From the Wretched to Being a Child of God: A Vision of the Virus Received from God Relating to the End Times

By Daniel Chung

From the Wretched to Being a Child of God by Daniel Chung

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644686768

Book preview

My Root of the Family Tree

If I retrospect my previous life, I was not qualified to be a servant of God and, rather, had been accursed as a man of sins and had been wretched and victimized by the wrong society.

But only by His grace and the abundant mercy of God in Christ Jesus could my sins be cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. The worthy Lamb of God, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the Lord of Lords, the King of kings, my hope, my life, my true Shepherd, my strength, my Bridegroom, my All-Things-in-Him-Alone—He is the living God to worship. Before being born-again, seeking worldly things was the purpose of my life, even though I thought I believed in Jesus and that the Word of God is true. But in real daily life, I had been away from the teachings of God.

Before I was born, Imperial Japan had controlled Korea.

My Father and My Mother in the City of Fengtian of the Manzu

Before my father met my mother in the city of Fengtian, in Japanese colonial time, she was already married to the principal of the junior high school, but she found out he was in the last stage of pneumonia. In those days, parents made arrangements for their sons and daughters, without them seeing each other before marriage.

Once two parents decided to agree with the marriage arrangement, their children should follow their parents’ decision, which was the old Korean tradition which is still carried through by the ethnic people these days in the Golden Triangle of the countries of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. While I worked as a missionary in Northern Thailand, I noticed that Hmong, Akah, and Lahu minorities married at an early age, like fourteen or sixteen.

My mother told me many times about her story, and she had bad feelings for her father and for my father too. According to my mother’s classmates in elementary school, my mother was number one in almost every area, like dancing, singing, drawing, sewing, counting skills, etc. After she graduated from the elementary school, my mother wanted to study more in junior high school, but Grandfather didn’t want her to study more. I don’t know how my mother continued to attend junior high school and whether she had finished or not.

Anyway, my mother didn’t want to marry, but she had no choice from Grandfather’s pressure and threat. According to my mother, Grandfather had chosen him because he was an educated person and had the principal position. But he didn’t tell my mother about her future fiancé, and my grandfather deceived my mother.

Unfortunately, after my mother had one son and one daughter, she left the house and took only her daughter, who was my half-sister, and asked Grandmother to take care of her, and she ran away to the Manzu area to get a job with her best friend. The Japanese government forced her to learn the Japanese language from elementary school, and she was not allowed to speak the Korean language. I used to hear that my mother talked with her friends in the Japanese style.

In the city of Fengtian, now called Shenyang in Liaoning Province, my mother had gotten a job at the department store as an announcer, and my father worked at the Japanese government company. My father wasn’t married yet, but after seeing my mother, even though she told my father that she was already married and had a daughter and a son, my father consistently followed my mother to marry her. Well, that was the beginning of my birth.

After normal duties, my father would visit the department store to buy something or to see my mother and hear her beautiful voice as the announcer. He had this curiosity about who she was and had the compulsion to meet her, and finally, he found out that the announcer was a Korean woman from the South of Korea. Once he found out about my mother, he started to court her for marriage continuously, according to my mother’s story. That was the time that God formed me in my mother’s womb, and before the delivery of the baby, my mother went to her mother’s hometown in Hansan, Chungcheongnamdo Province, the southern province of Korea. I was born in my grandmother’s hometown, and my mother took me back to Fengtian (now Shenyang) and stayed there until 1945.

When Japan was defeated in World War II in 1945, my parents fled Fengtian to the home of my mother’s parents in South Korea. These happenings of my early days in Fengtian probably might connect with God’s purpose to use me as a servant for the people in China (Ephesians 1:4–5).

In my earlier life, I had been neglected and despised by the relatives and the neighbors, not only me but all family members with experience of the Korean War in June 1950.

I had grown up without a father from the age of four or five, who had left for Japan when I was in Jeju Island, and in my dim memory, I had been on some kind of highway and seen many holes and cracks, probably by bombs, I guess. Later on, before the Korean War, my father came back a couple of times, and then he left and couldn’t come back again due to the Korean War and the broken relationship between President Lee Sungman’s regime and Japan, until the opening of the diplomatic relationship in the regime of President Park Jung-hee.

As I remember, my mother worked hard by making hanbok, the traditional clothes with the material called Hansanmoshi for women. Some other time, I had known that my mother did business for distribution of rice and then was bankrupt. In those days, the society was in confusion, and lawlessness was prevalent in every walk of life.

The Korean War 6.25, June 25 in 1950

When I was in second grade at the Kunsan Elementary School, in the city of Kunsan, Jeollabuk-do, South Korea, the Korean War broke out. In the turmoil, confusion, and uncertainty of the future of Korea, all schools had been closed, and all things suddenly became in turmoil. People ran away to the countrysides to survive. I was seven years old and my younger brother was about five years and my sister was two years old. I didn’t know what happened in those days and only knew we had lots of problems economically. Grandfather, from the mother’s side, moved to his hometown in a small village not far from the seaside of Daecheon, Chungcheongnamdo.

My mother could support us no more, including my grandmother and half-sister and my brother and my sister and me. My grandmother from the mother’s side took care of us in these troubled times and in difficult situations when we didn’t have anything to eat. My grandmother used to contact well-known people to get some food for us. But since everyone was short on food, they couldn’t help our grandmother anymore.

My grandfather owned a pawnshop and became a rich man because of the high interest and had a concubine as the same age of my mother. I had seen a big army barrack building in the corner of his house where he kept many materials deposited as the guarantees from borrowers of money. Because his house was so big, and inside, it had two gardens and many flowers and fruit trees, I remember. So we lived in my grandfather’s house for a while. I noticed that grandfather didn’t like me and remember that, all the time, he hated me because my father had left us to go to Japan.

In my grandfather’s garden, there were many azalea trees and jujube, pomegranate, and other fruit trees, and I liked to climb the pomegranate and jujube trees to take fruits when they had lots of fruits. Spring times blossomed many flowers, and I used to play with the flowers by picking up the flowers and burying them under the earth, and I covered them with a piece of glass and would enjoy looking at it. When my grandfather found out and realized that I made bad things to him, he used to rebuke me for this matter.

He treated my grandmother badly and also didn’t like my mother and wanted that both should move out. Grandfather didn’t help my mother financially, as far as I had known, because my mother never said such a thing.

My grandmother’s hometown still is a very famous town with the name of the prestigious Hansanmoshi, for weaving clothes with Hansanmoshi. Whenever she had time, she worked hard all the time to make weaving for clothes. Hansanmoshi is ramie fabric (scientific name: Boehmeria nivea), and clothes made of ramie fabric have been used particularly during hot weather due to the good air circulation, and it felt cool when worn and became the popular clothes in summertime in South Korea.

My mother had learned from my grandmother how to make Hanbok, the traditional clothes of women a long time ago. During hot seasons, Hanbok clothes, made of ramie fabric, were popular with women. To survive in those days of hardships and economic difficulties, my mother worked hard to make clothes of Hanbok day and night to feed us. My mother was an expert in sewing with the machine and had hand skills in weaving and using a hot tool to straighten up the clothes.

Since my mother had been making the women’s clothes with Hansanmoshi or other clothing materials, many women were hanging around her all the time and talking and talking. I realized that my mother loved talking with any woman around her. Even when she had just met her for the first time, my mother would start telling the same story about the bad things my father had done. Whenever she told the other women about her past life story, I would be so embarrassed that I would leave my mother and walk around to spend time.

When my mother’s friends came to my mother, they all spoke the Japanese language, and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Quite often, my mother looked at me and wept on and on while talking with them. I barely understood my mother’s heart. Her life at that time was so hard, and she suffered too much.

In the midst of these turmoils, my younger brother went missing when he was about four years old, and my grandmother frantically tried to find him by asking anyone about his whereabouts by describing him. In those days, my mother had big arguments with her only brother. I called him uncle and then he went somewhere.

The Korean War destroyed so many families and societies and produced hatred, poverty, diseases, food shortages, many orphans, crimes, murders, stealings, and distrust of one another, no love and no kindness, and they only think of how to survive at whatever cost for their lives.

To avoid the war, my mother’s brother and his wife’s relatives came down from Seoul to his father’s house to stay there until the war came to an end. I came out of Grandfather’s home and became homeless and wandered around to search for food to fill my stomach.

During summertime, I traveled to my grandfather’s hometown area in Daecheon, Chungcheongnam-do, near the Daecheon Beach. First, I boarded on a boat for free and took a train from Janghang train station. There, among the crowd, I pretended to hold onto an old man or woman to get in the train to the train station of Daecheon for free. The city of Janghang is the southern city of the Chungcheongnam-do Province faced with the city of Kunsan of the Jeollabuk do Province across the strait of seawater.

In my grandfather’s village, I wandered to find who could give me food to eat, and at nighttime, I slept over piled wood at the back side of someone’s house. The villagers were the clan of my grandfather’s last name, and most villagers were my grandfather’s relatives.

Meanwhile, my half-sister was older than me, so she could help with housework and survive. My other sister was so young, maybe two years old, and my grandmother took care of her in a separate house of my grandfather.

And then I traveled back to the city of Kunsan in the same way by free bus, free train, and free boat. I couldn’t count how many times back and forth just to fill my stomach with food. Some good people gave me food, and I still remember that one Chinese restaurant owner who gave me enough rice to eat. Compared with other people, they have a merciful heart. One day, the village people near the Chinese restaurant gathered and talked stealthily, just pointing at the ditch, so I went there and saw a tiny baby dead in there, probably an embryo of a baby.

In the cold weather, at nighttime, I was crying and crying because I had no place to sleep. My relatives didn’t want to stay together, so I couldn’t stay at my grandfather’s house. The Korean culture of discrimination of boys and girls that came from their parents was still sustained in some parents.

For example, if parents have a boy, the parents would give most of the wealth to their eldest son and less on the next son, and to daughters, nothing. The tradition was if their daughter married her husband, they thought that their daughter has become their daughter no more. This kind of tradition still happens in the society of South Korea.

Therefore, my uncle thought the same way, that the house of my grandfather belonged to him. They treated me as unwanted in front of the whole family’s eyes.

In the cold night, I wandered around where I could sleep. No one showed mercy, except one family; still, I remember. The good house owner suggested for me to stay in the kitchen, so I slept at night in the squat position.

I couldn’t remember how long I had to wander around that way, but finally, young people in the neighborhood came to my uncle and punched and hit him severely. So my uncle took me back to his father’s house and asked his mother to take care of me. In other words, I became a troublemaker for them. So my poor grandmother didn’t know what to do.

The Orphanage Life

By the grace of God, my grandmother heard of the orphanage near the beachside. She said to me that if she took me to the orphanage and left me alone to stay there, at a certain time, my mother would come and take me back.

I was so hungry and had no place to sleep, so I told my grandmother, I will stay there.

The orphanage near the beachside was founded by an elder of the Methodist Church, and I heard that the elder was a general in the Korean Army. The other elder took care of the orphanage. While I was there, I saw the elderly general of the army a couple of times.

In that orphanage, I learned about the story of Jesus and worship songs. At first, I was almost blind and had difficulty seeing. Gradually, my eyesight was recovered. They provided us with white rice, salt, and milk too. We memorized the twelve disciples’ names and loved the story of Moses and of Jesus Christ.

During wintertime, many kids didn’t want to go to school because they didn’t have socks and