My Mother's Voice and the Power of Prayer

My mother called me out of the blue today. I was home, being lazy, as I felt I should be on a warm Sunday afternoon. I had just experienced one of my most excruciatingly tiring days yesterday, having hiked up about 3000 stairs after getting drunk till 2 am the night before. My face was pale all day long from lack of oxygen. I blame being anemic. It strikes you at the most inopportune times. Just like phone calls from mothers.

"Did you go to church today?" She asked me as soon as I picked up the phone.

"..." A sense of guilt came over me like an overwhelming realization. "I will later," I said.

Wrong answer. My mother started crying over the phone and asked me, while ensuing in me the biggest guilt trip ever, why I had stopped believing.

"I didn't stop believing mom. I just need some time to find out the truth for myself," I said, trying in vain to calm her down.

"Why can't you do that while going to church?" she asked.

"Because I don't like the churches here," I nearly yelled back. "They're so commercialized, and they always ask me to teach them English when I go. I don't feel like I'm in a Christian community." I thought I had made a pretty good argument to defend myself.

She didn't believe me. "You're just being lazy. You don't want to wake up early on Sunday morning, so you're making up these philosophical excuses," she said between her muffled sniffles.

I thought about her statement. I couldn't get myself to argue, mostly because part of the reason I hadn't been going to church was simply because I needed rest from my hectic week. It wasn't a good enough excuse to miss church, according to what they teach you at church. If you really love God, you would still be there even if it cost you an arm and a leg and your night's sleep. That's what my mother said, at least.

For the next two hours, she kept asking me why I had changed. "You were such a strong believer in high school and you were so convicted to do God's work," she said. She thought I had been corrupted, among other things, by men. Men had somehow changed my faith and my priorities. I thought about this possibility and ruled it out. If anything, men had probably strengthened my faith because of the realization that I could not rely on them for anything.

To tell you the truth, it was painful. I appreciated the sincerity with which she spoke to me and the genuine concern she had for my spiritual well-being. But it didn't touch me. It felt intrusive, and I repelled her words, unconsciously. I had been sitting on the hardwood floor for quite some time, and my back had begun to hurt. I was shifting from one uncomfortable position to another, hearing her talk, trying to evangelize to me. It was a new experience to be on the receiving side of the prosthelytization. I had always been the one doing it before. Words entered my ears but not my heart. I felt nothing, surprisingly, despite her tears.

And then she asked me, "Can we pray together?" My mother has always had the habit of praying with me over the phone, at the airport, in bed, at restaurants, at school, wherever she had the opportunity to do so. But we hadn't prayed together in a while. I kind of missed it. I agreed, and I closed my eyes and held the phone to my ear.

Strangely, for the first time in all of the two hours we were on the phone with each other, the words she was speaking made me cry. I don't know what it was. Maybe the memory of feeling secure when I prayed with her in the past, maybe the unbreakable strength in her sobbing voice, or maybe it was really the holy spirit. Something. But it was no longer the guilt trip that I dreaded, but rather a soothing reassurance that everything--despite the million uncertainties about the future--would be okay. And I felt like running to my mother across the 10 thousand mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean to tell her I loved her and thank her for her little reminders about the reasons why I exist today.

I still don't know how I feel about Korean churches, but I think I'll pray tonight. A prayer that seems so foreign to me after all these months of being silent. Maybe that's the first step to get me back on track.