Yoon's

Wordpress. I go back to thee.

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:31:20 +0900

Wordpress. I go back to thee.

13 years of friendship and I sometimes get her last name wrong....

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:11:44 +0900

13 years of friendship and I sometimes get her last name wrong. But her consistency has always assured me of a love and friendship beyond cognitive reasoning.

On the Fine Balance

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:31:24 +0900

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.

Video

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 07:19:41 +0900

"Lord I offer my life to You Everything I’ve been through - use it for Your glory"

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 10:21:42 +0900

“Lord I offer my life to You
Everything I’ve been through - use it for Your glory”

- The weight of these lyrics just took a whole new level of meaning as of late.

On Cho Parentals and Me.

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:56:36 +0900

(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.

"33 things to do, i have zero ability to do those thingys, pray is the only thing to do…1 + 0 =..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:00:22 +0900

“33 things to do, i have zero ability to do those thingys, pray is the only thing to do…1 + 0 = 33”

- Mommy Cho’s old tweet from 2010.

kyungmee: Bethel Music- Fall Afresh ft. Jeremy Riddle (by...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:48:29 +0900

kyungmee:

Bethel Music- Fall Afresh ft. Jeremy Riddle (by ibethelmusic)

"옛날에는 세상이 회색 빛이 였어요. 아무것도 보이지 않았어요. 하지만 지금은 colorful해졌어요. 보여요."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:46:59 +0900

““옛날에는 세상이 회색 빛이 였어요. 아무것도 보이지 않았어요. 하지만 지금은 colorful해졌어요. 보여요.””

- One of my clients.

On Knowing Why

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:39:00 +0900

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?

On Being Daddy's Girl

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:13:54 +0900

(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.

When I think about my God, I think of Him as my Lord who is faithful, King who reigns, Savior of grace and mercy, and Father who is sovereign. These days, my heart is softening to my God as Daddy. A daddy who gazes at me lovingly and simply loves me as me, before I even did anything.

Lessons from being the 5th wheel.

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:30:14 +0900

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 (-;

"my writings may seem lofty, my edits considered trendy, and reasons found cheesy. but still the..."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:20:25 +0900

“my writings may seem lofty, my edits considered trendy, and reasons found cheesy. but still the message of it all is Jesus, the answer to it all is Jesus and the reasons is meant to be Jesus, the most important one. and i pray that at least something of mine and me points there.”

- (via longlivethepublic)

On You are Worthy

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:57:20 +0900

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.

The best way to wrap up my 2012 with the best travel buddies I...

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:13:02 +0900

The best way to wrap up my 2012 with the best travel buddies I could ever ask for. Cheers to our biannual trips from here on out! Cheers to the conclusion of our conversation and our throwback singalongs and having the most supportive, loving, and real sisters with hearts of gold.

On my 2012.

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:18:00 +0900

2011 was all about the transitions. 2012 was all about the deepening. Setting my feet down firmly into the place He transitioned me into.

12 things I learned in 2012:

1. God works in counter-intuitive, keep-you-on-your-toes kind of dynamic matter of a sort. Every time a plan seems to pan out as you expect/predict, He surprises you with a detour, an acceleration in speed, a sudden pause and all sorts of adventurous schemes. Bottom line is, you can never begin to draw a line in which you think you think you know where He is going or what He is doing. You think you think, but at the end of the day even you thinking of your thoughts is trying to wrap your head around how He surprised you yesterday.

2. It is sometimes, oftentimes, most of the time not just about you. It’s bigger than you.

3. Hey Yoon, are you willing? Are you?

4. There is something that my finger can’t quite reach and my words can’t quite formulate to portray what my head thinks and my heart feels. Grace. There is something about grace. That every deepening, ever thickening grace that’ll sometimes even keep you in oblivion. And then you look back with jaws dropped and marvel at that ever-abounding thing. That thing called grace.

5. Family. If you give me approximately 90 extra seconds to dwell upon this, my nose will surely turn red and I will be up & ready to tear. Every. single. time. My expectations and hopes were set about yay high, and they ended up shriveling in shame because of what I saw and experienced only within the first week of 2012. And can I say something? We had more fun, delved into greater intimacy, and grew together as each day progressed. It wasn’t strain-against-gravity kind of hard. It was easy. & that’s when you kind of just shuffle a few steps backward and stand paralyzed in utter awe of His sheer goodness and undeniable love for you. A love that pierces every and anything else through and through.

6. Hope. and I mean the real kind. Real hope is risky and frightening. Real hope has the prerequisite of all of you: your emotions, your energy, your thoughts. And then due to a split momentary lapse of judgment you wonder, is this worth it? And it always is. It always is.

7. Explosions of mini-miracles can happen anywhere. This anywhere includes within the four-walls of a secular therapy room. You bring the Kingdom - not a title, label or an institution.

8. We are such relational creatures. And to have the blessing of relationships (인복) makes 15-hour frustrating study sessions, a burning-hole like stomach pain, and emotional couplings of the former just all okay. It doesn’t make much sense and it doesn’t require much to be exchanged. Just a little bit of sitting over a cup of coffee. It makes it all okay.

9. The physical pain is real, but it’s not truth.

10. Cherish morning rides to school with dad. (So many “I want to stand up in the car and give him a slow clap, bravo, fingers-on-my-nose” kind of moments).

11. 하나님의 일은 평생이니까. 공부하는 것은 과정이고.

12. When in doubt - cook dinner for family & friends, listen to 젝키’s 예감, dance the Seoul-boy dance, go on a picnic, don’t hike 한라산 in the peak of winter in the midst of a blizzard, cry your eyes out at a 설렁탕 restaurant and laugh until your legs wobble.

Through and through.

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:31:00 +0900

You love me through & through.

On 2013

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:41:34 +0900

Holding fast unto His promises.

In 2012, my ears opened. It was as if I had noise-cancelling headphones on and I asked myself on a whim one day, “What would it be like if I took them off?” My ears got cold and felt quite bare, empty, loose, a little too light. They felt naked and insecure. But over time, I learned to get accustomed to my ears just being - just hanging on both sides of my face. And one day, with the lack of any barrier and the consequent merging into the very air I was in, I heard something. Something of a mixture of words of some sort that somehow formulated into a promise of a kind. A promise. A promise from One that always keeps His promises. He said it, and I heard it. The words entered into my ears and traveled into my head and were captured by my heart. My ears heard it, my heart touched it, my spirit grasped it.

It’s funny how oftentimes there seems to be a fun (for the lack of a better word, or maybe for the sake of its sheer irony) detour before what is to come, manifests. And here I am, sitting through this adventure of a sort and enjoying this detour. Or trying to enjoy. And that’s how 2012 came to an end.

& in 2013, my ears have re-perked to another jumble of words: Don’t forget what you heard in 2012. Hold fast to my promises. Embrace all of you unto all of what it is.

2013, here’s to the unfolding of His promises.

On Pruning

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:54:14 +0900

What a positively difficult and pruning of a season. A positively, compactly difficult of a season that fits ever so perfectly in the continuity of this life-long journey that is written by Him (complementary illustrations included) with a soon-to-be destination called healing (an entire, tangible one). A season marked by a wave of, no - wave after crashing wave of physical pain and academic, emotional challenges that barely had me breathing but still had me singing. That was the irony of this season. I felt like I couldn’t breathe with the restless waves crashing me down repeatedly - again and again and well, why not once more. But somehow I was still singing through it all. Singing song after song - sometimes in harmony with you, sometimes in unison with all of you, and sometimes alone. But even in the moments of absolute alone-ness, even in the wee hours when my voice barely croaked a (off)tune, there was still a song that was leaving my lips and creating some melody of a sort. A melody, a sound that dug pockets for pieces of eternity to fall down and settle in. In the very here and now.

Video

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 23:33:52 +0900