04Lilly of the Valley, page 1
Lilly of the Valley
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Lilly of the Valley
Tears of Heaven Series
Lilly of the Valley
Kenneth Zeigler
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Lilly of the Valley
© Copyright 2011 – Kenneth Zeigler
All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request.
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
Please note that the author’s publishing style capitalizes certain pronouns in Scripture that refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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Lilly of the Valley
Dedication:
This book is dedicated to Bishop Elvina Miller, my spiritual mother, who gave me invaluable guidance in the formative years of my Christian walk.
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Lilly of the Valley
Acknowledgments:
I wish to extend sincere thanks to James D. Fuqua for his awesome cover art.
Blessed are the artists, for they shall capture on paper the essence of His glory.
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Lilly of the Valley
Introduction: The outcry of the martyrs
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of
them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they
should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled (Revelation 6: 9-11).
Welcome to the world of modern North Korea, a nation falling slowly into
the abyss of starvation and desperation, a land ruled by the select few at the cost of the multitude. Much is said of the suffering of people in Syria, or the nations of Sub Saharan Africa. Yet little is known of the suffering that goes on within the dark realm that is North Korea. For over a century, North Korea has suffered
under the yoke of one foreign master after another. First it was a variety of western powers that took advantage of this nation followed by a long and far more brutal occupation by The Empire of Japan.
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Strange as it might seem, the current capital of North Korea, Pyongyang,
was once referred to as the Jerusalem of Asia. It was the site of a Christian revival that rivaled that of Azusa Street in the early twentieth century. That revival was crushed with the arrival of the conquering Japanese who insisted that all of the citizens of Korea adhere to the strict principles of the worship of their emperor. To refuse was punishable by a death of the worst kind.
Following World War II, the Japanese influence was removed and Korea as
a whole was divided into zones, an American controlled zone in the south and a Russian controlled zone in the north. This was to be but a temporary condition, until free elections might be held. Yet free elections were the last thing that the Russians wanted. Time and time again they moved to sabotage and delay the
process, even as they concentrated upon building up the military of the north.
They installed Kim Ill-sung, a resistance leader during the Japanese occupation as the man in control of their sector.
Note, that according to Korean tradition, the family name precedes what
westerners would refer to as a person’s Christian name. So John Smith would
become Smith John. The Kim Dynasty is the only communist family dynasty in
the world. Leadership is passed down from father to son.
Kim Ill-sung, first of the Kim Dynasty wished to invade South Korea and
unite the peninsula under his control almost from the moment he took command,
yet the Stalinist Regime that had supplied him convinced him to exercise patience.
It was not until the Russians left his nation that he launched his attack upon the south in the conflict that we now refer to as the Korean War.
The south was totally unprepared for war, and the City of Seoul fell to the
north in a matter of days. It was only with the aid of the United Nations, led by the 7
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United States that this invasion was ultimately repulsed. Today the borderline between north and south is the thirty-eighth parallel. An uneasy truce exists between the north and south, though technically they are still at war.
Under Kim Ill-sung the north managed to hold onto a living standard that
was roughly in parity with that of the south, but it didn’t last. The Korean
Peninsula is very rocky and mountainous with only a limited amount of
cultivatable land. This is particularly true of the north. Therefore they depend on food imports. In the south, these imports are paid for by the fact that South Korea has the seventh largest industrial economy in the world. The people of the south live and eat well. The north has no such economy. Virtually all of their industrial production is dedicated to the maintenance of their huge military. Little thought is given to feeding the people beyond that level needed to sustain life. All males are required to serve for up to 10 years in this military. In fact, due to poor nutrition, the north has had to relax their lower height limit for entrance into the military. On average, the people of the north are more than two inches shorter than their
southern counterparts.
To minimize the costs of building the military’s weapons, political prisoners
with life sentences are often conscripted into the work. After all, they are virtual slave labor and will never leave the prison camps to expose any of the country’s top secrets. They are, for all intents and purposes, disposable people.
So, through three generations of the Kim Dynasty, the most repressive
government on the planet has continued. Through famine, cruelty, and repression, this little piece of hell on Earth continues to survive. But, for how much longer?
That is the real question. Their government is unsustainable. In the end it must collapse one way or another. And it will not go down easily. It lives on by not 8
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only threatening its own people but the people of the south as well. One day a provocative action by the north will go too far. It will escalate from a cold war to a very hot one. To the leadership of the north, withdrawing will not be an option, and to the south capitulation will not be an option. The result will be a war involving an army of tremendous size with limited nuclear capability on one side against a much smaller, non-nuclear, yet far more technically advanced military force one on the other. The outcome is likely to depend upon what those nations around the Korean Peninsula do in response.
This is a story of life in modern North Korea, and of the birth of a child who will one day hold the fate of the entire peninsula within her hand. Until then the clock is ticking toward a regional Armageddon.
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Chapter 1
The first snowflakes of the season were swirling through the air as 22 year
old Kyun Ae-cha walked from the grave hand in hand with her four year old
daughter, Li-hua. Her husband’s death had come on so suddenly, with the first chills of fall. Just last week he had seemed so full of life, upbeat about the excellent wheat harvest this year. It had been so much better than last year, and a good harvest meant that their family flour mill would be very busy. Well, in
reality, the mill belonged to the government, though the Kyun family had operated it for three generations. Still, there was pride in its operation.
Ae-cha’s five year marriage with her husband had been a blessing to her.
Chin-ho had been a kind and thoughtful man, two years older than her. It had been an arranged marriage between her parents and his. Both were party members in
good standing and their families had been close for generations. It seemed only natural to arrange a marriage between a beautiful daughter and a handsome son.
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Though the marriage had been arranged, Chin-ho had hardly been a stranger
to Ae-cha. They had played together as children and had grown to be good friends.
Ae-cha had been promised to Chin-ho for nearly as long. Marriage to Chin-ho was something that Ae-cha had actually been looking forward to. Had she had the
choice of her husband, she might have chosen him anyway.
Marrying Chin-ho meant leaving the big city of Pyongyang and moving to
the more rural home of her in-laws, some hundred kilometers to the north. Their home was larger and somewhat nicer than her parents’ home. She lived there with her husband, her in-laws, and their younger son. All in all it had been a wonderful experience.
While her husband went to work each day at the mill, she saw to the choirs
around the house. She cleaned and sewed, she preparing lunch and dinner for the family. It was a labor of love, and she took pride in it. She felt as if she belonged to something special, and she did. She had a purpose, and her efforts and diligence were openly appreciated by all. Her mother-in-law, Chun-hei, was just glad to be free of the burden that Ae-cha now gladly bore. Housework was something she
had never much cared for. She was an active and very enthusiastic communist
party member, and there were plenty of local functions that she was now free to attend. For this reason, if for no other, she appreciated Ae-cha.
But now those times seemed so distant. Ae-cha thought back to her first
year in this house. She was only seventeen and far from home. It had been an adjustment. She thought back to her pregnancy. The months before the birth of her first child had been a time of great expectation in the Kyun household. The birth of a daughter rather than a son had been a real disappointment to her
husband’s parents, especially Chun-hei. After all, to carry on the family name they would need a grandson. They were consequently somewhat distant when it came
to Li-hua, who Ae-cha had nicknamed Lilly.
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How could her in-laws not fall in love with Lilly? She was such a beautiful
child, perfect in every detail, from her dark almond eyes to her jet black hair. How could anyone not love one such as her?
She had been born at the time when the lilies were in full bloom in the
rolling hills around them; hence, her name, for she was most surely a beautiful flower. Chin-ho had loved her, more than anything. It didn’t really matter to him that she was a girl. The next child would be a boy. Yes, that is what he told his parents, but now there wouldn’t be a next child.
Chin-ho’s illness had started as no more than a low grade fever and some
swelling around a scrape on his leg from a minor accident at the mill two days before. No big deal, he brushed it off as nothing serious and headed off to work.
There was to be a large shipment of grain arriving that morning and he wanted to be there with his father when it arrived. After all, he’d be taking over the business one day and he wanted to be involved in all aspects of its operation. Anyway, the government looked favorably upon the sons of managers who took an active and
enthusiastic interest in their father’s work. He wanted one day to be the manager of this operation, not just a bookkeeper like he was now.
It had been just after noon when Chin-ho had returned home, too sick to
continue working. For Chin-ho to do that, both his mother and Ae-cha knew that he had to be pretty sick. As party members in good standing, they had access to an old pickup truck that they used to transport Chin-ho to a small hospital in the nearby city of Anju.
Being party members, they were able to see a doctor almost immediately.
Yes, it was an infection, and the bacteria aggressive. The hospital didn’t have any antibiotics on hand, it rarely did. Antibiotics were hard to come by in North Korea, even for party members in good standing like the Kyuns. He treated Chin-12
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ho with sulfanilamide, but it didn’t help. The bacteria spread relentlessly up his leg, and within a few days reached his major organs. He didn’t live long after that.
If only there had been antibiotics on hand. The doctor felt sure that would
have helped.
Ae-cha was stopped in mid stride by her mother, Hana, who had made the
long trip from Pyongyang for the funeral. She looked at her daughter with sad eyes. “I’m sorry that your father was not able to make it,” she began, “but he was not able to get time off.”
“I understand, Mother,” said Ae-cha, “it is a long distance to travel.”
“It is,” confirmed Hana, “But I needed to be here for you.” Hana hesitated.
“There is another thing that I needed to talk to you about. I know that this is a very bad time for you but it is of great importance to all of us. I have been talking to your mother-in-law. You understand how important it is to remain in the good
graces of the General.”
That comment caught Ae-cha by surprise. “Of course I do,” she confirmed.
“His image, and that of his father are the only two photographs on our home’s wall of honor, as it was in our home while I was growing up.”
“Good,” replied Hana, “I was afraid that you might have forgotten. You
wouldn’t remember much about the great famine. It swept across the entire world when you were but a child. We had plenty to eat because we were loyal to our
beloved leader. Others who were less loyal were not so fortunate. I do not know how many people died during that dark time, it is not something that we are
supposed to know, but it might have been millions, just here in North Korea. I remember seeing bodies scattered about the streets, the dead and the dying. The government did what it could. The bodies were gathered together by the army and burned in great bonfires. It was terrible. The odor was beyond description. Who can say how many died throughout the world, it might easily have been a billion or 13
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more. I want you to keep that in mind, for what you are doing now is placing our family and your late husband’s family at risk.”
“What I’m doing?” asked Ae-cha, incredulously.
“Yes,” confirmed Hana, “what you’re doing. You’ve never been any good
at deception, so don’t try it now. There can be only one faith in this nation, one faith that binds us all together, Juche. You are both blind and foolish if you believe that there is a god. The only god for us is our divine leader, Kim Il-sung, and his son Kim Jong-il.” There was a pause. “But you have another god, don’t you?”
Ae-cha hesitated. She was not prepared for this, not today.
“Momma, you must tell her,” said Lilli, looking up at her mother and then
toward her grandmother. “Grandma Hana must know about Jesus. I want her to
go to Heaven too.”
Hana looked only briefly at her granddaughter, yet she glared at Ae-cha.
“You taught her this. Daughter, what have you done?”
Ae-cha realized that her secret was out. What was she to do now? She
knew that she had only one choice, she couldn’t deny Him. “Yes, Mother, I taught her this. I am a Christian. I’ve been one for five years now.”
“You didn’t learn this from us,” objected Hana, anger in her voice. “I didn’t raise you this way. Who told you about this Jesus?”
Ae-cha hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”
“I think it was that boy you went to school with, that Kwan, the one you
spent so much time with,” said Hana. “I’m right, aren’t I? He was the one who filled your head with all of these lies. Well he won’t be doing it any more. They took him away three weeks ago, along with his parents, his brothers and sisters.
They executed him, Ae-cha, but not before they tortured him. I can only assume that he refused to tell them who else he had pulled into this insidious cult of his.
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Otherwise you might be in some camp yourself, you and your daughter. Now his
family is going to be spending who knows how many years in a total control camp, and it was his fault. He didn’t just bring dishonor to his family he might have brought them death. Those caps are very bad, especially during the winter. People freeze to death there, if they don’t die of hunger first. Do you want to do the same thing to us? Do you?”
“No, of course not,” replied Ae-cha.
