SYMBOLIC TEACHING FROM THE DO, GIL HWOE STORY
by Ronald K. Nielsen
Let me illustrate how symbolic teaching can convey differing meanings to different individuals. This following illustration is an actual story in my life. But whether the story is actual or merely parabolic, the main point is what is being taught by the story (symbol).
In May of 1964, the Taegu Branch took an outing to the famed tourist site of HaeInSa. The American missionaries were able to secure the services of two troop transport trucks from Camp Walker.
About 50 Taegu members, investigators and missionaries piled into the two trucks and we were off to the Buddhist temple in the mountains.
It was obvious that one of the truck drivers had volunteered his services just to get off base. His lack of truck driving experience became apparent as he drove the huge truck up the mountainous road.
As the road narrowed and began to wind up the mountain, he would crowd the truck to his (the driver's) side and even scraped against the rocks.
We didn't pay much attention until we were coming back and now he was driving too close to the other side-a precipitous edge. On one hair pin turn he cut the corner too close, the truck's rear wheels crumbled the road edge away and the truck spun around so that it was dangling over the edge of the precipice, rocking back and forth like a teeter toter.
I was in the back of that truck and thought of jumping to safety, but the rear of the truck was so far over the edge any jump would be about 100 feet down. Somehow the truck didn't tumble off the road.
Miraculously it was as if a huge hand had pushed the truck back onto the road. All of us there remarked how we were saved by the powerful hand of God.
I have told this story many times to teach the principle that the Lord protects his servants.
But let's now look at it from another perspective.
The day after this hair raising event was Sunday. The Taegu Branch President, Do, Gil Hwoe, was substitute teaching a Sunday School class. In the middle of his class he told a story to illustrate the principle of personal revelation.
He began to relate a dream he had a few weeks earlier where he dreamt that he was traveling up a precipitous road and the vehicle he was in began to slide off the road.
He awoke in the middle of his dream not knowing whether the vehicle he was in was going to tumble to destruction or would make it back onto the road. He felt that this dream symbolized his frustrations in his travels on the road of life.
At this time in Korea, the whole country was in dire economic straits. He had no work commensurate to his college degree and was having great difficulties providing for his wife and two small children.
To make matters worse, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and had no money for the needed medicine. He had come to a point in his life where he felt like he didn't know if he could go on in life or not.
He felt his situation was so bleak, he said he even considered suicide.
He said that as we were traveling back from the outing on the previous day, his heart was heavy considering these very things.
He said that as the truck rounded the curve he felt thrust back into the continuation of his dream. As the truck was hanging over the cliff on the brink of our destruction, he said it was manifest to him at that very point that the truck would make it back onto the road.
And more importantly for him and his family, was that he would make it in life and would be saved by the sustaining love of the Lord.
It is interesting to see how this same event conveyed differing messages from the Lord to the persons involved.
The sign, the symbol, the story, the parable, or even an actual event in life can be used by the Lord to speak to us the message we need and convey it to us at whatever level we are able to comprehend. |