God, Korea & Me

By Dr. David Tee

Follow the journey of the author as he went from a nobody to a respected teacher in a country that respects teachers. Each step of the way God led him through many lessons and experiences that have broadened him and made him a better person. All the glory goes to God for the positive results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. David Tee
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201990169

Book preview

JulyFebruary

Introduction

Several years ago we wrote a book titled, ‘What II learned as a Korean Public Teacher’. We were not happy with the way it turned out and we took it off the market. Maybe we were just too close to our departure from Korea to write effectively. We are not sure.

Six years after our final departure from South Korea, we may be in a better position to write about what took place during our 14 years in that country teaching in public and private schools.

For us, it is hard to write about ourselves as we believe in not speaking about our own testimony. So this work will focus more on God’s involvement than ours as we do not take any credit for our success.

While we are not rich, my wife and I live in a small 2 bedroom house that we rent for $100 a month in American money. Nor are we famous except to our students and a handful of Native English teachers in Korea at the same time we were.

That is probably why we should write this book. We were and are anonymous, common folk who did their best to look to God to guide them through this chapter of their lives. God does not just work in the lives of the rich and famous but in everyone who accepts his one as their savior and obey his word.

This work started out as a sermon we wanted to give after we spent a week giving our Church and Archaeology seminar a for Pastors and different church leaders. It was our closing sermon for Sunday night as we envisioned it but so far that was not meant to be.

Not only did the rise of Covid ruin a lot of plans, our fear of public speaking also played a role in our not getting to go around the country with our seminar and this topic.

While we can speak publicly and have pastored a church for a year in this country as well as being a guest speaker at different churches, we prefer to remain behind the scenes and let God get all the attention.

Then if we were fortunate enough to go out and speak, we will customize our introduction. What we would say would depend on who was in the pews at the time. There is a good reason for that customization as we would have a special message for certain people that we were never able to tell them when we were together in our younger years.

There are many mitigating circumstances that made that effort essential, none of which we recall ever talking about in our 60+ years of life. Even when we were in our Bible college undergrad days did we talk about those circumstances and that may have hindered our ability to communicate well with others.

The point of our sermon and our seminar was to build the faith of other believers. That has been our essential theme throughout our other work, ministering to pastors, church leaders through our books and websites.

We may not work for an official organization but through the years we had an information website, a discussion forum, a blog (now in its 10th year), a second blog about archaeology and 6 books. All were and are designed to build the faith of pastors, etc., who in turn could build the faith of those they ministered to.

We take no credit for the work as we prayed that God would help us get it right when we put our content on those public forums and media outlets. A list of all these things will be given at the end of this book.

Then we use the word we, ours, theirs, etc., simply because we do not like the words ‘I’. ‘My’, ‘Mine’, and other first person pronouns. Since we asked God to be with us and help us those first persons pronouns are not really acceptable here or in any of our works.

What we accomplished was not done on our strength, as that will soon be evident. God was with us each step of the way so we cannot say that those successes were from our effort. Nor can we say that when things went bad we learned our lessons on our own.

Some of those lessons will be included here and as we wanted to say in our sermon, there were some good lessons, some terrible ones and the ones we are going to tell you. There may also be some negative opinions expressed in this work as we did not always see eye to eye with our Korean co-teachers and our fellow NETs from other schools.

One reason we moved to public school was that we would be teaching without any other foreigners at the school. Office politics, personality clashes, and other issues arise when you have more than one NET in a school, like the Hagwons or private schools have.

When you are in public school you are alone and that was the way we liked it. We did not have to worry about watching our backs when we were in class or away from the school. We could relax and build good relationships and enjoy teaching once we made the move.

If Korea continued putting NETs in public schools, we would have suggested that they create a program where all incoming NETs would have to spend a year or two in a Hagwon just so they could get adjusted to the Korean culture and the Korean way of doing things.

Then after a year or two teaching here and getting their feet wet, they could be promoted to teaching in public schools. This format would have spared the students much grief from those westerners who could not adjust to the Korean way.

We never got the chance to make this suggestion as the Korean Educational Ministers started cutting the public school programs and we eventually fell victim to that. But God was there through that as well.

What comes in the following pages will be our journey in that leg of our lives, how God worked, and other details that probably should be mentioned just so we get it out of our system.

Lessons are never easy to learn but they must be learned if we are going to grow in Christian maturity. Why are we writing this book now? Probably because our perspective has changed enough to be more honest about our lives in Korea and the people we encountered.

Also, we have spent the last few years as content writers and now our arthritis is catching up with us and we may not be able to type so well in the future. This and our other books serve a dual purpose of building people’s faith and providing an income for our