Faith & Life

A Teacher Who Saved His Pupil

Kaden Koebcke, a twelve-year-old boy from Georgia, U.S., was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease when he was two years old. When he was five years old, he received a kidney transplant from his father and had hope that he would get better, but he had to go on kidney dialysis due to unexpected side effects. As his illness worsened in 2018, his doctor said that finding a kidney donor quickly was the only way for Kaden to regain his health back. Kaden’s family eagerly sought someone to donate the kidney. Meanwhile, Kaden received a call from the hospital that a suitable donor had appeared. The boy safely went through the operation during an emergency situation. Since the donor’s information…

Beautiful Steps to Preaching the Blessed News

We conduct a short-term mission every month to establish 300 gospel cities in Malaysia. To seize the blessed opportunity provided by God, many brothers and sisters volunteered, and our team went to Kluang District where the gospel hadn’t been preached at all. We gave thanks to God over and over again for giving us the mission to cultivate the barren land and preach the truth. Kluang District is four and a half hours away from Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. As we had only five days and four nights to preach there, we unpacked as soon as we arrived and went to a crowded place. The people of Kluang District had never heard about the Spirit and the…

Short-term Mission Team to Kluang District, Malaysia

Giving Love on Behalf of Mother

“Mi-suk! Come to eat strawberries.” “Mi-suk! Corns are so delicious. I’ll steam them. Come and eat.” “Mi-suk! I went to the hills and picked some salad plants and spring herbs. They are so delicious. Come to eat.” My oldest sister calls me whenever she has something to eat. My siblings are six, and the oldest sister knows how busy I am. Despite that, if she has something delicious, she never misses to call me. She has two large refrigerators and two kimchi refrigerators. A total of four refrigerators are standing side by side in her living room. After her youngest son joined the army, just the two, my sister and her husband, are at home. So it seems that they…

Gwon Mi-suk from Seoul, South Korea

Empathy, the Capacity to Put Oneself in Another’s Position

In Korea, once the phrase, “Are you hurt? It hurts me, too,” was the talk of the town. This heartwarming phrase of a character in a soap opera, who didn’t just understand the pain of the other person but shared it with her, gave a big resonance to the viewers. Actually, that phrase is not exaggerated. When people see someone else get a shot or fall or skin their knees, they frown as if they were the one in pain. Not only pain but also laughter, yawning, and itching are contagious. Why do we feel others’ emotions as if they were ours? It is because of empathy. Empathy is the capability to understand others’ emotions, opinions, insistence, and so on,…

For the Establishment of Zion in Hiroshima

In summer 2018, western Japan had a series of disasters. There were lots of victims caused by earthquakes, volcano eruptions, scorching heat, and so on. Particularly, Hiroshima suffered a huge damage by the unprecedented heavy rain. Hiroshima is the largest city in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions in western Japan. As we know, it is also the very first place where an atomic bomb was dropped. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which was the only building left among the buildings damaged by the atomic bomb, still has traces of black fallout and radioactivity rain on its outer wall and plainly shows the horrors of the war even after seventy years. In order to establish the kingdom of God in Hiroshima as…

The Short-term Mission Team to Hiroshima, Japan

Best Bargaining Card

Rafael Antoni Furcal gained popularity while steadily performing well after winning the National Baseball League Rookie Award in 2000. When his contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers expired in 2008, there was a fierce competition among the clubs to recruit him. The Atlanta Braves tried to persuade him the most with a high-salary offer, saying that there were many of his former colleagues in the team since it was his first Major League Baseball club. They hastily announced his return on the media. However, Furcal decided to renew his contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who offered a lower salary than the Braves. It was none other than a used fire truck that caught his heart. Furcal was born in…

Why We Need to Read

The brain plays a pivotal role in the body, feeling emotions, thinking reasonably, and giving orders to different parts of the body. Just as exercises strengthen the muscles and make a strong body, the brain can become healthy when it is consistently stimulated and moves. The best exercise for the brain is reading. When the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI] measures the brain of a person who is focused on reading, it shows a lot of blood is supplied to the whole brain. It means that the whole brain becomes activated. In fact, reading requires a complex thinking. You imagine something in the process of understanding a sentence you just read with your eyes, think of your old memories, infer…

Make Rules for Happy Home!

A happy family life is often included in a New Year’s wish list. However, happiness is not given by nature, by chance, or by itself. Happiness comes to those who try and practice. What are your efforts to make your family happy? If your family makes effort all together rather than alone, it will surely create a synergy effect. So, start brainstorming and make Happy Rules for your happy home. The important thing is to practice after setting up your Happy Rules. If you continue to follow the rules until the year end, starting this month, wouldn’t your family become happier than now by the end of the year? Tip Set your Happy Rules in detail. (Hug each other, reconcile…

As a Seed Hidden in the Frozen Land Springs Up out of the Ground

I moved to the city of Siheung to live together with my younger son. It wasn’t easy to leave a place where I’d lived for over sixty years, but I was happy to move there because my oldest son and daughter too live in that city. But one day, my oldest daughter came and said something that confused me. “Mom, I heard that there is Heavenly Mother in the Bible.” Heavenly Mother? I had been Catholic for decades, but never heard about Heavenly Mother. So I didn’t even pretend to listen, but made her leave. After that, I would get mad at her and persecute her a lot so that she would not even want to mention it anymore. However,…

Shin Dong-rye from Siheung, South Korea

Only After I Became a Mom Myself

I was born in a remote village in Gangwon Province. There were many good things about living in the countryside, but I wished I would have many chances to eat delicious foods that were only sold in downtown. My favorite days were the national holidays and my birthday, when my uncle visited us with snack gift sets. Knowing how excited I was about special food, my mom prepared delicious food on my birthday every year. I moved to a city when I entered middle school and lived with my sister, who is two years older than I am, until I got married. My mom felt so bad that she couldn’t take care of me as she let me, her youngest…

Gi Geum-ju from Chuncheon, South Korea

The Best Gift on Mother’s Day

The second Sunday of May is a special day in the Philippines. It is Mother’s Day when all family members gather to express love to their mother. On this day, a family event was going to be held at the Mandaluyong Zion. I wanted to invite my family to this special event. I used to invite my family to many Zion events before, but I was rejected every time. My family didn’t like my going to church. My parents were very sad that I changed my religion without their permission. Their attitude didn’t change for a few years. When I tried to deliver the truth to them, they only listened absentmindedly and showed no interest. I heard the news about…

Vernalyn P. Marcos from Taguig, Philippines

A Happy Task

I wanted my middle school student son to have a meaningful memory before his vacation ended. What I thought of was to let him experience his father’s job. My husband, who is engaged in the distribution business, delivers hundreds of 18 ㎏ [40 lb] cooking oil tins every day. As it is tough work, my husband hesitated, but agreed, and my son too was willing to try it. The day came for him to experience his father’s work. Seeing his dad carrying heavy cooking oil tins, he said, “Dad, you are a real man with veiny arms.” Then after carrying two oil tins, he looked at his forearms and the back of his hands. “Mom, would I look nice if…

Gwon Seong-eun from Uijeongbu, South Korea

God’s Blessing for My Whole Family

In the summer of 2017, my happy dream finally came true; I had been dreaming that my whole family would sing in one voice and share hope for heaven in God. When I was attending a Sabbath morning service together with my loving family, my eyes were filled with tears of happiness. I always had faith in God and hope for heaven in my heart ever since I was in primary school. However, I stopped going to church, seeing so many problems in Christianity, and then I got to know about the Church of God. While studying the truth of the new covenant, I became confident in going to heaven and received the truth with joy. It was about two…

Seok Min-seo from Seoul, South Korea

The Reason You Need to Make Your Bed

“If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed first.” This is what U.S. Navy Seal Admiral, William H. McRaven said during his speech at a university graduation ceremony in Texas. The act of making the bed is something that anyone can do. How is it that someone can change the world by doing something so simple? Admiral McRaven said that if you make your bed every morning, you have accomplished the first task of the day. This simple act will give you a small sense of pride and encourage you to complete another task. He said, “Even if by chance you had a miserable day, when you come home to a bed that is made,…

The Most Popular Titles

The title of a book determines the first impression it will receive. The title of a book should suggest the overall content of the book well, and attract the attention of the readers. As a result, authors make every effort to select a perfect title before publishing their book. From the title of a book, readers can somewhat determine the social circumstances and interests of the people during the time period the book was written. To commemorate “World Book Day” on April 23, 2019, the National Library of Korea surveyed the titles of books published in 1998, 2008, and 2018, respectively. They ranked the words most frequently used in titles from 1st to 20th. Some of the words that appeared…

Positive Words Design Happiness

In 2016, at the 31st Rio de Janeiro Olympics, a men’s fencing individual épée match was being played. South Korea’s Park Sang-young who was competing with Hungary’s Géza Imre was losing 13 to 9 in the final third round. He got a point, but soon lost another point, leaving Imre a chance to win a match point (the final point that decides the victory or defeat in a sports game). It basically meant defeat for him. However, he scored more points one by one and scored four consecutive points, creating a tie at 14-14. And he won a victory like a miracle by winning the last winning point. It was an unbelievable dramatic turnabout. The decisive energy that created the…

Specify Your Happiness

“Are you happy?” If you can’t answer this question without hesitation, there are probably two reasons: One reason is that you actually feel unhappy, and the other is that you are confused whether you are happy or not. When you think of happiness abstractly, you find it difficult to grasp it as it seems vague and sometimes far away. If you can’t get a clear answer to the question, “Am I happy now or not?” specify happiness, asking yourself about what you are thankful for, if there is someone you love, what pleases you, when you are proud, what brings you a sense of accomplishment, and so on. If you ask yourself these questions, you will know that you are…

What Changes Me into a Good Person

Good and evil, true and false, light and darkness, joy and sadness! If you like one, you come to dislike the other.However, there are relationships that you must like both. They are you and me, compliment and rebuke, success and failure, and high and low. If you sacrifice yourself for others, you will find joy in your life; and if you are willing to accept rebuke or correction and change yourself for the better, you will receive compliments later; failure becomes the foundation of success; and if you become humble, you will be exalted by other people. You, rebuke, failure, humility . . . These are the things that you may find it hard to embrace. However, if you accept…

A Son with Great Filial Piety

There is a young man of twenty, named Guo Shijun, living in the Anhui province, China. A few years ago, his mother was left mentally disabled from a battle with meningitis. What was worse, his father was injured after falling fifteen meters off of a bridge and became paralyzed from the waist down. Despite such insurmountable odds, he was a good student earning top marks at school. However, before entering university, he had a big problem. Although the university welcomed him, exempting him from paying the tuition and promising to give him a scholarship, and his grandfather promised to take care of his mother, he had no one to take care of his father who was left alone. So he…

Not Becoming Weary and Not Giving Up

The Cape Town Cycle Tour is a large-scale international cycle race; more than 35,000 cyclists from all around the world participate in the race and more than 2,500 volunteers manage race operations. On March 11, 2018, more than 70 members from the Cape Town Zion supported this event. Since the event was scheduled to begin early in the morning, we gathered at 3 a.m. and got to the venue after driving for forty minutes. We were supposed to volunteer at a rest area in the middle of the course, located at the mountainside. It was pitch black because there were no streetlights or electricity. Thanks to that, we could admire the stars shining beautifully. Not long after the race started,…

The Cape Town Church in South Africa