Wings to Fly - 20

Memoir Index

Bend in the Road

The years 2005 and 2007 would be very challenging years. There were so many turn and bends in the road that I was traveling. My life was sprinkled with sadness, troubles, excitement, freedom, happiness and so many more …what memorable years.

During these years Tom lost his mom and I lost my father. The feeling that our parents will always be there proved false.

I saw Tom’s mom as a simple lady who loved her family. She did not have much personal dreams. She lived her life taking care of her husband and children. In her dying days she was afraid to let go of her husband of over 55 years. She had traveled life’s tortuous ways yet she found security in Gifford her husband and later in Jesus Christ. When she finally was able to release her husband, she went peacefully on January 11, 2005.

My father had fought so many things in his life. He was thrown in the midst of Korean War, to support so many of his extended family. His older brother had died young and left him the burden that was too heavy for a young man of seventeen. He fought for what he could not have, education. He fought to have a career as a self made man in a foreign land. He fought his best to give his children what was elusive in his life, a real success. Yet life was cruel. He watched his children grow up and take on American culture. He knew they were good children yet he could never fully understand them. I watched him become simpler, like a child, as he was dying. I knew he was letting go of lot of bitterness of life. During his last days when he saw me, he asked me to pray for him. He also acknowledged that Jesus waited a long time for him. He went peacefully on October 13, 2007.

2005

In 2005 we already knew that we were moving. We had feeling for Goshen for the last 20 years, but it would require an external & internal push, for us to actually take such an action to move. As long as life was a status quo, we would have stayed in Chicago.

Tom has served the Lord in full time status for our church in Chicago for 8 years. His inner antenna was being alerted for some time already. The ministry we followed from California was dictating decisions and actions from Tom that he could not accept in his conscience. We talked about many options. He had only one desire; To follow the Lord and give his all to serve Him. We by now told the elders in our church that Tom will serve full time yet with no compensation. We were on our own.

Life has a funny way of training a person. My life was in miserable turmoil when Tom just hinted that he wanted to serve God full time in 1987. I told Tom to follow his heart and go for the service he so desired in 1997. All of my programming as an immigrant who cannot stop until human success could be attained was in direct contradiction to what Tom was doing. Why would God match two such opposing persons? Was He amusing Himself? Yet God would come to me with sweet love and security periodically and assure me that building treasure in heaven is much more profitable, only then I would be at peace with Tom. I became a person torn with two opposing persons within me. Yet it required this kind of pain for me to understand who I really was. I learned to be so brutally blunt and truthful to Jesus in my walk and talk with Him.