Raising her head

Amazing grace in the terrifying journey of Soon Ok Lee | Andrée Seu

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A seminary student once told me that he hadn't slept well for the last three nights, and that by the third night of praying for sleep his faith was shaken. I do not fault him for this; I am just as weak.

Then there is Soon Ok Lee. North Korea has been in the news recently (see p. 72) for its nuclear testing. Lee's memoir Eyes of the Tailless Animals chronicles six years in a North Korean labor camp, from 1986 to 1992. It is written simply, and with the unadorned purpose of bearing witness. Lee's burden, on every page, is the pleading eyes of 140 inmates in the front row who on the day of her public release dared to break the prison policy forbidding Christians from raising their heads. (Their peculiar punishment is to never be allowed to look up to heaven.) "Whenever I got tired, I remembered their eyes and kept writing."