The Shape of My Eyes, page 16
Often Jesus chose not to separate from those others scrutinized as sinful or unclean, but drew closer to them in love in order for them to be resuscitated back to life. He reached out and touched lepers to heal them. He held the hands of the dead and brought them back to life. He protected a woman caught in the very act of intimacy with someone who was not her husband and he forgave her. He protected her from the religiously “righteous” men ready to stone her to death. And then challenged them to examine their own sins. This Jesus took forgiveness to a new level. Love would triumph over judgment. Love was chosen to supersede any law or tradition. Love in action—not a love in some abstract form in my head or love defined as separating myself from the very ones who desperately needed to experience love. All these truths taught to me since I was a child were filling my mind, breaking my heart of stone.
I paused for a moment and looked all around me. The wide and unobstructed view of the campus field I stood on reminded me of the large expanses in Arizona. I remembered our family of five arriving in Phoenix as one close and loving unit. Then I pictured my dad’s blue eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder what my mom thought about Carolyn now that she was in heaven with a perfected mind. What was she thinking about this “adulteress” now?
What a random question. And what a surprising answer.
Mom would love Carolyn. And she’d want me to love Carolyn, too.
In that moment, I knew what I had to do.
Back in my dormitory room, I lay in my bunk bed. I contemplated what I felt I’d heard from God. I thought about my broken relationship with my dad and how my mom’s wishes were for me to still have a relationship with my father despite how he had betrayed her. I determined that no matter how my father responded, I needed to do my part. Even though I was the younger one, the less mature one in the relationship, I had to make the move. Who was I to judge? I was guessing there was so much I didn’t know between my mom and dad. Things unspoken and hidden from me that I might never understand.
I picked up the dark brown phone we had attached to the wall in our room and dialed his number. A moment later, I heard his voice on the line. He always sounded formal when he first picked up the phone.
“Hello, Gary speaking.”
“Dad, it’s Dave.”
The pause told me he was stunned.
“Son, how are you?” You could hear the surprise in his voice.
I’m not good at small talk. So I got right to the point.
“Dad, I need to see you.”
“Okay.”
“And, Dad, if it’s okay with you, I need to see Carolyn, too.”
There was a pause.
“All right. When?”
“Can it be over Christmas break?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, see you soon, Dad.”
What had just happened? I took a deep breath and didn’t know how it would all turn out. Yet I was confident I was doing the right thing.
I’m sure my dad was wondering what the heck was going on. Out of the blue, after months of avoiding him, I had suddenly called him. He probably assumed I was going to spew a torrent of blame, criticism, and pent-up vitriol at both of them.
When I flew home at Christmas and went to Dad’s place, I resolved not to expect him to apologize. I needed to do my part to repair this fractured relationship; whatever he decided to do or not do was on him.
I took a few deep breaths in my car. Went to their condo door and rang the doorbell.
They greeted me at the door and invited me to sit down.
In the kitchen, we situated ourselves at a small table next to the wall with three chairs. Carolyn sat to my right and Dad to my left. They both looked anxious and curious. I looked at my dad and I don’t know what happened, but tears started flowing instantaneously. Where were these tears coming from?
“Dad, I’m sorry. I haven’t been a good son to you. Please forgive me.”
Dad appeared shocked. Then I saw his face change from a protective, curious stance to one of openness and tenderness. Then I turned to Carolyn. This was the first time I had ever tried to have a conversation with her. The only time I really looked into her eyes. This was the woman my dad had had an affair with, the one who had taken the place of my mom. I was actually going to talk to her. I took another deep breath.
“Carolyn, I also want to apologize to you for how I’ve acted towards you. Please forgive me.”
Dad wiped the tears from his eyes. His face turned red when he got emotional. Carolyn was tearing up, too, still a bit anxious as she kept nervously looking at my dad and then me.
“Son, I forgive you,” Dad said, then quickly added, “And, son, will you forgive me? I’m sorry.”
“Of course, Dad. I love you.”
As we kept wiping the tears from our eyes, Dad stood up and hugged me. Dad had always been affectionate, so his embrace didn’t surprise me. He was the one who gave big wet sloppy kisses to us kids before we went to bed. It was part of our nightly bedtime ritual as small children.
I had never expected my father to respond the way he did. But I also didn’t expect all to immediately feel right. This was just the first step I had needed to take. When I embraced Dad and Carolyn, I wish I could honestly say that a flood of positive emotion overwhelmed me and that feelings of love and trust all came rushing back. They didn’t.
During the whole flight back to South Carolina, I found myself gritting my teeth, still feeling disappointed in my dad, unsure whether forgiving him in such an overt way had been the right thing to do. But in the end, I felt that I had done the right thing. I guess some would call it the very act of faith. Acting in a way that you hope to be true even when you don’t feel it. Hoping the actions will bear positive fruit later.
I now see the act of forgiveness like the locomotive on a train. The mindful act of forgiving someone—giving them grace for something they could never repay—comes first, like an engine on a locomotive. The feelings follow, like a caboose does after the locomotive pulls it along.
The next few years, I dedicated myself to staying in touch with my dad. I would call him, or see him in person when I could. It was a monthly rhythm. I felt I needed to lean into what was uncomfortable. For years, there were no particularly warm feelings. Yes, years. While I was making an effort, the feelings of judgment and pain still lingered.
The emotional feeling of love eventually came. But it would still take some time for me to see Dad and Carolyn the way God sees them. It’s one of those mysterious things that requires time, pain, repetition, and perspective.
Yet one thing was clearer. For much of my life my focus had been about the shape of my eyes rather than how I personally saw others with love or prejudice. The more I could see the beauty in Dad and Carolyn, the more I was able to love. The more I saw my own brokenness, the more I could love the broken. The more I forgave them, the more I could forgive myself.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1 + 1 = 3
On my first visit to Korea as an adult, I felt like a long-lost son finally returning home. It was the mid-1990s, and I was among a small group of Korean American leaders who had been invited to visit some of the megachurches in South Korea so we could learn from their models of growth and spirituality. At the time, eight of the ten biggest churches in the world were in South Korea. Large churches in Korea ranged from 30,000 to over 800,000 people. In Korea, whether you’re Christian or Buddhist, religion is a big aspect of your life, embedded into the culture. I couldn’t wait to go to see that, but I was equally excited to visit my motherland for the first time since leaving as an infant.
After getting off the plane in Seoul, I approached the immigration desk. An elderly immigration officer stood behind it, and I handed him my passport. He paused. Glanced at my eyes. Looked back down at the passport. He examined my passport and appeared confused. I knew he was wondering why I had an American passport with Gibbons as my last name yet I looked 100 percent Korean.
“한국 사람이에요?” he asked.
He noticed that I didn’t understand his question, so he asked again in broken English.
“Are you Korean?”
Both his tone and his expression showed his annoyance.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you speak Korean?”
Usually I say, “I know the profanities and the food,” to provoke a laugh so that I can divert attention away from the awkwardness of such a question. It would take too long to give an extended reasoning for my linguistic ineptitude. I wanted to say to him:
Sir, I’m embarrassed that I don’t know the Korean language.
But I knew it didn’t matter to this immigration officer. So I just said:
“No.”
He briskly handed me back my passport, giving me a stern look of disgust. Then slowly and angrily punctuated each word:
“You. Should. Learn.”
As I walked away from the gate, I said to myself: “Welcome to Korea, Dave.”
Man, I’m not even accepted in my own country of birth.
I had expected to be fully embraced as a native Korean son coming home. This sort of rejection hurt.
Like so many others I had met in my life, this man was treating me like an outsider. Only later in life did I understand the uncertain feelings Koreans had about second-generation Asians, especially from America. Perhaps they had legitimate reasons to be dismissive of me. As a second-generation Korean American, I was considered a person of privilege. I should have become proficient in both English and Hangul/Korean. I was expected to go the extra mile because I had been given so much as an American. People like the immigration officer didn’t know of my own insecurities and struggles of identity in America. They had remained in Korea and survived the great reconstruction of the homeland after the Korean War, one of the fastest economic, societal, and spiritual transformations of a nation in history. They’d struggled, too. I should have felt some of that pain, but at the time, I just saw a crotchety old Korean immigration officer. In reality, he probably just wished I cared enough to at least learn the mother tongue. Of course, modern-day Korea is much different toward those of us lost sons and daughters.
Rebecca and I married after I graduated from Bob Jones University. Rebecca had finished the year before and had completed a year of teaching English at a private school in Maryland. We were in our early twenties. We had been raised in a purity culture, which, while well intended, had significant flaws. The emphasis was on what not to do with potential partners, rather than what to do to have healthy relationships. I thought I was mature and ready for marriage, but really, my wife married an emotional child. I had a lack of self-awareness when it came to my own personal challenges. In fact, later, I blamed her for some of our issues: “You changed me. I wasn’t this way before we got married. It’s you and not me.” Classic blame-shifting rebuttals of the ignorant and immature.
I had this hubris, because of my religious experience, position, and urgency to do God’s work. But because you can lead in public doesn’t mean you’re mature in private. I created personal illusions based on external indicators more than the state of my heart.
The wounds of my past still lurked in the shadows of my soul, mostly unnoticed and under restraint. However, if I felt slighted, disrespected, or ignored, I would quickly react with anger. When I was young, I’d run away from these feelings by trying to restrain them or avoid thinking about them. As I got older, the feelings were harder to suppress.
Becca and I moved to the Mennonite and Amish farm country of Pennsylvania so I could start graduate school to obtain a master’s degree in theology. But I wasn’t going to be starting school right away. I had read in Jewish history that the Israeli soldier took a year off after getting married. That was a good enough reason for me not to go to grad school immediately. I wanted to spend time with my wife and do something other than study. After seventeen straight years of school, I figured it was time for a break. But what do you do with a bachelor’s degree in Bible and public speaking?
That year, I landed the job of head custodian at an elementary school. It wouldn’t be a job my parents would brag to their friends about, but frankly, it’s probably one of the best jobs I ever had because I had so much fun working with kids. In their eyes, I was cooler than all the other adults. I loved driving the large tractor to mow the grass. Kids would look out the windows at me like I was a superhero. To the kids, I was equal to the principal. Children didn’t care about titles or uniforms.
Before I got there, it had been hard for the kind elementary teachers to quiet the students. But I knew how to engage them after all those years spent working with elementary kids. In the middle of the large lunch room, bustling with the frenetic energy of kids eating lunches, I was able to quiet the kids in a couple seconds simply by raising my arm up and clenching my fist. This had always worked before. The children saw me raise my arm in the cafeteria and immediately started to quiet down, raising their arms too. It became a competition to see who could respond to me the quickest. Teachers were in awe. They didn’t know that by that time I had worked with kids for almost ten years, often hundreds of them at a time at camps or in classes. To them I was simply the blue-collar janitor, the antithesis of the Asian parents’ dream of a child, one who was most likely a disappointment to his family.
Admittedly, custodial work did bring its own set of challenges. I am a germaphobe, so wiping human fluids and other things off the floors was hard. I had to clean excrement, vomit, and who knows what else regularly off walls, desks, toilets, floors, windows, and carpets. But nothing was worse than noticing how I was invisible to some teachers. I’m pretty sure they thought I must not have graduated from college because I was cleaning toilets. They had no idea that I was a university graduate going to graduate school soon. I saw how people judge you by your uniform.
Being a custodian wasn’t what I had dreamed of doing when I was a kid in Maryland, but practically speaking, this custodial job was perfect for a student, so I kept it up even after I started grad school. I was allowed to study when I got my work done. Furthermore, it allowed me freedom to get acclimated to married life and to explore Pennsylvania, including the Mennonite and Amish cultures in the region. When work was done, it was done. I rarely had to think about the job after I left the campus.
Still finding my bearings after graduating from Bob Jones University, I attended a seminary known for its local church emphasis and practicality. It was not Bob Jones, but it was one small step removed. It was still a fundamentalist institution, but it felt a lot less rigid than Bob Jones. A couple of my close friends were also attending here, and learning was fun because of the people I had around me. Guys who would be friends for the rest of my life. There were four of us couples who did everything together. We were all newly married and recent graduates from Bob Jones University. The joy of this time came from our picnics, barbecues, and corn picking and husking parties. We would make creative videos and dream about the future. They were all white, and occasionally, someone said something insensitive about race, but I just laughed it off. I knew their intentions were innocent. We had built enough trust to give each other the benefit of any doubt.
School itself somehow seemed easy. Too easy. So I decided to leave and go to the graduate school where all the authors I was reading in books and commentaries were professors. I wanted to attend the renowned Dallas Theological Seminary, which offered a four-year master of theology program. I had never thought I would do more formal education, but I wanted to be prepared to be the best I could be in the pastorate.
Enrolling in Dallas Theological Seminary was considered a move away from my fundamentalist roots. In fact, my founding pastor, Dr. Simpson, who I grew up with in Arizona, wrote me a scathing letter when he found out I was going to DTS. He wrote: “I’m sorry that I taught you the things I did. You will curse the cause of fundamentalism. You have become a new evangelical [meaning I had compromised the truth I was taught as a fundamentalist Christian]. You are a liberal.”
He called me the “L” word. It was like being called a “heretic.” At the same time, Bob Jones University discovered I was going to DTS and wanted to get in on the fun of excommunicating me, so they sent me a letter letting me know I was kicked out of the Alumni Association. Interestingly, the letter was signed by the man who spoke at the camp in Telluride when I made a commitment to God. I felt sad for both these men, but I was convinced that there was a larger perspective of faith that I needed to explore. My time in seminary was some of the best years of my life as I gained confidence with spiritual matters and was humbled by how much I didn’t know.
When I’d finished graduate school, I was hired to be on the staff of an innovative Korean church in Ellicott City, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. It was led by a bilingual first-generation Korean pastor and professor, Dr. David Sang Bok Kim. Dr. Kim was educated, well spoken, and elegant in his manner. Gentle and intelligent, he was brilliant and artful in his ability to work with opposing opinions. I had heard many stories about Korean churches where it was not uncommon for leaders to get into shouting matches or fistfights as praise and worship music was playing in the background, but there was none of that here. Heated exchanges but no physical altercations yet.
After the Bob Jones interracial dating experience, I had expected that I would be welcomed wholeheartedly at this Korean church, but while I was being interviewed for the pastoral role, I learned that there were some who didn’t want me to pastor at their church because my wife was white. They thought we would be a negative role model for their children, since they wanted their children to marry Koreans. I was surprised to see how those who experience prejudice can unknowingly still perpetuate it.
The leadership of the church still decided to hire me. They would soon discover my wife was more Korean than I was! At the time, she was more sensitive and appreciative of Korean culture than I was. She felt more at home with Koreans than I did. She eagerly jumped into learning to speak Korean, became proficient in making Korean food, and ate all the Korean foods. She enjoyed wearing a hanbok, a traditional Korean clothing. Becca and I overturned some misconceptions about us, just probably not in the way they were expecting. To this day, there’s only one place outside of America that Rebecca says she would feel comfortable living—the nation of Korea. It’s now home for both of us.
