North Korea

I just finished an engaging book about the lives of North Korean defectors called Nothing to Envy. I always kinda knew about North Korea, but I don't think I was ever aware until reading this book. When I was reading through it, I was constantly in shock and in anger about the condition of the country. The dictatorship. The famine. The economy. The brainwashing. I just couldn't believe it. You hear all the stats in the news, but they are just numbers. But when you hear the stories of people who lived and suffered through it...man, it just hits the heart. The images that stick in my mind are the tree bark they would pulverize to make digestible, the man who was publicly executed for a "crime" committed merely to survive, the children with normal-sized heads but incredibly stunted limbs, and how Chinese dogs ate more food than North Korean doctors. Crazy stuff. Ridiculous stuff!

I also watched this documentary of Lisa Ling following a humanitarian eye doctor into North Korea. It is a rare moment when Kim Jong-Il allows any foreigners into his country.

So after the blind are healed and able to see again, they immediately praise the great leader, Kim Jong-Il, whom they worship as a god. They believe he is so good to them and all blessings they receive come from him. They adore him. My initial reaction to their outbursts of praises to Kim Jong-Il were, "These people are psycho! Don't they know that this man is the reason for their suffering?" But I also had this wild and crazy thought that these people don't look so different than Christians. Think about it. When suffering comes, we learn to still praise God because we believe He is good. When healing comes, we credit God instead of the doctor that treated us. In a way, we're a bit "psycho" ourselves. Non-Christians look at us and say, "Why do you believe God is so good if He allowed all this shit to happen?" I don't know, sometimes I feel that Christian spirituality is a little too far-fetched for me, a little crazy to actually believe. Yet He grips my heart in a way I can't really explain to others, or even to myself!

If anything, I guess this shows how our hearts really were created to worship something or someone. Its just a matter of who or what.