From time to time, I receive calls from social workers in various New York hospitals. As I come to understand their hearts—struggling to help Korean patients who cannot communicate in English—I see how their compassion eventually reaches me, weaving together a chain of helping hands.

I will never forget one beautiful social worker who had been searching desperately for a Korean person who could help a Korean woman in her forties who had been neglected in an adult home for years. When she finally found me, she was so overjoyed that her eyes filled with tears. The radiant expression on her face—overflowing with pure delight—was unforgettable, like the face of an angel.

In daily life, each person naturally carries out their own roles. Yet beyond the roles of parent, child, or worker, there are other parts we are called to play.

There are secrets you cannot see unless you suffer. There is a friend you cannot meet unless you feel loneliness. There are hearts you cannot melt unless you shed tears. There are miracles you cannot believe unless you have been ill. There is the wind of freedom you cannot feel unless you have been confined. There is no sharing in the sufferings of Christ unless you have been tested. There is no usefulness unless you have been refined in the furnace of adversity.

Everything you face today is your privilege, and the grace of God— a path on which you walk with Christ, bearing His yoke, a journey pressing on toward wholeness.

— Wanhee Yoon, August 27, 1999