Yoon's

Wordpress. I go back to thee.

Finding the balance between

• my here+now and interceding for others
• being faithful to my very task and taking a step back
• studying/being diligent with my busiest semester and resting
• asking myself the questions and being still and trusting God
• fully present and fully fixated on the cross
• understand my overwhelming responsibilities and grasp the fact that He sees me. hears me. loves me. and is for me.
• remembering and moving forward. 

(Parents & me, Mongolia 2012). 

Walking hand in hand in hand to morning prayer in the wee hours of the early morning with all and every layer bundled up. Enjoying a warm cup of coffee post-prayer and singing songs on our way to start the day. Sharing testimonies and cheers-ing over coffee, wine, water, whatever is at hand. Sitting side by side by side and watching our favorite TV shows with tea and some fruit. Daily morning kakaos. Watching me laugh at my own lame jokes. Being in awe, greatly dumbfounded of how He defies what makes sense in the natural. Going deeper than deep, hand in hand in hand. 

Isn’t it funny how God answers prayers? 

Well, there is never a uniform way that He does. But this time around, He answered my prayer that I had assumed to be far-fetched - immersed in frustration and coated with doubt. A one-word question: why?

Because I concluded the question to be far-fetched, I left it there. Without expecting an answer and mere emotions rising and falling in ebbs & flows. But as a thinker, a “melancholy,” an INFJ, my thoughts were muted with an unending song belting from me. For reasons of which I do not know, I had a constant tune on my lip and song on my heart. I croaked from the crack of dawn (& waking up everyone at home) to the hallways at school (whilst shamelessly bumping into my professor). 

And that’s when He answered my prayer. A prayer that had been tossed to the back corner of my brain because the forefront was occupied in praising Him. Worshiping Him. It was on an early Saturday morning when I was actually praying for someone else. But God pieced together all this past month’s worth of happenings, words, conversations and it puzzled into an enormous whole. An enormity of which He had held back until I was able to see it. Able to stomach it. Able to understand it. He guided me slowly, at my very own pace and when I demanded an answer He patiently gave a song on my lips. And when my heart was at a place of worship, He answered me. Clearly. It is terrifying but beautiful. Isn’t that how God is? Making the seemingly mutually exclusive, contradictory an actually beautiful whole?

(From my old blog) 

When I think about my dad, I oftentimes think of the gaze he lovingly gives me while I’m chatting away at the dinner table. I imagine his face held that same gaze the day I was born and he held me in his arms. I didn’t do anything at that point. I was simply born, and yet his face said it all.

For the past 7 weeks, I was a fifth wheel. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. All jokes aside, I really did. Because I was the fifth wheel, I had the luxury to take a step back and take mental notes. Take a step back and appreciate, get all heart ache-y (the good kind). My heart tends to do that a lot these days - get all heart ache-y. Anyway, here are lessons I’ve learned from the field. 

- It’s not simply about passively understanding and accepting your spouse’s passions and interests. It’s about actively engaging, going against the grain and learning. Risking looking/sounding like a fool to be fully and entirely there. To be there with them. It’s about subscribing to a magazine you would’ve never subscribed to, reading a book you would’ve automatically gleaned over, and putting aside your ideal day off to be all there with them. 

- It’s not about meeting midpoint but dashing full-speed the other way. And somehow, someway & somewhere you collide midpoint-ish and both of you are taken by surprise by how you’ve collided. And then it becomes easy. Because there is no measuring and calculating on where the midpoint is and when&how you’ll get there. But you just run.

- Newly wed or 30+years of marriage under your belt - they both can display a beautiful marriage. The beauty that unfolds with the newness of the covenant under God as well as the years of experience, sacrifice & pruning in deepening the oneness are both timelessly sacred. Time or cliches or today’s sweeping assumptions can be debunked by the Cho fam. Inquiries are welcome; skepticism, not.

- Happy wife happy marriage happy family. Precisely in that order (-; 

Today, during worship God asked me, “am I worthy?”

This morning, before worship I expressed to a friend of my sheer exhaustion of my 7th year of fighting. Fighting the pain. Fighting the exhaustion and wanting to throw up my arms and say, “what the hey, I’m done.”

But today, God asked me, “Am I worthy? Am I worth it, Yoon?”

And I couldn’t help it. Before I could premeditate and think, measure & revisit the aforementioned emotional surge - my heart screamed yes.

You are worth fighting the good fight.  
You are so, so, so worthy.