One another

Six rooms

For forty-four years I have been making rooms for people who did not have one.

An orphanage in Uijeongbu. An interpreter’s booth. A church for people who could not pray in Korean. A school for other people’s children. A cancer ward in Houston. And now a museum. Six different rooms, one instinct — and not one of them built alone.

1984 – 1987 · Hwarang & Soongsin Orphanages, Uijeongbu

The rice paddy

Bear with one another.

I came at twenty-one with a one-way ticket and no Korean. They did not put me in a mission compound. They put me in an orphanage in Uijeongbu, among children whose parents were gone, and I stayed three years. We planted rice together. I was in the water beside them and I was not good at it. My own father had come home less and less until he did not come home at all. Nobody there knew that about me. But I understood the room I was standing in.

Who stood in the water beside you when you were small?

Planting rice behind the orphanage, Uijeongbu

1988 – 1997 · Youngnak Church · The National Prayer Breakfast

The interpreter’s booth

Submit to one another.

For nine years my work was to disappear. Headphones on, inside a booth, turning Korean into English and English into Korean — Sunday mornings at Youngnak, and the National Prayer Breakfast in front of the country’s leaders. An interpreter has no sentences of his own. You carry another person’s meaning across and you do not add to it. When I was twenty-one I sat alone in a basement and watched a 16 mm film of Billy Kim standing beside Billy Graham at Yoido Plaza in 1973, turning his English into Korean for the 3.2 million who came over five days. I did not know that was a job. I have spent much of my life doing it.

Whose voice needs carrying this week — and are you willing to be the one nobody notices?

The interpretation booth — the sign above the window reads KOREAN

1998 – 2025 · Youngnak IWE · Somang EWS · Sinchon SCIC

A church you could pray in

Welcome one another.

Seoul was full of people who could not pray in Korean — students, workers, soldiers, scholars a long way from home. So we made a room. International Worship in English began at Youngnak in 1998 and I stayed fourteen years. Then Somang. Then Sinchon, until November 2025. On Thanksgiving Sunday in 2008 the Korean congregation and the English one worshipped as one service: I presided in English with Korean slides, then in Korean with English slides. That evening nobody was a guest.

Who sits near you every week — at work, at church, in your building — who still has no room?

The international congregation on the steps of the mission hall, Seoul

2007 – 2022 · Seoul Foreign School board and foundation

A school for other people’s children

Carry one another’s burdens.

Fourteen years on a school board is not a story anyone tells at dinner. Trustee, then secretary, then eight years as chair of the Foundation. Most of it was budgets and buildings and long meetings about things that would matter to children I would never meet. That is most of what love looks like after the first ten years: showing up for the dull part, for people who will never know your name.

What would you keep doing faithfully if no one ever thanked you for it?

Seoul Foreign School — the flags of its students' countries

2012 – 2013 · MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston

The worst room in the hospital

Comfort one another.

The year Korea made me a citizen, I was in Houston learning to sit with people who were dying — four units of clinical pastoral education at MD Anderson. Korean patients, a minority, a long way from home, in the hardest week of their lives, and the language I had spent thirty years learning turned out to be the thing they needed. You do not fix that room. You go in, you stay, and you do not look at the door.

Is there a room you have been staying out of because you don’t know what to say?

Now · Seoul Bible Museum

A room a whole country can walk into

Teach one another.

I turned sixty-five in November 2025 and finished an eight-year plan: I stepped out of the pulpit at Sinchon and went back to full-time missionary work. Not a retirement — a completion. What I am building now is a permanent place in Korea where the Bible is not a book you are handed but a room you walk into. It is the same instinct I had in Uijeongbu at twenty-three. Make a room. Leave the door open.

What would you start at sixty-five?

Gwanghwamun — the museum is imagined a few steps from where I am standing

2025–2026 · Daejeon, Wonju and Sejong

And one more room, with a net through the middle of it

Encourage one another.

In 2025 I won two national senior doubles championships — Daejeon in June, Wonju in October — and was promoted to the Gold League. Promotion is not the same as belonging, and for a while I was the man who kept losing to better players. Then on 2 September 2026, at the 3rd Sejong Special Self-Governing City Sports Council President’s Cup National Senior Tennis Championship, Lee Byung-seong and I won the Gold League for 65 to 69 — my first win in that league. I arrived in this country with nine hundred dollars, a cowboy hat and no Korean. Now I am a Seoul honorary citizen losing my breath in national tournaments against men my own age. Doubles, not singles. I have never been much good at anything alone.

The 8th Wonju Mayor’s Cup national senior tennis championship, 23–24 October 2025

Gold League champions, 65 to 69 — with Lee Byung-seong, Sejong, 2 September 2026

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