Grandma sitting before mom and dad, partaking in a Korean New Year tradition of paying respect to your elders.
After having lived a full life, laboring for years and raising all of your children and then some, at the ripe old age of 60, would you finally retire or move to a foreign country to start over? At my grandmother's funeral this past weekend, the reminder to never forget the selfless courage displayed through my grandparents' lives kept ringing in my ear, as if there was a cymbal inside that's never been touched 'til now. I grew up knowing, like most second generation kids, the definition of what it meant to be an immigrant
—to move to a country not of your native tongue and learn the trade of survival with only the aid of big dreams. What I didn't know was that my grandfather was 60 when he decided to forsake all earned comforts and bring his wife and family over, and that coming to America then would be the equivalent of me moving to Africa now (well, not now, but when I'm old and retired) with the intent of starting a life completely over, in a country not of my native tongue, to learn new trades of survival, with only the aid of bigger dreams, and then penniless to start
—for the sake of new freedom, new opportunities, and a new life for someone else.
If that's not grace, and if that's not courage, shown by the hands of human effort, sheer will, love of others, and selfless abandon, guided only by the promises of heaven—of unfathomable riches, security, and a deeper rest tucked away in Christ, as my grandparents lived their entire lives to demonstrate—then I don't know what is. I am a product of that grace, a witness of that love, and a beneficiary of that gospel courage. And I will never forget it.
