Last Plane to America

Near the end of 1971, I went to the United States. I had certain
tasks that absolutely needed to be accomplished there, but
getting there was not so easy. It was not my first time to go to
the United States, yet I had to wait an unusually long time to receive my
visa. Some members suggested that I delay my departure, but I could
not do that. It was difficult for me to explain to the members, but it was
important that I leave Korea on the designated date. So I decided to go
first to Japan and receive a U.S. visa while in Japan. I was in a hurry to
leave Korea.
The day of my departure was quite cold, but so many members came
to see me off that they could not all get into the terminal. When it came
time for me to go through the passport control desk, however, it was
discovered that my passport was missing the stamp of the section chief
of the Foreign Ministry’s passport section. This stamp was required as
proof that the government had cleared me to leave the country. Because
of this, I missed the flight I had been scheduled to board.
The members who had prepared for my departure apologized profusely
and suggested that I return home and wait while they tracked
down the section chief and got him to place his stamp in my passport.
“No,” I told them. “I will wait here at the airport. Go quickly and get
the stamp.”
My heart was extremely urgent. It happened to be a Sunday, so the
section chief would not be at his desk. But I could not afford to let myself
be concerned by such matters. In the end, our members went to the
home of the section chief and had him place his stamp in my passport.
So I was able to board the final flight of the day out of Korea. That night,
the government declared a national state of emergency and imposed
heavy restrictions on foreign travel by private citizens. I had boarded
the last flight that would allow me to go to America.
I applied for a U.S. visa in Japan, but again it was refused. I discovered
later what the problem was. The Korean government still had a
record of my being detained by the Japanese colonial police just prior
to liberation on charges of being a communist. The early 1970s was a
time when communism was spreading with ferocity. We had sent missionaries
to 127 countries, but those in four communist countries were
expelled. Evangelizing in communist countries in that era could result
in death. I never gave up, however, and continued to send missionaries
to the Soviet Union and other communist countries.
Our first missionary to Czechoslovakia arrived in 1968. Around 1980,
we began to refer to our mission work in the communist countries of Eastern
Europe as “Mission Butterfly.” A larva must go through a long period of
suffering before it can grow wings and become a butterfly, and we felt that
this was similar to the suffering of our underground missionaries working
in communist countries. It is a difficult process for a butterfly to come out
of its cocoon, but once it has its wings, the butterfly can fly anywhere it
wants. In the same way, we knew that once communism came to its demise,
our missionaries would grow wings and begin to fly.
Missionary Young Oon Kim, who had gone to the United States in early
1959, toured the major universities in that country to convey God’s word. In the
process, she met Peter Koch, a German student at the University of California
at Berkeley, and this young man decided to suspend his studies and travel by
ship to Rotterdam and then start his missionary work in Germany. Missionaries
to the communist countries of Asia were sent out from Japan. These
missionaries had to be sent to places where their lives could be in danger
without so much as a special worship service to mark their departure. This
pained me as much as having to push Bong Choon Choi to try again to
smuggle himself into Japan during our final meeting in the pine forest behind
the Gabsa temple. A parent who has to watch a child being punished
would much rather be allowed to take the punishment himself. I would
have preferred to go out as a missionary myself. My heart was full of tears as
I sent those members to places where they would be watched and possibly
executed for their religious activities. Once the missionaries had left, I spent
most of my time in prayer. Earnest prayers were the best thing that I could
do to help protect their lives. Missionary work in communist countries was
dangerous work. A missionary never knew when the Communist Party
might take him.
People who went as missionaries to communist countries could not
even tell their parents where they were going. The parents knew well the
dangers of going to such countries and would never give permission for
their children to go. Gunther Werzer was discovered by the KGB and
deported. In Romania, where the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu
was at its height of power, the secret police were constantly following
and intercepting the telephone calls of our missionaries.
It was as if the missionaries had gone into the lion’s den. The number
of missionaries going to communist countries, however, kept growing.
Then in 1973, there was a terrible incident in Czechoslovakia where
thirty of our members were taken into custody. One member, Marie
Zivna, lost her life while in prison at the young age of twenty-four. She
was the first martyr who died while conducting missionary work in a
communist country. In the following year, another person lost his life
in prison. Each time I heard that one of our members had died in jail,
my entire body froze. I could not speak or eat. I couldn’t even pray. I just
sat motionless for a while, unable to do anything. It was as if my body
had turned to stone. If those people had never met me, or never heard
what I taught, they never would have found themselves in a cold and
lonely jail cell, and they never would have died the way they did. When
they died, they suffered in my place. I asked myself, “Is my life worth
so much that it could be exchanged for theirs? How am I going to take
on the responsibility for the evangelization of the communist bloc that
they were bearing in my place?” I could not speak. I fell into a sorrow
that seemed to have no end, as if I had been thrown into deep water. I
saw Marie Zivna before me in the form of a yellow butterfly. The yellow
butterfly that had escaped Czechoslovakia’s prison fluttered its wings as
if to tell me to be strong and to stand up. By carrying on her missionary
activities at the risk of her life, Marie truly had been transformed from
being a caterpillar to being a beautiful butterfly.
Missionaries working in such extreme circumstances often received
revelations through dreams and visions. They were isolated and could
not communicate freely with others, so God gave them revelations to
let them know the path they must follow. It would often happen that a
missionary who had lain down to sleep for a short while would have a
dream in which he was told, “Get up quickly and go someplace else.”
He did as he was told in the dream, only to discover later that the secret
police had raided the place where he had been resting. In another instance,
a member had a dream in which a person he had never seen
before came to him and told him how to carry out his missionary work.
Later, when he met me for the first time, he exclaimed, “You’re the person
I saw in my dream.”
This was how I had risked my life and the lives of our members to
overthrow communism and build God’s Kingdom. Yet, the United
States would not give me a visa, because it suspected me of being a communist.
Finally, in Canada, after submitting materials illustrating my claim
to be anticommunist, I was able to receive a visa to the United States.
The reason I went to all this trouble to go to America was to fight against the
dark forces that had caused America’s moral degradation. I left Korea to wage
war on the forces of evil. At the time, all the major problems of the world—
communism, drugs, moral decadence, and immorality—were mixed together
in a hellish stew. I declared, “I have come to America as a fireman and a doctor.
If a house catches fire, a fireman needs to come, and if someone is sick, a doctor
pays a visit.” I was like a fireman who had gone to America to extinguish the
fires of immorality, and like a doctor who had gone to cure America of the
illness that made it lose sight of God and go to the brink of decadence.
America in the early 1970s was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and
activists were protesting. It was a country seriously divided. Young people
searching for meaning experimented with alcohol, drugs, and
free sex and in the process were neglecting their eternal souls.
Mainstream religion, which should have provided guidance to such young
people, was not performing its role. It could not help them end their aimless
wandering and return to proper ways of living. The hedonistic, materialistic
culture dragged many young people down, because they had no place
to rest their hearts.
Soon after I arrived in the United States, I toured the country,
speaking on the topics “The Future of Christianity” and “God’s Hope
for America.” In front of large audiences, I criticized the weaknesses of
America in a way that no one else would.
I spoke about how America was founded on the Puritan spirit and had
grown to be the strongest country in the world in just two hundred years
because it received God’s boundless love and blessing. I reminded the audiences
that America’s freedom comes from God but that today America had
cast God aside. “America has a great tradition,” I said. “All you have to do is
revive it.” I went to awaken America’s spirit, to save America from destruction,
to urge people to repent and return to God.