Today’s menu is a bean sprout soup for 120 people. The first thing to cook the soup is to prepare the broth. The leftover of radish, green onions, mushrooms, and anchovies to be added. Looking at the radishes and green onions that are formlessly mixed and boiled, I thought that I used to be resembled closely the leftover food.  

Devoted as a cook missionary at a Christian school

I am a 71 year-old deaconess. I just thank God for his grace that he still uses me even at this age for his Kingdom. The Lord has called me to the kitchen in a Christian school in which the next missionaries are grown and educated. He has made me an educational missionary who is responsible for the students’ and teachers’ meals. Truly speaking, I am not a good cook. When I was young, my older sister even had to cook in behalf of me, because I was the worst cook among my siblings.

However, being called to the position that decides the menus and cooks, prayer is all that I can to do. Even though I had an experience that I served for the meals for about 5,000 to 6,000 people in a prayer house kitchen, still I cannot handle anything without prayers.

When preparing the food, I do not talk, because I ought to pray. “Lord, what should I do? Please make the taste.” Then, the Lord gives me wisdom to make uneatable, sour and bitter kimchi to be tasty so that the students love to eat. With this way of prayer, I experience the grace of God’s power in myself, a leftover. But I see the greater grace facing my sinful nature that cannot unite with other people.

When I was first called here, everything was so thankful. No matter how hard the work was, or even when the food ingredients lack, My heart was overflowing with joy for running with the people for God’s Kingdom.

However, my sinful nature had begun to be risen up as time was going by? I began to see what other people do wrong and pointed it out rather than reflecting myself in front of the Gospel. I determined to love, and even proclaimed that the old self has been crucified on the cross with Jesus, and made up my mind to live by the faith, but facing hard situations draws me to failure.

God told me that if I have intimacy Jesus in love, I am supposed to love others as well. However, I could not. It made me frustrated. The old sinful nature seemed to be still alive. God also told me that if the failure of intimacy between other people means the Gospel is not the truth in my being. In order to the holistic Gospel of cross stands in my being, first of all, intimacy between God and me, and secondly, intimacy with other people in the love of God. I had found that no heart of Jesus existed in my being. I repented before him with crying.

Use me as the prey for all nations.

By the grace of God, he gave me a chance to have an intimacy with the person.  I apologized for not loving her. With the apology, I promised her that I would love her from that time and gave her a hug. And thankfully, she accepted my heart of apology and love. I had realized that she wanted to be loved by me by that time. How regretful that I could not love and had intimacy with her more back them!

The Lord has called me who had no love in my sinful nature to be united on the cross. Right now, God is using me, like the leftover ingredient in a soup being boiled in a pot, to be stewed and add deep flavor for the broth of God’s Kingdom. I pray that God may use me as a prey for all nations until all my flesh completely given to him. [GNPNEWS]