You Jin

Several weeks ago I was walking through the park back to work for my second shift.

The afternoon was golden and warm and the universe seemed most harmonious.

People were staring, as usual, but I took their stares as compliments to my sunlit golden hair and long trendy skirt.

My heart was light as my backpack and although I’d been up since before dawn I felt strong and not in dread of the portending junior classes.

In my headphones Ricky Martin was finishing up “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” a song about a woman who turns his world upside-inside out.

Almost through the park I looked over to see a woman huddled on one of the benches. Her shoulders were shaking. She could be laughing. But she seemed to be sobbing.

Her eyes met mine as I passed.

Passed by and kept walking, steps slowed but continuous.

What can I possibly say to her?

I can’t even speak Korean.

She’ll think I’m crazy.

She won’t understand me.

She’s a stranger.

I’m a stranger.

I have to go to work.

I don’t want to sit down and then rush off.

There’s nothing I can do for her.

I’m scared.

So went the logical voices of reason and cowardice and self-preservation inside my head.

And as my ponderous, conflicted steps approached the crosswalk, the song in my headphones changed.

Entering the mix of determined denial were words too apt to refute.

An argument too astute to ignore.

“When you feel like you’re alone in your sadness, and it seems like no one in this whole world cares, and you want to get away from the madness, you just call my name and I’ll be there.”

Third Day’s “Call My Name.”

A song that doesn’t command outreach or even mention God.

A song that could be a promise between any two people.

But a song that convicts—no one should be alone.

A song that tells me God never forsakes me, that He attends when I am silent and weeping or when I say His name aloud.

When I call and when I don’t, He is there. I know that.

But not everyone does.

Paul writes that God is not far from any of us. Sometimes it seems He is.

And many a lost soul has no idea of His proximity. Many doubt His very existence.

From where do these people get their hope?

From where do they maintain reason to live?

How do they even survive at all in this brutal world that is so often not the warm autumn sunshine?

“When you feel like you’re alone in your sadness, and it seems like no one in this whole world cares…”

How many people just passed her by, that woman weeping on the bench?

Across from a subway exit, this place was frequented all day long by passers-by, school children, business men and women, ajummas with their grocery carts and old men on their strolls. Young mothers with baby carriages and toddling children, teenagers with their gazes fixed on their phones.

How many of these had walked right by without stopping to even ask this woman if she needed help?

And would I be one of them?

God carried me to Haiti and back seven times. He rode with me to Missouri and flew with me to Paris. He stayed by my side through South Carolina, through heartache and pain and suicidal contemplations. He wept with me and sat with me.

He sang with me and rejoiced with me in victories and restoration.

He encouraged me into honesty and vulnerability and endured my rages, impatience and cursing.

He brought me to obstacles and then vaulted me over them, or held my hand and balanced my teetering feet on firm ground.

He brought me to Korea and walks with me every day.

He did not bring me so far so I could walk with blinders.

I knew that.

The idea that she might not know, the weeping woman on the bench, that thought turned my feet around and sent me back the way I had come.

The others walking through the park probably thought I was some foolish, lost tourist walking in circles, and my own cold logical side yearned to flee back to the crosswalk and carry on towards the school—the reason I’d come here in the first place, right?—but the grateful child loved by her Father persisted.

I wanted only to share the love I’d known with the woman before me.

I might be her only chance.

“Call my name, say it now. I want you to never doubt: the love I have for you is so alive.”

Okay, God.

Here I go.

I don’t know what to say.

I don’t know what to do.

Please help me.

She watched me approach.

When I’d passed I’d wanted to believe she wasn’t crying. I hoped now to see she was fine and well, just caught in a sneeze or laughing over a silly Kakao message.

But she was crying. And she was alone.

As I came closer, angling in towards her, she shook her head.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said.

Clearly she didn’t want me there.

But I hadn’t walked back those few hundred feet to back out now. The shortest distances are often the most difficult to cover.

“Are you okay?” I asked, because even when we know the answer, such are the words. So goes the eternal script of human outreach.

She nodded, tears still leaking out of her eyes.

“Because you look very sad,” I said, leaning in, drawing one hand down in front of my face. So goes the behavior of an ESL teacher: you will forever use pantomime and slow deliberation, whether addressing a beginning student or native speaker.

She tried to smile, the way we try to hold up the flower with the broken stem by propping it on the vase-rim just so. The flower always droops right back down and no one is fooled; there was no light in her pooling eyes.

“Can I pray for you?” I asked, touching her shoulder.

“No,” she said.

Oh, well this is awkward.

Well, God, I tried.

I’d never had someone refuse a prayer before.

Whether a believer or not, in times of desperate heartache, people will accept any possibility of betterment, even prayers to a God they don’t acknowledge.

This woman said no.

Now what?

Upon reflection, I don’t think she meant to reject prayer. She simply wanted to convey her lack of need. She didn’t want to bother anyone. She didn’t want to weep in front of a stranger. She didn’t want anyone to see her cry.

We never do.

But sometimes a stranger is better than a friend.

Assured we will have no further contact, that in the jungle of concrete we are safe from their witness, we disregard decorum.

Regardless, she said no to my request, and I did not want to push upon her a prayer for my own benefit.

(How often do we pray to please our own ears, or impress those listening, rather than for intimacy with God?)

Regardless, I stayed.

Because no one should have to cry alone.

“When you feel like you’re alone in your sadness…”

Moving sideways towards the remaining bench space, I asked if I could sit down.

I sat, backpack on and phone still in hand, music paused.

She sat, legs crossed and one hand holding a cigarette still shaking. Tears still coming, along with the occasional shuddering sob, muffled but wracking her hunched shoulders.

I sat and contemplated the tragedy of life.

How many people sit alone with no hope, no prospect of tragedy’s termination, no light at the end of their dark tunnel?

Beside the woman I murmured prayers.

I don’t know who she is or what she’s going through, God, but you know and you can help her.

I don’t know what to do. You know. Comfort her.

Help me to help her.

Give me words.

She looked at me and looked away.

I suspected she was experiencing the same inward struggle as I—wanting to both tell me to mind my own business and to sob her problems onto my shoulder.

So I sat beside her, murmuring.

Then I was quiet.

I stared out towards the sunny park, admiring the blue boundless sky that reached far beyond the apartment tops, relished the breeze kissing my face and the green of the trees and the grass.

My soul was quiet.

After a minute or two I spoke words of reason.

Shaking my phone gently I asked, “Can you call someone?”

I did not want her to be alone, nor did I have words for her. I hoped someone she knew could comfort her in her own language and watch over her. Also I had only a few minutes before I had to move on—I had to teach class.

The woman nodded and reached for the phone.

Classic misunderstanding.

Unsure what to do I simply obeyed the natural gesture, and tapped the Contacts tab.

I opened up a new contact page for her and handed over the phone.

She began to enter in her phone number while hiccupping tears. Her shaking fingers tapped numbers into the name space.

“Here,” I said, and tapped the space below. She corrected her mistake and typed in her name first, then her number.

 “You Jin Joung?” I read.

I saved her contact and then called her. We watched her phone ring with the unknown caller, phones in our laps.

I ended the call.

“I’m Rachel,” I said.

“Rechel?”

She saved my number.

She began to ask me questions. I answered willingly because I was afraid to ask questions of her, this solitary weeping woman.

This woman who could have been anywhere from 25 to 35, with her smooth tanned skin and lush caramel hair pushed back from her face oversized sunglasses. This woman with thick sweeping lashes and wide eyes and unstoppable tears.

She wore an oddly childish t-shirt dress, gray and casual, hitched up high on her crossed legs. A massive purple bruise blighted one thigh. Her feet were bare, free of the high-wedged plastic sandals with leopard print soles.

“Where from?” she asked.

“Mi-gook saram,” I replied, “American.”

“Job?”

“Son sang-nim,” I said. “Teacher.”

“Family?”

“In the United States.”

“You are alone?”

“I have new family in Korea. New friends.”

“You have friends?”

“Yes.”

“How many friends?”

I had to contemplate this one.

“Three,” I answered, holding up three fingers.

She nodded.

“You go to church?”

“Ne. Yes.”

“I don’t have church, just Jesus.”

Praise God.

Then she asked the inevitable question.

“Why Korea?”

I hesitated and looked around at the sun-soaked park again. The rustling green trees and the soaring blue sky, the fluttering, puttering pigeons in their magnificent diversity, no two alike.

I recalled the answers I always give: money, experience, a good place to start.

And I said something new. “This is where I need to be.”

I looked at her wide brown eyes. “Sometimes Jesus says ‘Stop, Stay.’ Sometimes he says go.”

She nodded and started sobbing again, her shoulders shaking and tears pouring out.

I don’t know if those words struck true or echoed some conflict in her soul, or if they merely coincided with another fit of sadness, in the way grief washes in predictable yet disarming as the tide.

We shared perhaps fifteen minutes together, and then I had to rise for class.

“Will you come with me?” I asked, pointing to my watch. “I have to go to school now.”

I had told her I had a little time before teaching.

She nodded and stood up, discarded her cigarette and slipped on her sandals. Together we left the bench and headed for the crosswalk, me already considering what I would say to Jack and Sienna at the reception desk. Perhaps I could just lead her right into the staff room and sit her at my desk, away from anyone’s gaze, at least until classes changed.

But at the crosswalk she stopped.

“I go home,” she said.

“You’ll go home?” I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. Call me if you need me,” I said.

I wondered if ever again I’d hear from this woman, who for some reason I still had no idea was crying on a deserted park bench in the middle of the afternoon rather far from her home.

She nodded and I bent to give her somewhat of a hug.

“Good luck,” I said and then we parted.

She walked away down the sidewalk and I crossed the street, recommencing my commute.

Across the road going up the sidewalk I told God I didn’t want His job.

“You listen to that all day long. You hear people crying and witness tragedy constantly. I could never do it.” I clenched my hands. “I would die from grief—I’d suffocated under the weight of all that misery!

“Thank you, God,” I breathed, “for being who You are.”

A few days later I texted her, You Jin, greeting her in Korean and introducing myself.

“Annyeonghaseyo! It’s Rachel from the park. How are you?”

I didn’t expect a reply but prayed for her, and shared our brief encounter with a few people. I both wanted to talk about You Jin and our unorthodox meeting, and to keep the encounter entirely to myself.

It’s been over a month since we met.

Tonight as I was reaching the end of my solitary enjoyment of Back to the Future III, I received a Kakao talk message from an unrecognized name.

“Who is You Jin?” I asked myself, trying to recollect if this was a student or church member or some other acquaintance.

“Hi,” she said, this unknown person.
“Hello,” I answered, “How are you?”

“Fine. Thank you.”

“Have we met?” I asked.

“In Daejeon,” she answered in Korean.

“Where?”

“At the park. Bench.”

I had time only to type “Oh!” (as my Korean typing is exorbitantly slow) before my phone began ringing. The caller was You Jin Joung.

We had a delightful brief conversation.

Her English is better than I remember, or perhaps she simply speaks better when she is not miserable.

She is in Seoul, she said, with family.

“Alone, in Daejeon,” she said, “Family in Seoul.”

“Oh, good. Very good.”

(Obviously I am very adroit at conversation.)

“I like Ray-eechel. First American friend.”

“I am so happy to hear from you! You sound good?”

“Oh, really?”

“You sound happy.”

She did.

We concluded this brief exchange with prospect of further communication.

“I call Ray-eechel sometimes. Ray-eechel is my friend.”

“Yes, I would like that.”

“Okay, I will go now.”

“Okay, have a good night.”

“You also, have good night.”

“Okay, bye!”

“Bye.”

I don’t know as I will ever meet You Jin again in person. She has moved back to Seoul where apparently she has family; she is not alone.

I am not sure if she will call often or if our exchanges will develop beyond extremely small talk. If my Korean improves then this is quite possible.

I don’t know what is happening in her life or what was happening that led to her isolated misery on that park bench in the midst of sunshine and busyness.

But God knows and God knew.

I pray that I will always follow God, off the course of my own schedule and away from the expected and comfortable. I pray that nothing will ever be more important than sharing His great love.

We cannot know the full impact of our actions or our words. Sometimes we will never see the after-effects of our interactions or fruits of our labors.

Jesus did not promise us immediate results, earthly recognition or a nicely typed report cataloging cause and effect.

He did promise us the Spirit to give us words when we have none and boldness before the unknown. And He promised that if we call on His name, He will answer. If we seek Him, we will find Him.

“Just call my name and I’ll be there…the love I have for you is so alive.”

I don’t always go out of my way or perceive the lost and desperate before my eyes. But when I do, God pours blessings of love, peace and joy over me with abundance so that no matter the awkwardness, the delay or the physical discomfort, those few minutes or hours spent beside someone in need are far better than whatever I had planned.

“I’ll give you all that your heart could ever want, and so much more.”

Praise God for being who He is, able to hear the sound of every breaking heart, catch every falling tear and answer every unspoken call.

The love He has for us is so alive. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLc_nJGxvWc