Thursday, 6/26/14
Humor me while I tell one of my old Korea stories about
building on the solid rock of Out Lord’s teachings. I was twenty-six many
summers ago. when I was sent to a town on the east coat of Korea. A good number
of the Catholics there had fled down the coast from North Korea, and I became
friendly with two young husbands, Peter and Paul. They both had grown up
helping out at an old German Benedictine monastery in North Korea.
That May they started on building a two-room house to share
with their wives, and I hung around, giving inexpert help. Their plan called
for two nine by nine rooms with a common five-by-five kitchen. We dug eight
three-foot holes for corner posts, and we borrowed a pull cart for hauling up from
the stream eight boulders to drop into the holes.
Having progressed that far, Paul and I had to see Peter off.
He was taking his young wife fifteen miles south to her parents’ house for
having her first child. I then helped
Paul anchoring the end post on the boulders in those holes, and I watched Paul wielding a wood chisel for nicely
fitting in the little house’ crossbars and roof beams.
We then strung a netting of U.S. communication wire between
all the uprights, and I had a great time pasting gloppy handfuls of damp red
clay onto that netting.
We had tied in great bundles of straw for thatching the roof
when our whole coast was hit by the strongest typhoon in memory. All nineteen
bridges up and down the east coast were washed out to sea, but the house Paul
had finished just in time held firm, It rocked like hell, but it held.
We worried about Peter and his wife. They were three
bridge-less rivers to the south of us; and the road, where it wasn’t gone,
looked like a river of shiny bean soup.
We were thrilled two weeks later when Peter struggled into
town with his wife and her baby. Her
parent’s village, next to a stream, had been washed away, and Theresa had given
birth while hanging onto a scrub pine high above that stream that had become a
wild river.
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