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My father immigrated to the United States on June 29, 1974 at age 68. At the farewell luncheon in Korea he declared to his friends and colleagues that he plans to travel the world to preach the Gospel like Apostle Paul. Indeed he traveled to Chicago, Jersey City (NJ), Philadelphia, Erie (PA), Denver, Boston, Greensboro (NC), San Jose, San Francisco, LA, Vancouver (Canada), and other places—more than 10 cities and 8 states in North America—and tirelessly proclaimed the Gospel. He loved studying and preaching the Word; and he gave his earnest and best effort to practice what he preached. His attraction and curiosity toward the Bible converted him to Christianity at age 17. His faithfulness to the Word helped him to overcome the Japanese colonial power, gave him the courage to oppose the Shinto worship during the World War II, and helped him to endure the imprisonment for 5 years and 4 months which was imposed on him by the Japanese police for opposing the Shinto worship. He tried to live to the end in accordance with the Apostle Paul’s words: to die and to live with Christ everyday (Gal. 2:20; I Cor. 15: 31).*(FN) In the United States he settled down in Chicago in an apartment newly built and ran by the Chicago Housing Authority. In front of the apartment was a newly built Truman Community College where an ESL class was taught by a now renown ESL author and teacher in Korea, Min Byung Chul. My father took up the biblical name, Jacob, and diligently undertook the study of English—mostly concentrating on the grammar—the subject he had once studied some 30 years ago in the Pyung Yang prison when the Bible was no longer allowed in the cell. My father loved Jacob and liked to identify himself with him for being a blessing to Pharoah despite his “few and hard years” he had lived as he confessed to Pharoah (Gen. 47:9, 10). I am sure, my father would have liked to be considered a source of blessings, like Jacob, to many believers he had touched through his life-long ministry of the Word. When he was pastoring a church in Denver in 1988, after returning from a busy preaching engagement in San Francisco, he developed shingles on his left arm and hand. His palm was dotted with irritated red nerve endings that each looked like a sand particle but caused him a great deal of pain. To avoid the pain some, said the doctor, would even go so far as to amputate the limb. There is no cure; and the painful effect last for a lifetime. My father had to take 6 pills of Tylenol (extra strength) everyday for the rest of his life. My mother confided in me that the outburst of the shingles at the pick was the most difficult time in her marriage. When I visited him (from Chicago), he was able to resume his daily routine. During a walk in one of those balmy Colorado winter afternoons, he shared with me a Bible verse and told me that the thought of Christ on the cross was the only thing that got him through the period of pain: “… always carrying in the body the death of Jesus…” (II Cor. 4:10). It was the first time I ever heard him talk about Christ’s suffering as vicarious. Christ's suffering enabled him to endure his. In the next year, in May of 1989 he lost his second son, Chung Shin, to a severe depression in Chicago. Arriving at the airport from Boston, as he was met with his younger brother, Rev. Lee Myung Jae, and a long time friend, Ms. Park In Soon (who had also campaigned with him against the Shinto worship) he gave out a loud moan of grief with profusion of tears. In a few months later, in 1990 in Boston where he resided, he again wailed out load for several days at the passing of Mrs. Pek Young Oak, the wife of the long deceased dear friend of his, Mr. Cha Jai Sun, with whom my father served his home town church together in Mil Yang in 1930’s. (Mr. Cha served as a pastor there as a seminarian).**(FN) Thus, my father had his share of suffering both in his midlife in Korea under the Japanese colonialism as well as in his later years in America. Converted to Christianity, he remained a Confucian who upheld the ideal of being a virtuous man (君子, 군자), cherished friendship and loyalty, and maintained the love of learning throughout his life. However in 1960’s he seemed to have been a strict authoritarian. Influenced by the American fundamentalism, he at one point forbade us, the children, from listening to the radio. Had we had a TV (not many could afford it at the time), I am sure, he would have forbidden it too. He was also preoccupied with doctrinal issues at the Synod meetings. I remember him vigorously debating with his long time friend, Rev. Pek Young Hee, regarding whether or not the saved soul could sin, the debate which ultimately cost the friendship, which was however restored later after some decades. In his later years my father's theological focus seems to have changed. Rather than the doctrinal issues, he devoted himself to learning and teaching about the fullness of the Holy Spirit and about becoming like Christ in one’s character and life. For example, he liked to share with me and my mother at lunch what he meditated on in the morning that day. I remember him talking about the Gospel of John and quietly repeating to himself and to us the verse: “... I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). One day he confided in me what he had shared with a young pastor: A secret to being a pastor is: “For Christ did not please himself…” (Rom. 15:3). Pastoring meant being a servant to others. The favorite verse he liked to meditate on was II. Cor. 3: 18 (which he one time asked me, a seminarian, to translate directly from the Greek text): “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” He earnestly tried, as he preached, to become transformed into His likeness. He did not talk much about his 5 year- and 4 month-imprisonment he suffered along with other fellow Christians at the hands of Japanese during the WW II. To our amazement, he did not consider it to be an extraordinary or heroic feat of faith. In one of his sermons he states: “We could all courageously give up our life for Christ one day when the opportunity presents itself and as result obtain the glory of martyrdom. But the greater glory lies in dying with Christ everyday” (The Heavenly Visitors, 176). He thought that his decision to sacrifice his life to keep God’s honor and His Commandments was something that any Christians would do without much qualm or hesitation (although he knew this was not true at all). Thus, he did not think to highlight the remarkable feat of his faith. His humility also forbade him to talk about it much. For a long time—probably from the time of his imprisonment—he only had a slim peripheral vision on his right eye, the condition he came to know very much later, in 1980’s. (The right retina had been irreparably damaged in the center for a long time.) On September 11, 1997 he got up from his bed in the morning, called his wife to his bedside, and quietly said: “I have become like Isaac.” At age 91 he had completely lost the sight in his left eye, the only eye he had been relying on for many years. The small veins behind the retina had burst (in a little stroke), clouding the entire inner eyeball. As the ophthalmologist pronounced, he had become “legally blind in both eyes.” As result, he could no longer read the Bible and sermons (of other pastors) as he used to enjoy doing. He had to stop his daily walk, too, and suddenly became confined to his bed. He felt helpless and distraught. The wait had begun. In her autobiography, If I Die, Ms. Ahn Yi Sook, who had also been imprisoned with him in Pyung Yang for opposing the Shinto worship, referred to my father as “meek as a lamb.” And just as his self-chosen name suggests (仁宰, 어질인 재상재), my father was a meek and gentle person who easily sympathized with the unfortunate, on one hand, and also just as easily came to a righteousness indignation when he saw injustice, on the other. The Shinto worship was one of the most unjust and deplorable event that provoke his righteous indignation as a Christian. As much as the Shinto worship was a violation of God’s Commandments, it also went against the Confucius sense of virtue (his first name,仁, is one of the key Confucius words meaning goodness, man-to-man-ness, benevolence, love, virtue, or human-heartedness). He could not tolerate the defamation of God’s name, as many Christians succumbed to the pressures of the Japanese colonialism and observed the Shinto worship. By a simple, personal act, despite its great risk to his life and family, he thought, as he told me, that he could redeem God’s name and honor. So he stubbornly refused to bow down before the Shinto gate and actively campaigned against the Japanese edict forcing all Koreans to participate in the Shinto ceremony. On April 30, 2000, in the early morning on the first Sunday after Easter, at 1:50 AM, as the cherry blossoms fell in droves at the gentle breeze of spring, my father breathed his last quiet breath and committed himself to God entirely in the presence of his watchful wife. He thus remained gentle and meek both in his life and in his death: "Blessed are the meek..." Chungsoo J. Lee (이정수 李 廷 秀) |
| A son's memory |
| A Korean art work purchased and owned by Rev. Lee |
| With Chungsoo, the youngest son, a freshman at Wheaton College, 1978 |
Chungsoo Lee's June 2008 interview with Kingdom Resources for Christ Magazine on the legacy of Rev. Lee |