Please Pass the Gochujang

February 29, 2016January 1, 2018 ~ tashajun ~ 2 Comments

Over the last year I’ve read a few articles about how Gochujang is the “new” hot sauce.

I am not going to lie. Upon discovering the articles, I felt some pride that the sauce that had humbly graced my family’s dining room table night after night was in some sort of positive spotlight. It was being described beautifully, with food words that I can only assume appeal to those who call themselves connoisseurs or trendsetters of all things food and taste. Yes, I silently agreed while reading one of the writer’s words, gochujang is good for you. You’re right,this spicy sauce is earthy and deep. In fact, its earthy texture and taste remind me of how I felt as a little girl playing in Korea with my cousins after our first-ever meeting. We ran out to a nearby field of dirt, and dug for treasure, filling our fingernails with mud and grime. We didn’t speak the same language, but played together easily, bonding over filthy fingers, imagination and sweaty, summer-heated foreheads.

this photo was taken in Korea, after an afternoon of playing with my cousins like I

described above…My mom is the one in red and white strips in the back.

Can you guess which one is me?

As I write I can imagine my mom now, across the table from me, extending one of her perfectly-assembled lettuce wraps the size of her fist, waiting for me to open my mouth so that she can stuff it full. After the initial cool crunch of lettuce, my mouth would find warm, soft rice, then a spicy and sweet, sesame-flavored kalbi piece with a burst of of Gochujang to complete it all. Had I not noticed how amazing this sauce was all throughout my childhood and beyond?

This was the sauce that my mom always got in large, rectangular tubs from the Korean store. Or, if she didn’t buy it, she made her own and filled a large, stout glass jar with it. It didn’t come in small bottles covered in fancy, cool fonts which cost double what my mom would pay for something triple the size.

I bought one of those bottles when I spotted it at a local organic grocery store. It resembled a beer bottle with a much shorter and thicker neck. This particular brand even gave back to the community. There’s no question that this Gochujang is doing good things. I used some with my egg-over-rice-lunch and even instagrammed it in my excitement over how delicious it was. And yet, if I am completely honest, something
about my lunch and documentation of it made me feel like I was cheating on the depth of my upbringing, and dinner after dinner of my past.

Truly, I am (mostly) glad that there are people who will get to discover and experience things like Gochujang because of cool packaging and the voice of a culinary journalist or a trendy chef, even if they would never come any closer to Korean culture than the taste from a well-designed bottle.

But, sometimes, it annoys me. Sometimes I am sick of the intentionality of marketing and the voice of trends and, even more so, the quick following of them. Sometimes I am tired of everyday things in one culture being propped up as cool or trendy for a year or two among the unfamiliar majority in another. Gochujang is special to me for different reasons. My Mom used to (and still does) stand at her kitchen counter, snacking on hot peppers (that most of us, including me, would probably faint if we took one bite of), into a bowl of Gochujang. She would eat them raw, not bothering to close her mouth as she devoured them. It’s not customary in traditional Korean culture to close your mouth when you eat. Food is loud and messy and shared. It’s a boisterous family affair. This snack of fire-inducing peppers dipped into Gochujang comforted her and brought her back to where she was from; and the picture in my mind of her snacking this way now comforts me and brings me back to where I am from as her daughter.

For me, Gochujang tells the story of my Mom, the story of our family’s dinner table throughout many years of highs, lows, heartbreak, misunderstanding, love and laughter. It tells the story of my own childhood home, wherever we lived at the time. It tells
the story of my own growing and changing understanding of the heritage God has
given me.

A year ago, I had a friend ask me to go to a Korean restaurant with her. She hadn’t ever had Korean food and wanted to try it. We ordered Dolsot Bibimbap and sat across the table from each other, talking about how much Gochujang she should add to her hot stone bowl, and how spicy it would be. This friend was willing to try something brand new and listen to me tell her about stories of my upbringing and my history with the foods on the table in front of us. It had nothing to do with being trendy, or being a food expert, and everything to do with a relationship and a priceless willingness on her part, to step outside what was normal and expected and understood. It meant the world to me.

God obviously made food to nourish us. Beyond nourishing, I believe he made it to stretch us, to be a tool of care, and to give our memories scent, taste and color. I believe that the true gift of food lies far beyond taste and personal benefit, and is found in the power it has to connect people.

So, Gochujang, I will love you even if everyone decides you have too much brown sugar to make the health benefits of fermentation worth it. I might buy you in a trendy, over-priced, made for non-Koreans bottle, or I might buy you in the kind of red tub I grew up with. Either way, you will always remind me of my Mother’s love language of food and your scent will take me back to summers in Korea and the everyday dinners of my childhood. Whether you are called the new “it” hot sauce, or not, I will still ask for
you and pass you on to my babies in lettuce wraps as big as my fists.

14 Hours (and more) Away From Our Little Girl

February 21, 2016January 1, 2018 ~ tashajun ~ 2 Comments

Almost a month ago, I picked up my phone and saw that I had missed a phone call from Grand Rapids. I listened to the voicemail and learned that it was our adoption agency and my heart started to beat more quickly. I know our social worker and I must have exchanged some kind of greetings when I called back, but all I can remember her saying
is, “we have a referral for you, and it’s a little girl.”

We have been in this adoption process for 2 years, and in some form of waiting all throughout; and yet, I wasn’t ready for her words. I had been prepping myself to wait for much longer for that call. I also expected that we would be matched with a boy. Both surprises brought tears to my eyes. Emotions are so telling when we give them room to breath.

When the file arrived, I sat there reading every piece of information over and over again, while looking at the 4 pictures I had in front of me — again and again. I moved from shock, to fear, to shock, to compassion, to numbness, and to fear again as I wondered why I felt numb, to a million other emotions, including happiness over her chubby cheeks.

A week later, we said yes to our referral. During that week of decision, I grew very attached to this 9-month-old little girl and her already-complex story. I prayed a lot, asking God to give us wisdom, but also just sat with God and my big bundle of emotions without words. That’s prayer too. A good friend and adoptive mama I admire, told me to pray, yes, but to listen more than speak as we sought the right decision. How I needed that advice!

Matt, was much more calculated, calm and level-headed. I felt like a crazed squirrel running in circles around him and all of his calmness. I will never forget when we made the final decision and he called her our daughter for the first time. When he verbally named her ours, it felt like 2 years worth of waiting, working on mountains of paperwork, and being poked and prodded in every area of our inner and outer lives broke some sort of protective dam I had carefully built; and everything spilled over with the force and power of water gone wild.

It’s been almost a month now. We just sent in all of our acceptance paperwork and we are waiting for a court date from South Korea. I keep telling my close friends that I was very okay with waiting for the last two years; and now, now that we have a little girl, with a name and a face who is a 14-hour plane ride away, I feel like a lunatic. I wake up at crazy times in the night, just thinking about our little girl and about all the details ahead, not to mention the rest of our family here and details here. Between us is a 14-hour plane ride, 14 hours of day and more waiting.

In all of the joy and excitement, I am struggling with waiting. I just wrote a whole post about the good of waiting, and yet here I am now, just 2 months later, feeling my own version of crazy. Despite me, I hear God consistently and graciously reminding me that he has purpose and good in the waiting. The kind of waiting in our adoption process has changed in a big way, but, as in everything, he is still the point.

I recently heard Wendy Pope say this in a video over at first 5 :

“WE CANNOT LET THE OBJECT OF OUR WAIT REPLACE THE PERSON OF OUR FAITH.”

These words were so timely for me. Aren’t we all tempted to do this when we are waiting? It might not be a little girl across the ocean, but perhaps for you it’s a dream, an answer, a relationship, a change, or an invitation that you are waiting for. While it would be easy for whatever we are waiting for to become the goal, especially when it requires so much of us and we are actively working for it and praying for it, it cannot hold the weight of that place in any of our hearts. Jesus is the faithful one and he wants us to find him, to trust him, to see him, to keep stepping out, and to be transformed by him in our waiting.

So, now we wait for the call that says we can go to Korea and meet our little girl. We wait for that and for the day when we can bring her home. Above all else, we wait for Jesus, the one who holds our hearts in his hands, no matter what.

Strangers Welcomed In

August 20, 2015January 1, 2018 ~ tashajun ~ 2 Comments

One of the most beautiful and challenging gifts of travel is that it makes us strangers in need.

After our team arrived in Kigali, two weeks ago today; sweaty, tired and ready to be upright, we spent around an hour trying to figure out where our missing luggage was. Once we understood that our luggage wasn’t in Rwanda like we were, we left the airport to meet up with our ALARM partners. It was my first time to meet Rwandans face to face. I will never forget Benjamin’s genuine expression, his big smile and his first words, “Welcome. We are so glad you have come to Rwanda. This is your home too, so please feel at home here.” Any stress or worry over missing things faded behind the genuine welcome and care of those who welcomed us.

Hospitality. How often do I reduce hospitality to the gift of entertaining? I know entertaining is a skill and I truly admire those who have that skill and use it. But the gift of hospitality in the hands of God has the power to go deep into a heart and transform it. It has little to do with how much we have or how nice of things we have, and everything to do with how and who we notice, how we love and how we bring those who are strangers into a place of being known and welcomed in.

From those first welcome words to thousands of details throughout our 10 days there, our Rwandan friends genuinely did everything they could to not only share their world with us, but to make our team feel like anything but strangers.

When we are strangers in need, we are in a position to receive. And there is so much to receive when we follow the God whose grace is abundant and whose hands have held the entire oceans in their hollow, who has named every star and created every person, in every country and every culture, in his image.

In my own familiar culture, where there is an abundance of the material, an abundance of personal choices from cereal to forms of education, an abundance of resources, an abundance of events, and an an abundance of entertainment and noise, I forget (or choose to ignore) the vital places within me that cannot be filled an inch by those things. I am ashamed to admit that I easily grow numb to the hunger of my soul, the thirst of my spirit, and the needs of my heart. I am so prone to wander and grow slow to realize how great those needs are in the face of all of the things I allow to distract me.

In Rwanda, I will not forget how we were greeted so personally almost everyday, by everyone we interacted with, from the ALARM staff who served us breakfast, to the ALARM leaders, to the women who attended the WLTI conference from every part of Rwanda and every kind of life circumstance. There was so much eye-contact, so much acknowledgment for each person, so much “noticing” of needs despite any language barrier, that it was overwhelming. It’s easy to think that we don’t need those little gestures, but oh, how our hungry souls do. That kind of hospitality allows God to show us his love for us. And oh, how he loves us! Oh, how his loves welcomes us in our strangeness!

Every time we sang with the women at our conference, they would dance and clap and the room would fill with a freedom and joy from the Spirit that I had not known before Rwanda. One of the older women who attended the conference sat near me, and she would ever so graciously and freely dance and sing while looking back at me to see if I was catching onto the arm movements. We exchanged no words, but she noticed me next to her and just with her eyes would move and nod as I tried to move my arms as she did. She did not have to do that. She did not have to notice me, standing a bit behind her. But she did. I could cry right now as I type, for the unspoken measure of grace and and love offered to me in that moment. She noticed and God loved on me in a way I did not know I desperately needed, in her noticing.

We went to serve and to love the faces and people we met. I think that our team did just that and it was a joy to do it for each of us in the varied roles we had. We also went because God knew we each needed to be strangers who were noticed by Him when we felt most strange, and because we needed receive his love in the Kinyarwandan language, and in the Rwandan way.

The Adventures of Mini Asher and Timo in Rwanda

August 3, 2015January 1, 2018 ~ tashajun

There are 2 more days until it’s go time! I am ready and not-quite ready all at the same time. Our team had an wonderful commissioning at our church yesterday. My whole family left there encouraged.

Be on the lookout for more about the adventures of these two little men…

Last night, in a moment of sadness over leaving home, Matt reminded me of all the stories that will be involved. He reminded me that God has made me a lover of stories and that I was going to learn new stories because of this trip, share my own story, capture beautiful stories that God is writing in Rwanda, and bring them home so that they can brush up against stories here. What an amazing honor.

Then, as we were talking, I remembered that the word I choose at the start of this year, for 2015, is story. I had completely forgotten about it. God brought it to mind as we were talking and I was overwhelmed by his faithfulness in something as simple as picking a word for the year. I picked story because I wanted to have a year where I payed close attention to the story God was writing in and through my life, in my family’s lives and in the lives God places around me. I wanted to search for HIS story in all things and I wanted to be faithful to write stories like I believe he has made me to do. I didn’t even have a single thought about Rwanda then. I had no idea what it would mean for me this year, but He did. He is so faithful and he is in the details of our lives down to a five letter word.

While I am still struggling with sadness over being away from my boys, I also see the incredible opportunity and gift this trip will be to model for them the value of living on mission. Of course, I think there is opportunity to model this every single day in the everyday and the mundane, and that it is VERY important to do so. However, I also know they will not have to choose the everyday and the mundane in the same way they might be able to choose to say yes to something outside of it. We all get some of the everyday and mundane in life. Beyond my prayer that they will faithfully live in and through the everyday and mundane, I also hope and long for them to grow up to be men who will say yes to risky things, men who will choose to walk into unknown places and things bigger than they are, when God calls them to. I pray they will know that choosing to be brave because of Jesus’ love for them and for others is worth it, no matter how scared they feel by the choice. The husband and I want them to know that they can say yes to crazy things if God leads them to, and that we will be behind them 100%, no matter how brave we have to be as parents watching them say yes.

So, this trip is also for my boys and the story that’s being written for them. It only made sense that Mini Asher and Mini Timo should head to Rwanda with me so we can create a lighthearted story of our own! I hope you will follow along.

The Land of a Thousand Hills, Over the Sea From Me

July 20, 2015January 1, 2018 ~ tashajun ~ 2 Comments

There are 16 days until I head to the land of a thousand hills for the first time.When I was asked to consider going to Rwanda with my church last April, my first thought was that it was only that: an exciting thought that was for someone else and not me, due to our season in life. I said I would pray and think about it…but I really thought I knew that my answer would be a no. That evening, I told the husband about it over the phone in our usual he’s-heading-home-from-work-while-i’m-cooking-dinner-and-at my-wits-end-because-it’s-5:30pm-and-the-boys-are-running-in circles-around-the-house-or-fighting-phone-conversation, fully expecting him to say it was too crazy for us right now. After all, he is the one grounded in reality and I am the one with my head in the clouds. Instead, he simply said, “You should go.” Jaw-drop. I am pretty sure I relayed the details again, just in case he couldn’t hear me due to his electric-guitar-damaged-ears and the Pteranadon-level-screaming my boys are capable of during play and sibling fighting: Africa. Me going. In a few months. We have no one to watch the kids. He said the same thing again, and added, “We can figure out the details. It sounds too good to miss.”

Too good to miss. The hubby is realistic, yes, but his reality is not only grounded in the hard and tangible facts, it is also grounded in not missing the ultimate fact that God does amazing things in and beyond our current reality, and these things are things you don’t want to miss. I am so thankful for his faith.

So, we said yes.

In 2003, I was spending the week on the Spanish coast with the ministry team I was doing campus ministry with in Germany that year. We were in Spain for a week mid-year conference for encouragement and training with teams that were serving all over Europe. On an afternoon off, my teammates and I went to the Rock of Gibraltar and at one point before heading back up the coast to our conference site, we stood and looked at the sea. In the distance, we could see Africa. I can’t describe the feeling I had then, but I remember wondering and sensing that there was yet much of God to see and know in that continent that had always seemed so far away before. I wondered if I would ever get to go there.

And now, more than 12 years later, with 16 days to go, I will be standing on that continent for the first time. And while I don’t have a clue what it will be like there, my heart is expectant to see God in the people there. I don’t love travel only because it is exciting. Like Mark Twain, I agree that to a degree, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” I have needed it sorely on those accounts in my own life. But it’s more than mere travel. It’s seeing the One who made the lands and people so different from our own, and understanding that we are connected and meant to be connected because of Him. It’s traveling and seeing more of the places and people God’s heart beats for, and allowing our own hearts to grow and beat with his for the same, not just in theory but up-close and personally. I believe that travel can deepen the fear of God in our lives and directly combats against our natural fears of all that seems so “other” to us.

While in Rwanda, our team will be working with ALARM and specifically with women leaders. We will helping to put on a conference for around 40 women from all over the country. These are women who have influence where they live and the conference will serve to encourage and equip them in their leadership. Would you pray alongside of us for these strong, precious women who will be traveling to learn about the bible and about leadership from all over Rwanda? And would you pray for our team as we prepare to travel and for our upcoming travel and all of the last minute details?

I am almost finished reading Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven, co-authored by L. Gregory Jones and by Celestin Musekura, the founder of ALARM. If you haven’t read this book, you should. Not only does it shed light on the history of Rwanda, it is powerful in it’s message of forgiveness and I have been so moved by Celestin Musekura’s story, vision and ministry. I think we, as the global church, can learn so much from the message of forgiveness through our Rwandan brothers and sisters who have modeled this and continue to do so, in such amazing ways.

There’s more to come. I hope you will join me here, and travel with us in the days ahead…