Our Story, Our Song
By Daniel Jung
This is the second installment of a series of reflections from the 51st PCA General Assembly 2024. Our goal is to serve the greater PCA by highlighting our stories and by platforming the abundance of talent we have among the KALI community. In this reflection, Daniel Jung (TE - Korean Northwest Presbytery) shares his thoughts and experiences from his time in Richmond, VA.
“This is my story,” has always been a whisper—definitely not much of a song.
On the night of the last worship service of the 51st PCA General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia, David Bae (TE/Korean Capital Presbytery) led us in a bilingual rendition of the song, Blessed Assurance. When we sang the chorus, “This is my story, this is my song,” an emotional dam within my heart burst, opening a wellspring of tears that streamed down my face. Weeping was a common recurrence throughout the nearly two-hour monumental worship service. There were many moments when emotions, too intense to process in real-time, found its release through muffled tears and clenched eyes. But the lyrics of this song’s chorus have attended to me long after the week ended and I boarded my plane back to California.
“This is my story. This is my song”
My story, like so many Korean immigrant children, is wrought with self-hatred and a deep sense of shame. Some of the most harrowing moments of my early teenage years were spent in front of my bathroom mirror, extending two middle fingers to my own reflection. Everything about my ethnic identity was undesirable. Appearance, language, customs, even food. Satan convinced an entire generation that our mom’s homemade dosiraks were inferior to Wonder Bread ham-and-cheese. The lies of the Enemy are immense in both scope and breadth.
This self-reproach has produced an unhealthy desire to be accepted. It’s a generation-specific longing that is idolatrous. If we can shirk and contort, if we can chameleonize ourselves to the point of being story-devoid blank slates, then maybe others will affirm our value and worth. This is the wholesale lie we believed. What many of us are learning—what the Holy Spirit is rebuking into us—is to recognize that ours is not just a story worth telling, it’s a song worth singing.
Tim Keller once preached a sermon on the Creation narrative from Genesis 1 and 2. He posited the question (paraphrased), “Why are there two Creation stories? Both Genesis 1 and 2 seem to tell the same story of Creation, so why are there two accounts?
Because while Genesis 2 is the story of Creation, Genesis 1 is the song.”
Songs contain repetition, refrains, and rhythm. God said…there was evening, there was morning…and God saw that it was good.
For Keller, the two accounts are intertwined. The Creation narrative needs both accounts—its theological worth requiring a double feature. Creation’s magnitude carries immense value and both chapters, story and song, are needed as a testament to its gravitas.
What many of us are learning—what the Holy Spirit is rebuking into us—is to recognize
that ours is not just a story worth telling, it’s a song worth singing.
It’s worth noting that in his creative process, the Divine Author pens the song before the story. Creation’s beauty is highlighted before its biography. The poem before the prose. The song’s soprano is undergirded by the story’s tenor, and in the deep recesses of our spiritual consciousness, this is what Thursday night’s worship service cemented in many of us. Our story is incomplete without the song. The gravitas of our God-penned ethnic value necessitates singing—proclaiming we are fearfully and wonderfully made until we believe it to be true. We sang the line of that chorus multiple times and with each passthrough, I was compelled to sing louder.
This is my story. This is my song.
It was a sweet gospel melody that silenced the resounding gong of self-reproach, if only for that moment.
“Praising my Savior all the day long!”
Later that evening, Rev. Dr. Joel Kim preached from Psalm 67 and I felt an unexpected emotion. As he transitioned seamlessly between Korean and English, a tinge of sadness crept to the surface. I realized that while he was preaching in Korean, I only understood about ten percent of what he was saying. Conversely, while he was preaching in English, I estimated that only ten percent of the Assembly’s worshippers understood my story as a Korean American TE. My childhood longing for acceptance reared its ugly head once again. But this idolatrous longing was kept at bay, however, by a different refrain. Rev. Kim repeatedly reminded us, “If we are faithful to the Scriptures and true to the Reformed faith, then we must be obedient to the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.”
As we heard stories of God’s faithfulness to our ancestors, and as we were reminded of their obedience to the Great Commission, we realized that our calling as Korean Americans is inextricably intertwined to our story. Both good and bad. It has all been composed directly into the score sheet. Rev. Kim reminded us that though our immigrant experiences made us cultural orphans, we are simultaneously positioned as intentional missionaries wherever we serve. The circumstances of our story have forced us to constantly look heavenward while navigating seamlessly between divisions in appearances, languages, customs, and even food. A missions-mindset is in our DNA and it’s been reinforced every single day of our lives. Thursday night’s worship affirmed the tremendous beauty of this minor chord. What Satan meant to derail, God has written into his masterpiece.
Songs have a way of speaking to us. They elicit emotions we had long forgotten.
To this day, I still shudder every time I hear Thriller by Michael Jackson. I was four years old when I first saw the MTV video and the image of Michael Jackson in zombie makeup has been seared into the fear-section of my amygdala. The song still evokes a slight uneasiness within me. Michael W. Smith’s Friends is another example of this phenomenon. A soft spot in my heart opens when I hear, “a lifetime’s not too long… to live as friends.” We carry with us a memorialized anthology of songs like stones erected along the Jordan River. I’m certain that Blessed Assurance will be a song that evokes emotions well into our final days of vocational ministry and beyond.
If the theme of this year’s General Assembly was “Knit Together,” then the closing worship service of the 51st PCA General Assembly marks a mutual step toward believing our Korean American fabric is worthy enough to be included in the denominational quilt. We belong and we have been commissioned by God to serve and lead.
This is our story. Now hear us sing our song.
Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at Home of Christ in Cupertino. In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing media reviews for Think Christian. You can find more of his work here.
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