I attended a mission school run by the Kwangsung Church Foundation for high school. Over those three years, I spent more days attending revival meetings than studying. Dozing off during those sessions meant getting whacked on the back of the head countless times with a long stick. My grades in Bible class were always zero, and I was forced to join the choir, croaking out hymns with a voice that wouldn’t cooperate. I was ignorant of religion, not knowing who God or Christ was.

My family and I spent four years with a woman who claimed to be one of the two witnesses in the Bible. Through her, I came to believe in God. She taught a mishmash of Christianity, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy—a veritable hodgepodge of doctrines. She sometimes spoke in tongues and taught various things, but all that remained for me was a lack of warmth, no inspiration, just memories of being brainwashed. It was in those days that I met the teacher.

What is truth to me? I want to express, even just a little, in words all that I have seen, heard, learned, and experienced so far. Since childhood, I vaguely attended church and believed in God, but there was always a lingering doubt in one corner of my heart: Does God really exist? Even while attending church, the Bible was merely a textbook unrelated to me, and instead of finding anything to learn or emulate in the pastors who claimed to testify about God, I saw them mistreating congregants for the sake of money. Eventually, I gave up, resigning myself to the belief that “God does not exist.”

Likewise, I’ve often come across people here who are struggling with different kinds of emotional and psychological pain. As I hear their stories, wounds, sins, and sources of shame, there are times when I honestly cannot see where God’s providence might be at work. Some stories are so complex, tangled, and burdened with pain that no clear answer seems possible. And yet, the teacher listens to each case and begins to untangle the knots of emotion and logic—from beginning to end—as if already knowing the entire path. Without hesitation or difficulty, clear answers are given, and time after time, I’m amazed by how every answer is precise, fair, and just—so much so that I cannot help but acknowledge, ‘There’s no way that could be wrong.’

Before encountering this truth through the author(From here on, I will refer to him as ‘teacher.’), my mother, younger sister, and I lived under the oppression of a church and pastor for ten years. They ruled over the congregation with fear through “Physical touch as part of a healing prayer(ㅡBut it was like abuse more than healing for prayer)” (physical discipline), wielding “spiritual” authority as a weapon to silence dissent and abuse believers according to their tastes.

10. God’s Power Over Demons

It was the New Year of 2010. The teacher was on the sixth day of fasting without a single sip of water. Among the members of the online community, there were three sisters. Though all shared the same last name, Yoon, they were from different regions. The teacher remarked that they seemed to be real sisters and said he would visit them after the fast ended. But on the sixth day of his fast, these sisters came to visit.