A few weeks into the start of the course in 2020, the first case of COVID19 was reported in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Our routines, and the stability and security they provide, were ruptured. I believe that we are creatures of habit. We sit at the same place at the family table. Every plate, cup and saucepan has its home inside our kitchen cupboards. COVID and lockdown has, for me, revealed to me my habits. One of which was my compartmentalization of faith. I cannot physically go to the church building; the space and environment where I would enter “prayer” or “worship” mode. Every space in my life was forced to collapse into each other. COVID collapsed and compressed everything in my life. The different areas of my life that I had unconsciously been keeping separate: the lines between home life, church life, social life, were erased and stacked on top of each other. Everything was deconstructed. I was worshipping on Sunday in the same space I would play legos with my little one. And at the 1 year mark of staying at home, the course was reopened and my dining table became my place of bible study.
It brought me to realize what a life of worshipping God and honoring God really meant. Everything was compressed until a breaking point, where by the grace of God, instead of an implosion, there was an opening, an unfolding, and a blossoming. My place of worship became my living room. My place of worship became the familiar walkways around my neighborhood. My place of worship became me, myself, my thoughts and my behavior towards others, as 1 Corinthians 6:19 says ‘your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’. We were assigned weekly tasks of committing verses verbatim to memory and summarizing select books from the New Testament. At first, paraphrasing self-evident truths seemed to be redundant. But I quickly discovered I wasn’t just writing out what was already present in the text, rather I was preaching to myself and distilling the spirit of the text, to articulate for myself what the bible is trying to convey about our God. And in doing so, I wrestled with the text and what seemed like a repetitive task became an experience to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Psalm 34:8).
There was an unmistakable correlation with the time I spent studying His word with my efforts to walk with God, to follow Him even when I don’t feel like it. The more time I took to read His word and be with Him despite being neck deep in housework, the more I could hear His gentle and unassuming voice through the bible. I could see how much God loves and cares for the weak and the vulnerable. And through this course, despite being a church-goer my whole life, I had a lightbulb moment where I realized we are all called to ministry, which is to minister or tend to the needs of others, and that my ministry, my calling, is my family.
I am called to minister to their needs, especially the most weak and vulnerable, my daughter. Being tired or hungry does not mean I can be unkind or impatient towards my family. Having something that does not go my way does not mean I have license to express my frustration at my family. God is worthy to be praised in every season of my life, regardless of the situation I find myself in, ‘for the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations’ (Psalm 100:5). There are times when I snap at my family in an unpleasant irritable tone. This is my honest self. This is my human self. But this is not my loving self. God gently invites me to be like Jesus who knelt down at his disciples’ feet and washed off the dust, dirt and debris. There is nothing glamorous about the relentless and repetitive nature of being a full-time mum, my shift begins the moment I wake up and ends when I fall asleep. I held a lot of resentment in my heart for a long time over being ‘just a stay-at-home mum’; until God showed me I am tasked with the privilege of meeting the needs of my wonderful husband and my precious daughter, and to foster a home that cherishes God above all else.
Growing up, faith has always been a difficult intersection between my somewhat estranged mother tongue, culture, ethnicity, with the wider society where I was called to preach to all nations and my friends at school (either fervent agnostics and atheists or disinterested in God). And there was a schism, an uneasiness of how to process and understand how to live and embody my faith when I wasn’t even sure how to live and make sense of my hybrid identity as a Korean-New Zealander. Distance, both chronological and geographical, has been enormously helpful for me to see. This course, in a little quiet college town tucked away in Canada, at this point in my life as a wife and a mother to a little one, has been a balm.
I started the course with the goal of gaining more knowledge of God. I quickly discovered that knowledge about God simply does not satisfy, what I needed was His presence. The hunger that I had to know God was misdirected to feed my ego and my desire to appear smart. My ego and the ways it would lead me to indulge in self-importance came from wanting to be seen and loved. Being truly seen for who you are and being truly loved only comes from God. I had so many ‘a-ha!’ moments taking this course, too many to share in a 1-page testimony. Completing this course felt like Marie Kondo teaching me how to fold laundry. I already have my method of folding laundry and organizing my closet. And while I suppose my laundry-folding is passable, it would be difficult to describe it as successful. With a young child in tow, taking this course was a journey. I worried a lot about how I would get through it but at the end of this journey and having learned a little bit more about the basic tenets and tradition of Christian faith, I find myself humbled and grateful.