... thoughts ...

These are some recent photos of a little trip I took with some co-teachers to a river nearby Daejeon to go for a swim ... the water was great and the weather was hot enough to make us pant for the cool and refreshing waters. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the river or of the bridge where we were near ... I can assure you that it was a name long enough for me to just forget about because I knew neither I nor my friends/family back home could say it either! ha! (the two on the right are from Canada, the young man in the Manchester United jersey, a British football club, is from Scotland, and the guy on the left is from Bangalore, India ... a rather international mix I would say.

Now for the real reason of this post ... finally! I love the Koreans sense of community. We drove up and down the river looking for less populated areas where we could swim and be "alone" from the kids and throngs of people. We must have stopped by half a dozen people on the road and asked them where we could go and they all pointed us back in the direction of the bridge, where we ended regardless of our search. This at first was rather annoying, but then it dawned on me how much they love to be around one another. We in the West love our space, our individualistic freedom, our sense of ownership and separate-ness from the masses ... yet what do I see when I think of this ... all the truly lonely and disconnected people in America. Ok, I'm not preaching ... back to the story ... South Korea is home to something like 12 of the largest churches in the world, one is close to a million people in Seoul. I don't think they hate to be alone, but more like they just love to be around one another. Even if they don't know each other. They certainly didn't know us as outsiders to their culture, but as soon as we walked up, as we got many intriguing looks we also got many smiles and waves of greeting. Now, I don't know what kind of person you are with regards to community like this but I'm the kind where I truly do love to be around good company but I do need my time alone to do my "own thing" whatever that is. As I ponder on what this means for the culture and society as a whole and how it makes up the collective psyche of all the communities of South Korea, it seems to come to a result of truly being that "good neighbor" or even giving itself to the loving thy neighbor mindset where there is no room for fear of someone unknown to you. I have only been here a short time, but there doesn't seem to be as much fear in the people that I come across on my daily activities, which I love and is very disarming to me.

So that's all I really wanted to write, just thoughts on community as I've witnessed here. If I learn nothing else from this point on, I will have felt blessed to have learned what I have this far into my journey.

Grace and Peace to you!

John