Father

(A note: This is an e-mail sent to my father from one of his long-lost friends from Korea. I have transcribed the body of the e-mail here, without corrections; the letter stands as-is. This is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read, and my father's friend is not a native speaker of English.)

Jaeyong,

It is dreary. Clouds are moving to the southernwest. Every tree keeps silence. Earth is being dimmed with clouds. This is a sketch of Pohang's weather of today. A green and green season of our past high school life shoots out of my memory. I think that I must be searching out an old friend in the silhouette of the old days.

You are in America. Taejun is in Heaven. I am in Korea. We are all living in the memory of the past.

One day I was alone praising, praying, and preaching in the deep woods in June. When I finished worship and turned to the right side to find a tomb, I got a grace that a living being and the deceased in Jesus are same in the view of God.

Thanks God to refind my lost dear friend. I am glad to have a party to hear my inner man.

I am going to leave for home. It is 6'oclock in the afternoon.

Let us have a conversation later on.

Love, peace and joy to you and your family.

Hallelujah,

Inkil.

The.Spaces.Between.Us.

There are so many spaces between you and me

They could be warm or full of doubt and shadow, laden with demons rearing their ugly heads in the darkness, waiting for your step to falter, for that one moment when everything you know becomes wrong

These spaces could be as warm as the summer sun with the promise of a million golden memories hovering in the veil of the future

They could be as empty as the hollows of a broken heart

But these spaces between you and me are real, the miles are rivers, the hours are canyons, and they are growing bigger

The spaces between us could be anything we want them to be

To.Flex.Without.Breaking

Learning to be flexible means knowing what it feels like to be the trees in the wind and the kelp in the deep sea, moving and flowing with the breeze and the tide

If you break as I have you have failed in this but learning how to break is also part of learning how to flex

So when sorrow and longing and love washes over you learn how to bend and curl and curve. Learn how to let it flow through you and learn how to become sorrow and longing and love and you will know a fraction of the divine and how it is all one sweet beautiful thing and how we are all one big we

You may break.

You can still learn how to flex.

Can you do this.

Can you flex.

Can you be strong.

You can find me here. In shadow and in peace. In light and in pain. Can you find me. Can you follow. Can you tell me the things in your sweet heart. We can do this.