Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Frozen Chosen

Which reminds me that there are many very old books that have antiquated spellings of the name of the country Korea, transliterated as "Corea" or "Chosen." I suppose that some jokers might laugh at that and think that perhaps the Koreans imagine themselves as the Chosen People but that would be a misunderstanding. The Jewish people are the Chosen ones and the rest of us are the Gentiles are the grafted on branches, even the Japanese who tend to disdain the Koreans as a race inferior to them. Which was another annoying thing about Cori when she was talking about the Koreans and putting them down as if she thought herself Japanese. I thought that was weird because if you are in a missionary family you know that all of those peoples in all of those counries have various prejudices against each other and there are higher and lower classes who would rather die than sit next to each other on a church pew but the missionary is American so that missionaries can stay above all of that internal class warfare stuff and just preach the Gospel to everybody regardless of race or ethnicity, all those who have ears to hear and are willing to listen, because that is the job of the missionary or the preacher. We don't really care who is Brahmin or Untouchable or whatever. The Gospel is an equal opportunity employer in one sense even though not everyone is called to do that. I may not be called individually to do that but I am just saying that it is the principle of the thing that we don't want to get involved in their internal class warfare. We kind of know it is there but we can't really understand it. There are some wounds that only God knows how to heal. I really have no idea.