Psalm 73:28

Psalm 73:28 ~ But as for me, how good it is to be near God!  I have made the Sovereign Lord my shelter, and I will tell everyone about the wonderful things you do.


This was a verse that I read a few days ago.  I believe that God spoke to me through this scripture and I just have to tell everyone of the wonderful things that He has recently done in my life. So, I'm moving to South Korea. This has been almost a year long process of preparation since the Lord first whispered the words into my heart to this moment, my final weeks here in the USA.  Why am I doing something so crazy?!  I don't speak the language, the culture is very different from western culture, and I'm moving really far away from home.  I don't know.  My heart yearns to travel to other cultures and get to know people in their own familiar setting. I want to be the foreigner who is placed in an uncomfortable and daunting situation. Granted, everyday I step outside my door I am in some ways a foreigner as I interact with unbelievers. My culture, my home, is in Jesus Christ.  I don't fit in with the majority of my fellow American citizens. Maybe this realization has been one of many that the Lord has shown me to mold my heart into one that is willing to let go of the familiar and follow Him to the unknown.

O.K. It's time to dig into the goodness of God. So I'm moving to South Korea to teach English as a Second or Foreign Language. I originally wanted to move overseas to work but teaching English was not at the top of my list. I didn't know what options were out there for working overseas so I decided to do a Google search. Yup, good 'ol Google. You can find so much on the Internet. Most of the jobs that came up were either medical jobs (I'm unqualified), tourism jobs (hmm, watching other people having fun travelling? No thanks), or ESL teaching jobs (am I unqualified?).  With some prompting from my sister I decided to at least look into this option. We learned that you don't necessarily need a teaching degree but TEFL  (Teach English as a Foreign Language) certification would be a good idea. So I signed up to this TEFL email list to get a free PDF info book about teaching overseas. The book wouldn't come up so I thought, "Oh well." and promptly forgot about my search in the busyness of life. 

Fast forward to a couple months later. I was emptying out my Spam folder when I came across an email from the TEFL website that sparked my interest. They had been sending me emails constantly and I just ignored them since they were going directly to my Spam folder. The email spoke about a guy who worked for a year in a pizza factory so that he could save up money to take a TEFL course and then travel overseas to teach. The article itself wasn't that amazing, but I started reading other stories, including testimonies about teaching, and learned that TEFL teaching isn't like ordinary English teaching. There's A LOT of creativity involved. Creativity that someone with an acting background such as mine could really enjoy. And so began my searching and praying about teaching ESL overseas. I knew I would teach in an Asian country. I just needed to decide which one. Pretty quickly I settled on either South Korea or Japan.  Really, I just happened to mention to a coworker that I was thinking about teaching overseas and he mentioned that he had once pursued the possibility of teaching in Japan and that he had a friend who had taught in South Korea. Hmm. I did some research and decided that South Korea was where I wanted to go. (This was partly influenced by the fact that I had a South Korean friend who was there already.)

Next, began the crazy process of deciding where I wanted to teach and when I wanted to go. Do I teach in a hagwon (private school) or a public school? Do I want to live in the Seoul, the largest city, or a smaller city? Should I leave in 6 months or a year? All of these questions I brought before the Lord. I'd like to say He made the answers extremely clear, but the reality is that He walked me step by step through the process revealing only enough to get me to take the next step. I'm thankful that I was studying the book of Acts in my BSF Bible study at the time because there were moments when I felt like Paul as he was guided by the Holy Spirit to go or don't go to certain areas to share the gospel. Actually, the Lord used my study in this book to confirm His call for me to go. I can remember reading about Paul's decision to to go to an unfamiliar land with unfamiliar people and share the gospel. The Lord was asking me if I was also willing to follow Him to an unknown land and an unfamiliar people. The book of Acts also taught me to wait for the Lord to lead me and trust Him even when things look uncertain or confusing.

So let me share with you the goodness of God in how He lead me to the city of Changwon. I decided that I didn't want to move to Seoul - too big and too popular! The cities on my list were the next largest cities in South Korea - Busan, Incheon, Daegu, Daejeon, and Gwangju. My sister (who is also moving to Korea to teach English) found some cool information about Daejeon, so we settled on applying to work there as a first choice. Well, when we applied for the EPIK public school program we were told you no longer had a choice about which city you wanted to live in, you would be put wherever they decided to place you. Boo! Alright, if the Lord wanted us in Daejeon we would be placed there, if He wanted us somewhere else then we'd be place in that city. Well, we didn't get into EPIK. We then decided we would try to get into the public school by applying directly to the Ministry of Education (MOE) in individual cities.  We weren't able to apply for Daejeon schools so we decided maybe we should go for Korea's second largest city, Busan. Through a recruiter (who later turned out to be not that great) we applied with the Busan MOE. We didn't get into their schools either but we did learn about an interesting city called Changwon, which was located 40 minutes away from Busan. After dumping our recruiter we started to search on our own for jobs at private Schools all over South Korea. There were many jobs advertising for Changwon positions. One in particular preferred to have a teacher who was a Christian. I applied, interviewed, and eventually obtained a position with CNS Academy. The leaders are Christians, which is an extra blessing because I didn't even ask the Lord for this, and one of them even leads the music worship at his church, which is what I do at my church. Cool!

Writing this makes it sound so simple, but the process was long and bathed in a lot of prayer and even fasting. There were a lot of frustrating moments when I cried out to the Lord "Why do I have to go through this!?" And there were a lot of verses that He used to comfort me and encourage me to trust Him.  Hebrews 10:35-36 ~ So do not throw away this confident trust in the Lord. Remember the great reward it brings you!  Patient endurance is what you need now, so that you will continue to do God’s will. Then you will receive all that he has promised. I don't know what South Korea holds in store for me but I know that the Lord will be with me every step of the way. There are no coincidences in His plans. He has me going there for a reason. My sister will eventually join me in Changwon. She is currently searching for a position but now she knows which city to focus on. I'm confident that the Lord will bring just the right position for her.  He did it before and He'll do it again. And when He does I can't wait to share about the wonderful things He's doing in her life.