I am sorry to be an intrusion in your busy life by sending you this message. I wish I could do otherwise, but I care about you, and though this is an unexpected gift, I want you to read this. I guarantee to you that in reading this email you are taking a significant risk. It will in fact have profound implications on the way you perceive your life, and your relation with all other people. In accepting this risk, you will be also given an opportunity to be more free than you have ever known yourself to be. You will also be given the chance to live as you have lived your life until now, which you may so be inclined to do, and this will have little impact on you and will seem a waste of your time. But I guarantee that it will remain a part of your memory, and some day you will once again encounter this letter in the time that you seem to be least in control of your life. At that time, I hope this letter may be of some solace to you, and console the deeply troubled consciousness and inspire the hopeless soul to rise once again, in a new and free form.

By choosing to live the life you have done, you will continue to imprison your mind, and more importantly, deny the only one that can help you. But He will eventually win, and you will eventually find out that you are not in control of as much as you had thought. In fact, it is impossible to control the number of things that you imagine to be within your own power, and you will be exhausted in your pursuit to chase everything down and control things to a miniscule scale. I have been down that road. I have had much ambition, trying to determine the outcome and my next move in anticipation of trouble, and to some varying degree successful at achieving control and reaching some of my expectations. But it has not led to the kind of fulfillment that I had expected at each stage of my progression. I found myself too detail oriented, having always to multitask and put out fires, resulting in a lack of confidence in myself and others when I was incapable to change the system. The crisis arose when I awoke from the daze to see how little faith I had in a cyclical, simplistic, and dry life, in other people and myself. It seemed there must be meaning in all that was going on, and that something beyond the detail of what I was seeing must be happening. It was the philosophical questions that drove me to the answer. And I encourage you to embark on the same journey with similar questions. Not only to be or not to be. But, why do we make choices, goals, and friends? Why do we make rules, excuses, and theories? Not only why, but also how. How do we measure these things, by what standard do we judge each other? What lies at the root of all our motivations? What do we fear, and why? Recognizing the answers to these will lead to greater fulfillment and trust in yourself, but also, you must step beyond trust with issues that have no foreseeable answers. Not only will you learn to be dependent on others, but you will receive a new perception on the life you had been leading, and a new way to lead that life with a renewed purpose.

While God is patient, He does have a plan. He chooses to use you in that plan, but when you finally choose to get it started, the more time you can spend doing things that will give you a sense of purpose and fulfillment. He does not like to see suffering, yet He knows that in that way He can speak directly to your soul. If you are naked and ashamed, you have nothing left to hide and nowhere else you are welcomed, you can only then see the beauty of God's love for you, and feel the grace that only He can provide you in that moment. And you will know what many others have known but been afraid to tell you because of the fear of losing the chance to tell you, and what too many others need to know.

We can only gain the trust from those that know and respect us, this is usually done from personal contact and attention to the other's needs. The reason you have not recognized God yet, and the reason that many others around you have not already done so and continue to refuse Him again and again, is because of my own shortcomings. I have sat idly by while billions of people may be condemned. But in my writing this email and sending it to you, you now have access to some piece of truth that forces you to respond. You must evaluate a proposed truth by using a system of known truths to validate it. However, I caution you that there is a point where you can become too confident in your own knowledge, and it will serve to impede you. Eventually, you will come to that point where all the knowledge you have accumulated will not help you to connect to the answer, but through faith alone you must depend.

The system of truths must also be examined. Many truths are actually opinions formed from experience, and mostly from interpretation. For example, God does not authorize anyone to kill for Him, as some have proclaimed. He does not induce suffering. This perception is something some have constructed in their minds, among other things, to prevent their conscious realization that they are doing things to ignore Him, isolate themselves, and control their destiny. It is true that without the purpose of God in your heart, you may do good things, and truly enjoy doing them out of the goodness of your being, but the reason you are doing them is not the same. You are responding to a feeling of self-worth, that feeling is not wrong. But you have no understanding of why that feels so good, except that you are responding to the feeling. God has given us a way to find Him, and this feeling reinforces the knowledge that we are on the right path, doing His work. But you do not recognize Him, and for that reason, you can not get beyond the self-gratification of doing good deeds.

Not every Christian does good, but they recognize their shortcomings and the need for help, guidance, and forgiveness. Would it be better for a child to continue to hurt others if they thought that everything they did was acceptable? In a sense, we are like spoiled children. Many of us don't like to have it thrown in our faces that we aren't perfect, but admitting it does a lot to make our expectations more realistic, but also more honest. By remaining unscathed and hiding our faults, we feel that we are protected from others we don't trust who may want to exploit our disadvantages. We even protect ourselves from bruising our own egos. It puts a great distance on those who can also help us, and work through the problem to find a solution. But as a result, it causes staggering by people into categories, those who can hide their problems well, use their strengths, and exploit the disadvantages of others, creating a competitive world with a wide range of disparity between the poor and the wealthy. We need to know that we aren't expected to be perfect. We recognize that we have differing problems, but we are all bound together by the fact that we aren't perfect. Each of us could have had the problems of the other, and we would still be navigating our way through life with a new lens and with the given resources available. It is difficult to imagine yourself in another's shoes, with a new reality viewed through their experience, friends, and understanding of how things work in the world, and therefore, impossible to be able to judge another's actions.

Let me never be proud of the fact that I am Christian. I would rather put my life before God than to have a non-believer parish before me into eternity. I am comforted by God's presence, but I do not wish to be proud of anything, because the strongest feeling I possess is shame and guilt, because I don't feel I deserve it, and that I am not doing enough for others to come aboard and know true security. For me, it doesn't really matter what I am going through, and what others will think of me. The reality is that God is the one I testify to, as we all can do. I know I am not perfect, and sometimes I choose not to be. I don't wish to be complacent, and I don't want to be passive. I know that God can reach all of us, but that He is reaching some of them through me.

There are many barriers that prevent us from recognizing Him, one is by our own choice. Another is our dependence on what we know to be true. The third is our fear of the unknown.

We fail miserably in our understanding. We can not speak the language of God, but God can speak to us in our language. The tools with which God must use are quite antiquated, the grammar structure is too constricting, the vocabulary is overly limiting, and the concepts are misinterpreted. Our own experiences define who we think we are, and how much power over our lives that we exert. The feedback we get from our senses define our world and our reality. We choose a reality that we have confidence in, because we see the logic in it, and have grown to depend on that order. We can't depend on others because they are not ourselves, but we can trust those who seem to behave like we do, or have reliable characteristics that make them predictable. We leave God out because we don't understand Him. He is either apathetic or absent. We can not interact on a level equal with Him.

God has given us order, but also, He has given us disorder. In the midst of all this that is order, we find comfort. But it is in the disorder that we will find redemption. We live in the order, and grow too comfortable and secure in that part of the world. From childhood, we have been taught that we need a plan, and that we are to do it well. We have maneuvered ourselves by understanding the rules, and making our way best through them using the rules, while cutting corners when an advantage could be made. When we fail, we blame ourselves.

But in truth, God has given us disorder so that we may know Him. Disorder can result in both a good and a bad outcome. The disorder is where choices can be made. If God had been about strictly order, we would not have sinned. Because He gave us disorder, we would certainly sin, and He knew that. In the infinitely many decisions that we would have to make, certainly He knew that we would fail by not making the perfect choice in at least one at some point in time. But disorder was not created to cause us suffering, but the opposite. He has provided us with hope, faith, and love. Without disorder, these would mean nothing. He has subjected Himself to pain and vulnerability by loving us, by caring for His creation. In doing so, He has made Himself subject to His own creation. What kind of creator could love something that would intentionally inflict pain on Him? We choose to ignore Him, we choose to use His name in vain, we choose to worship and give thanks to other idols and ourselves, and we act justly when we have no concept of the word.

God loving us is the insensibility of God, and the beauty we can find in redemption. He has put aside the order, which would demand that we be cast away for our sins, our shortcomings, or our inability to meet His order. Instead, putting aside His judgment, He has given us love in return for our inadequacies.

And we choose repeatedly to ignore Him, though He waits for us and our recognition of Him in our lives. I sent out this letter to you, at the risk of your perception of me, because of His love for me, and because you are an important person to me. I challenge you to know yourself. By taking on this challenge and accepting the purpose of this message, you take on no additional risk except that of your time and effort. Far worse would it be if you were wrong and at the end of your life, you only then realized how far off you were. You would see how much you wasted in doing nothing with your life and pointlessly resolving your personal issues, but also that you did a disservice to those who trusted you and whom you led away from the comfort they so desperately needed during their life.

Whatever comes from your research may make you more certain or less certain of the path you will take, but if you feel that you need more information than this, then the answer may not lie in your assumptions. Do not let the actions and interpretations of a misguided group deter you from learning the truth, but find this in yourself, for yourself. Do not be discouraged by the realities of the world. At the very least, you owe it to yourself to make the time to find out more about peace, acceptance, and love. You can then do as I am doing, and reach out to others to reveal this message, because truly, it is in your nature, and not in your control.

With sincerity and the love of Christ,
Jung-Hoe Hopgood