God is Excellent

Three months ago today I left home. What a very short space of time, yet how much has happened in it!

Today’s first grade class is still in the foreground of my thoughts. I decided to give my students a sort of pre-test on the same sight-words that we’ve been studying together for the past nine weeks. Poor James, one of my favorites, got eight of the ten wrong. I sighed. “Study, James! Study. Study.” Then I had him read the words back to me. He stumbled over ‘the’, was stumped by ‘to’, then his face crumpled and he burst into tears. I patted his shoulder, “It’s all right.” I’m sure he didn’t understand the words, but my tone was reassuring. He sniffed back his tears, and I helped him to sound out the rest of the list. I’m going to have to think of something ingenious if I don’t want to still be stuck on these same ten words for another two months.

I’m having a hard time getting to sleep again. Once my brain does finally shut down, I sleep like one dead, but usually it takes between three and four hours for me to even get to the drifting off stage. I lie there, not tossing, just limp. My eyes burn and my limbs ache for weariness, waiting for the sleep that will not come. Just waiting for sleep.

On Monday I began language classes at Ewha Woman’s University. Level zero. That’s like Korean preschool. It shouts at me, “How ignorant you are!” I have much to learn, and feel the urgency of it. There’s some amount of pressure, caused by recent developments on this side of the globe. Again, it’s impressed upon me that time is short. Pressure. Always that nagging pressure of a desperate need elsewhere, and I so unqualified to meet it. Sometimes I just want to lay my head down and weep for all the desperate pain and suffering in this world. And yet, as I wrote yesterday in my journal, “God is excellent. Today I read of Him destroying the world with a flood, restoring a destitute man to wealth and honor, winning a battle with zero casualties against impossible odds, and raising a girl from the dead. My God is an extreme master-planner, with limitless mercy, resources, and power at His disposal. How can I be so foolish as to get caught up in these petty concerns and troubles that fill my days? Is He not the same God now that He was then? Ought not my response to impossible difficulties be one of eager excitement as I wait for this unconquerable God Whom I serve to show Himself mighty to the world? God is indeed excellent.”

I’ve still been meeting with the two ladies on Monday. That’s a mixed blessing. Sheena helps me enormously with my Korean, which is heaven and earth to me right now. In return, she practices her English on me. She’s really quite fluent, so I don’t do much but listen. These last three weeks she’s been taking me through the Old Testament, with occasional dips now and again into the New. The topic of study has been the Passover, and how the observation thereof, on its original date, is an essential element of salvation. I will present to her, next week, why I believe that Christ’s death alone is sufficient. I’m persuaded that this won’t in any way cause her to alter her beliefs, so I'm loathe to spend valuable time on such a study. But of course, on such an issue, I can’t keep silent. I can only pray that God will use this in a way unfathomable to myself, as I continue to pursue what seems to me, in light of such afore mentioned persuasion, almost foolish.

The weather has been absolutely lovely lately. Chilly in the mornings, but sweet and balmy once the sun comes up. It makes my heart sing to be alive on such days as these have been. What a miracle nature is!

Please continue to hold me before God. I stand in hourly need of strength and discretion. I’m lately confronted with a sense of my own weakness and incompetence in a way that I’ve never before experienced. I trust that God knows what He’s about, but I do feel so very unqualified for the great task that lies at my door. Pray that He will become my sufficiency.

Missing you all dearly,
Elisabeth