A description of your spiritual growth and development. Include, for example, the faith heritage into which you were born and describe and explain any subsequent, personal conversions, your call to ministry, religious experiences, and significant persons and events that have impacted, or continue to impact, your spiritual growth and development.
As I look back on my faith journey thus far, my spiritual growth and development can be characterized as learning to appreciate “the benefits” of the Lord (Ps 103:2) in the face of diverse situations life throws at me. Ever since I began to recognize myself as a Christian, I have kept asking what such benefits are in having a relationship with God restored through Jesus Christ.
Fortunately, there were three important encounters—1) encountering God in terms of religious conversion at a church youth retreat; 2) encountering the message of the gospel with the help of Rev. Timothy Keller; 3) encountering shame as a personal and academic research topic—turned into three major turning points spread over the period of four stages—1) religious curiosity; 2) religious fervor; 3) exploring faith identity; 4) toward loving neighbor—when it comes to my spiritual growth and development. Each turning point becomes a transitioning, watershed moment as I move from one stage to the next. Thus, below I will describe each of the four stage in terms of my spiritual growth and development, as well as how the three encounters have occasioned for me to transition from one stage to the next.
Among these four stages, stages one and two (religious curiosity and religious fervor) are before I have come to understand and embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, while stages three and four (exploring faith identity and toward loving neighbor) are after I have understood what the gospel message is. (In a sense, therefore, it can be said that I have become a Christian after stage three, while I have considered myself a Christian all the way from stage two on.) Also, the latter two stages are not necessarily to be taken as chronologically linear, which means that these two stages are simultaneous and ongoing, while the third stage did begin earlier than the last one. In describing all these encounters and stages, I will focus on all of them as part of a process of figuring out, appreciating, and helping others to appreciate “the benefits” of the Lord. In particular, it should be noted that dealing with shame in my life has become one of the central benefits of the Lord I have learned, which I enjoy so sweetly so far, for the purposing of living a life of service to God and others.
Religious Curiosity
The first time I went to church was, as far as I remember, when my mother took me to a church kindergarten’s Sunday school. My mother, who was born and grew up in a Christian family, was a nominal Christian at most, but she wanted her son to go to church regularly, so at a very young age I began going to church. However, I was not interested in what the church professed; my only interests were that at church I could have a lot of great food and have a great time with my friends. Thus, I went to church whenever I felt like it, which means that I did not go to church whenever I did not feel like it either. Even so, I was curious about what church was all about and who God was, however latent such curiosity might have been. Thus, when I was at church, I was reading the Bible, praying, and doing everything required of me, in vague hope of hearing something interesting and valuable, only to find nothing. Such latent curiosity lasted all the way through my elementary school years. Once having entered junior high school, I have added one more reason to go to church: girls. As a hot-blooded youth, I became highly interested in girls, which has led me to be even more active at church. Because of my active involvement at church, people at church thought of and treated me as if I were Christian, but deep down I knew I was not. At this point of my life, I was not even aware that there are such things as “the benefits” of the Lord.
However, in my junior year in high school, I went to a summer church youth retreat, and it was the night before the last day that I experienced something burning in my heart. When the pastor finished preaching, he urged all of us to pray together aloud, asking us to call out “God!” three times together. (This was still when I was in Korea, and Korean Christians are known for their praying aloud.) Not having been used to such type of prayer, I was reluctant to join all my friends who were praying while crying and shouting and even speaking in tongues. A little while, I felt something hot inside me and suddenly found myself praying to God with all of them, crying and shouting. That was my first encounter with God and the beginning of my religious fervor, making me even more active about church activities.
After the retreat, I never missed a Sunday worship service, served in the church’s youth group choir, led prayer meetings in my school’s Christian club, etc. However, it was just pure religious enthusiasm without any concrete knowledge of God, whom I claimed to be serving and loving yet knowing little. In fact, God was nothing but the mirror image of my perfect self. I knew neither anything about a God of Christianity nor about the benefits of such a God. Still, I was full of religious passion. Looking back, now I know that my religious passion stemmed from my desire to prove how religiously exemplary I was before God and my church friends, and most importantly, before myself. An emotion that had to do with proving my worth was shame, whispering to me that I would never be enough before God’s absolute moral standards, and that if I did not keep all God’s commandments, God would abandon me and see me as worthless. Apparently, shame was already plaguing my whole being. Outwardly, I would like to be known as passionately loving and serving God; inwardly, I was secretly afraid of God abandoning me.
Religious Fervor
In my college freshman year, I joined my college’s Korean Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (a sister organization of the U.S.’s Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship). The Korean IVCF was known for emphasizing reading books for spiritual growth, and through the organization I read many books by typical evangelical gurus, such as John Stott, James Packer, Francis Schaeffer, etc., which affected me deeply in terms of forming my conviction of Christianity as a comprehensive belief system for life. However, while I was growing intellectually in terms of what to believe about God and life, my shame did not go away, and the central motivation of my religious devotion was still fueled by my desire to prove my worth, that is, my shame.
At the end of my college freshman year, my parents decided to immigrate to the United States, so I had to drop out of my Korean college and had to start over at a new college in the U.S. After my immigration to the United States, I had a great culture shock as I make myself adjusted to the language, culture, convention, etc. in my new country. After transferring from a local community college to a four-year college (the University of California at Berkeley), while I did join a couple of campus Christian clubs, my shame was still the driving force for my religious enthusiasm. Even so, I enjoyed reading books on theology and Christian ministry, and I wanted to spend some more time reading books and reflecting on the Christian life. Perhaps for this reason, after graduating from college, I have gone on to pursue a Master of Divinity degree in theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. At this point, I did not set my mind on becoming a Christian minister and a theologian; I just enjoyed reading books and reflecting on my life as a Christian.
It was not until my third year at Gordon-Conwell that I finally began to grasp what the gospel message meant for me. An encounter with Rev. Timothy Keller, former senior pastor of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, provided the second turning point for my spiritual growth and development, specifically with reference to my shame. Neither am I a friend of Rev. Keller’s, nor a parishioner at his church in New York, except that I have attended his lecture on preaching at Gordon-Conwell, which changed my life forever. In that lecture, Rev. Keller began to ask how the human person experiences change according to the Bible. His answer was that the Bible focuses on the human heart, which literally became the turning point of my life. According to Keller, the heart according to the Bible is the motivational center of the human person not just involving intellect and will, but deeper desires—called affection—for survival and flourishing, such as security, approval, and control. Such desires generate all kinds of human emotions, from such negative ones as anxiety, guilt, fear, and shame to such positive ones as joy, happiness, gratitude, and serenity, all of which in turn are deeply connected to our beliefs, values, and perspectives on life. In light of this analysis, Keller argues that if a person truly wants to experience genuine change of the heart through the gospel, she should begin from noticing her emotions and desires, rather than her thinking and willing.
That hit me real hard.
Keller’s message regarding the need to be self-reflective of my emotions and desires in order to get to my heart has penetrated through my legalistic, moralistic heart covered with shame. With such keen insight, I was ready to hear the gospel message anew, from that of exhorting me to follow all the legalistic, moralistic rules for the sake of covering my shame, to God’s message of love for changing my heart from the inside out. This becomes arguably the biggest turning point for my spiritual growth and development in all my life so far, as you will see below. Thus, the third stage of my spiritual growth and development begins with my hearing the gospel message anew, in a heart-changing way.
Exploring Faith Identity
Keller helped me see myself in the older son from the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, particularly concerning my desire for approval and the shame lying behind it. While the older son kept all his father’s commandments, when his younger brother came back and his father embraced him warmly and lovingly, the older son says the following in Luke 15:29-30: “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes come home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” In terms of emotion and desire, the older brother is angry with both his father and his younger brother precisely because all his effort to keep up with what he believes to be his father’s expectations and requirements. Keller showed that the mindset of the older son was such that he needed to keep all the requirements in order to receive approval from his father, which is supposed to be exactly how his father should treat his younger brother. However, the ground of the approval for his father was not based on his performance, but the fact that he is his father’s son. Likewise, he was angry at and looking down on his younger brother precisely because his younger brother had less performance than he did in terms of keeping his father’s commandments. In other words, his mind was saying something like this: “I am not enough, and I need to do more to secure my father’s approval. Since you, my younger brother, did not work hard to receive our father’s approval, you do not deserve our father’s love!”
This is shame at its peak. Through reading the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 again, I have come to confront my own shame, telling me that I should work my way up toward gaining God’s approval through all my religious devotion and passion. Keller has shown me how the message of the gospel has taken away my shame, that I do not need to work hard to be loved by God; all I need to do was to learn to enjoy God’s love. I cannot tell you how relieving it was and it still is! I set my mind on building up my identity not around shame-based moral performance, but around learning to appreciate and enjoy God’s love. As far as I am concerned, this was the beginning of my spiritual growth and development in any tangible and concrete sense.
Once I learn to appreciate one of the “benefits” of the Lord as taking away my shame, another positive spiritual growth developed regarding how I relate to others. Just as the older brother used to ‘measure’ the worth of his younger brother based on how much of his father’s commandments his younger brother has kept, I used to ‘measure’ the worth of both others and of myself based on performance. Later I have come to realize that the gospel teaches that I should not ‘measure’ anyone according to their performance but embrace them for their being made in the image of God. When God relates to me, God did not ‘measure’ my worth according to how much I keep the biblical commandments; instead, God’s mercy and grace of acknowledging me as the divine image bearer of infinite worth came pouring down on me even in the face of all the self-centeredness in my life. Being a Christian means that I need to image such grace and mercy not only toward myself, but toward others. As the Bible says, “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or a sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:19-20). Slowly but surely, I was growing toward loving neighbor by loving myself just as God loved me.
With such insight into who I am vis-à-vis who God is, I have begun studying in a Ph.D. program in practical theology and religious faith formation at Boston University in order to broaden and deepen my understanding of all that I have learned, which opened up ways for me to reflect on the “benefits” of the Lord (especially a theological and pastoral study of shame) I have experienced in a way that could be conducive to others.
Toward Loving Neighbor: The Ministerial Calling to Healthcare Chaplaincy
Spiritual growth and development should never be just about one’s own individual religious fulfillment. According to the two greatest commandments of loving God and neighbor in the Bible, such individual religious fulfilment should be always oriented toward loving and serving others. While many people tend to regard Ph.D. study as having little to do with spiritual growth and development, my Ph.D. study has allowed me to grow spiritually in terms of translating my experience of resisting shame into helping and caring for others suffering from similar issues. Additionally, it was through this process of rigorous theological and pastoral engagement with shame that I began to consider healthcare chaplaincy as a possible career path for me.
My scholarly engagement with shame as a personal and theological theme started with studying it in terms of the Christian doctrine of justification by grace through faith, for it is through believing God’s justifying grace which people are assured of what they were forgiven by God and in what manner such forgiveness has been granted through the death and resurrection of Christ. My concern has been that many churches and theologians in the West have tended to focus upon the human guilt as what Christ’s death has justified sinners, while setting aside the place and meaning of shame in Christ’s atonement. While guilt delivers the message of “I did wrong,” shame delivers the message of “I am wrong.” In other words, guilt is primarily about external behavior, and shame about personal and communal identities. (To be sure, these two emotions happen simultaneously in reality and not easily distinguished; however, scholars still make a distinction between the two for the sake of clarity in research.) Thus, if God’s justifying grace has only to do with guilt, then it cannot address my existential shame which I have been relieved of with the help of Tim Keller.
Therefore, such traditional construal of the doctrine did not provide me with tools to understand and explain my experience of being freed from the grip of shame over my life, preventing me from resisting it through confessing God’s justifying grace for my life. While this essay is not a place for me to go into much theologizing of how the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is available for those who suffer from shame, one thing I have been helped in my spiritual growth and development in this regard is that the term ‘justify’ (make just) is originally a relational term, referring to the relational restoration between God and humanity, by means of God’s granting all the members of humanity the dignity of divine image bearers. All human persons want to be treated with dignity and honor worthy of their humanness, and if God acknowledges that every human person is God’s image bearer, then no one needs to feel the shame of being treated as less than human but is required to stand up against any such treatment against oneself as well as against any other human persons. Such study of the doctrine of justification, therefore, allows me to look beyond my own suffering toward helping others who suffer just as much from shame and other mental health issues. Still, how do I do that?
To this question, it was my study of narrative and identity which helped me see the clues for how God’s justifying grace could be narrated as a story for shaping the identities of people suffering from shame. We human beings are shaped and formed according to our life stories, giving us our personal and communal identities. Thus, if the ways we look at our stories change, our identities change. Interestingly, I learned that listening to someone’s story as carefully and caringly as possible empowers that person to look at her story in a new way, thereby changing her identity. This is so even without offering any advice or suggestion to aid the person’s struggle. In fact, I realized that this has been substantiated once, when I went to my college’s counseling ceneter. When I was struggling with whether I should switch my college major or not in Korea, alongside all the uncertainty with immigration and military duty, I visited my college’s student counseling center and talked to the student counselor, and all she did was to listen to my story without offering any advice. Every time I spoke to her about all my worry and fear, I felt strangely healed and relieved without her giving me the ‘answer’ I desperately wanted. In other words, I was originally looking for the answer and the solution to my struggle from her, only to find her standing in solidarity with me by showing empathy for my situation. It was a strange but enlightening experience.
In my Ph.D. study, such insight came to the fore of my consciousness, solidified and crystalized, leading me toward listening to my own story consciously and caringly, holding responsibility for self-care. At the same time, it has also spurred me to listen to other people’s stories as much consciously and caringly as possible, showing my care for others. Formerly in my pastoral counseling sessions, I used to listen to people’s stories rather glibly, more intent on finding something to tell someone I counsel, but I now pay much closer attention to what they tell me about who they are. In terms of career and vocation, it has been my dearest hope that my career will not just be a place of earning a living, but God’s unique calling for my life as I set out to serve others through my vocation as an integral part of my spiritual growth and development. In this regard, what Frederick Buechner has once said in his book Wishful Thinking has helped me a lot: “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Taking everything into consideration, I strongly believe that healthcare chaplaincy might be where God is calling me to be, precisely for the purpose of my growing spiritually through helping and serving others. In other words, following Buechner, I find the work of healthcare chaplaincy personally satisfying and publicly serving others at the same time. Doubtless there is no certainty in this, for I have never worked as a healthcare chaplain. Even so, the nature of the work of healthcare chaplaincy—listening to people’s stories and spending time with them as an expression of empathy, offering pastoral counsel and guidance to those who need them—is precisely what I have been desiring in terms of my professional life as integral to my spiritual growth and development.
Above all, it is personally satisfying because I find it deeply glad to listen to other people’s stories and to help them experience change of their beliefs, values, and perspectives on life with or without offering pastoral counsel and advice. On more scholarly terms for my intellectual development as part of spiritual growth and development (I am gladly aware that there is the journal of healthcare chaplaincy, to which I possibly would like to submit journal articles in the future.), I also find it fascinating that the human person is psychosomatic, drawing me to have deep interests in such issues as addiction, depression, and trauma. There is arguably no better person than the healthcare chaplain who can not only witness firsthand how the psychosomatic dynamic of change happens, but also assist the person with whatever spiritual care is necessary, which is why I look forward to growing spiritually through the work of healthcare chaplaincy.
It is also a great channel to publicly serve others because helping people to live healthily—both physically and spiritually—has tremendous public value for the common good. I believe that one of the most significant ways religion can contribute to the common good is precisely this point. Spiritual care provided at hospital, I hope, has the potential to invite people to accept a particular religious heritage, or at least to listen to the ancient wisdom of religions which they have not been paying much attention to thus far in their lives, which might help them live their lives as wise human beings and good citizens. At the same time, I am convinced that serving others as a healthcare chaplain can provide another opportunity for my own spiritual growth by encountering those with other religious traditions. I believe that engaging people from other religious traditions, whether patients, doctors, nurses, or other chaplains is not only a way of public service in terms of promoting mutual understanding among religious people, cultivating reconciliation and peaceful existence among religions, but also a way of spiritual growth in terms of learning about the self through others. Paul Ricoeur, a renowned philosopher whom I have high regard, once said, “the shortest route from self to self through the other.” Even if I identify myself as a Christian, that does not necessarily mean that I confine my God only to be a God of Christianity, limited by the Christian tradition. I believe that a God whom I confess to believe is much larger than Christianity and I am open to learning about my God through learning about other religious traditions. Such learning will expand my intellectual, relational, and spiritual horizons, which is itself a great opportunity for my spiritual growth.
All in all, I strive toward learning to follow the spirit of loving God and neighbor through cultivating my own spiritual growth, and I have high expectations for what God has in store for me. Thank you so much for reading this essay on my journey of spiritual growth and development. May God bless your journey and mine in growing to love and care for people, including ourselves.