Worship Opened June’s Heart

People are hardwired to worship. We are made to pour our devotion, trust, and longing into something greater than ourselves.

For those who grow up in North Korea, that devotion is forcefully claimed from childhood by the state regime. When June escaped and arrived in South Korea, religion was completely foreign. During her initial orientation at Hanawon Resettlement Center, she was introduced to religion through Catholic services. To June, it felt distant, rigid, and disconnected from her lived reality. She had spent decades surviving extreme hardship; rituals and recitations held little appeal, and she left the experience skeptical and uninterested.

When she arrived at Elim House, a residential community offering physical care and emotional refuge for North Korean women, June was still guarded. Yet it wasn’t an intellectual argument or a rigid lecture that began to soften her defenses.

It was the melody and lyrics of Sunday worship.

When Lyrics Become a Lifeline

A pastor leads the residents at Elim House in worship during a Sunday Service.

At Elim House, worship is neither mandatory nor performative; it is an open invitation into peace. Soon after arriving, June found herself drawn to the music. Rather than sitting silently, she volunteered to sing a special song during a Sunday service.

She later confided that she chose the song “I Love You, My Jesus” (사랑합니다 나의 예수님) simply because the lyrics spoke to something deep and quiet within her.

From that day forward, Sunday mornings took on a new rhythm. June threw herself into community life: helping coordinate Sunday outfits for fellow residents, thoughtfully selecting music in advance, and assigning vocal harmonies so everyone could participate together. Worship was no longer an abstract concept from a textbook. It was becoming a home.

The Weight of a Mother’s Grief

To understand why these songs resonate so deeply with June, it helps to first see the grief she carries. Beneath her warm smile is the heavy reality shared by so many North Korean refugee mothers.

Before one Sunday service, staff noticed June had been weeping and had barely slept. She had spent the night awake, gripped by a sudden, aching wave of grief for the daughter she had to leave behind in North Korea.

A week later, when staff introduced an upcoming service for incoming and graduating residents, June broke down again. The date coincided with what would have been her son’s birthday. Years earlier, her young son tragically drowned on August 21st. Every year on that anniversary, she had maintained a quiet, solemn tradition of walking to the water’s edge to remember him. But amid the disorienting, fast-paced rush of settling into South Korea, the date had slipped by unnoticed. Realizing she had missed it broke her heart.

Loss has walked alongside June for most of her life. During another service, while preparing to sing “Living Hope” (예수 나의 산 소망), she was overcome with tears mid-song. It happened to be her own birthday. With memories of her late mother and her daughter across the border flooding her mind, she cried out honestly:

"Mom, things are so hard right now. Help me... protect me so I can keep going and live well."

Honest Struggles and the Gift of Real Rest

June’s story is not a fairy tale where every hardship disappears overnight. The reality of building a new life in South Korea is physically and emotionally exhausting.

She often works long and grueling shifts. At times, exhaustion gives way to self-doubt: "How did my life end up like this?" With relational issues, debt and vocational troubles, the uncertainty weighed heavily on her.

Yet, alongside these very real trials, peace has begun to take root:

The Miracles of Simple Peace

• Physical Rest: One Saturday, June experienced something unfamiliar: deep rest. Having never been able to nap or sleep past dawn due to hypervigilance, drowsiness suddenly overtook her in the afternoon. She slept, woke, and then fell back asleep at 9:00 PM, resting uninterrupted until 2:00 AM—five unbroken hours of deep mental and physical restoration.

• Steadfast Praise: For a recent service, June prepared the song “The Lord Is Here” (주님 여기 계시네). Despite ongoing financial hurdles and housing delays, she stood before her community to sing, tears flowing down her cheeks.

Restoring What We Were Made For

June’s skepticism didn't dissolve because someone debated her; it dissolved because she found a safe space where her pain could be voiced honestly before a God who listens.

We were created to worship—not dictators who demand our submission, not freedom or money, and not the anxiety of our circumstances, but the One who meets broken hearts with lasting hope. Every time June stepped up to sing at Elim House, her voice carried more than a tune. It carried the defiant, beautiful sound of a woman reclaiming her dignity, finding her song, and learning she is deeply loved by a great, good God.

Director's Notes: Usefulness of Suffering

The following post was written by Crossing Borders' Executive Director, Dan Chung and was originally posted in 2014. The story has been updated to reflect the changes in the life of the North Korean orphan he references.  

At the age of eight, I began a dark stretch in my life. I started to have night terrors. Every night through my early teens, I would be caught in a terrible dream where I was running from some terrifying, unseen force. This dream would manifest itself into reality. Each night I would get out of bed screaming and run around my house and sometimes my neighborhood.

Some mornings I would awake to find myself sleeping on the curb.

As a result I was afraid of sleep and would do anything to delay the inevitable. And to this day, I have trouble falling asleep, even as I lay exhausted in bed.

But in some intangible way, this small bit of suffering has laid the foundations for my life as an adult. The pain, which was deep and seemingly unending, drives my work as executive director of Crossing Borders today. As I’ve sat and listened to a countless number of resilient North Korean refugees tell me their stories since 2003, my heart still breaks. And I know that it is in part because of the small quantum of pain I experienced as a child.

Today half-North Korean orphans in Northeast China experience a much greater pain. I saw it in the eyes of "Haneul," a North Korean orphan we helped. Haneul and her family have told us her story. 

Standing out on the streets, a wandering North Korean orphan was crying and looking for anyone to help her. Haneul was six-years-old.

Her North Korean mother fled China through the Underground Railroad and cut off all communication to the people she knew in China, even her daughter and her husband, who purchased her in 2001. Haneul's father left for South Korea to find his wife and to find work.

He would send money back to a friend in China, who was taking care of Haneul. But after a while the money stopped and he was never heard from again. Some say he died. Some say he moved to a different country. No one knows for sure.

Shortly after her father’s money stopped, Haneul was abandoned in the middle of a busy city by her guardians.

She wandered around and somehow found her uncle, a poor Chinese man. He took his niece in. He has a half-North Korean daughter, who is a little younger than Haneul. He too had a wife who he purchased. She left him after their daughter was born. He is poor. He has worked odd jobs here and there but nothing permanent. And he has no idea how to take care of these two girls.

In early 2014, when I visited Haneul at her uncle’s house, She was living in squalor. The soot from the coal that locals burn underground to heat their homes was caked her skin. She was shivering and had a runny nose. There were pans with crusted ramen noodles on the floor of their small living space.

Some experts say that North Korean orphans in China number in the tens-of-thousands. Though many have family who care for them, most live in abject poverty. Some wander the streets looking through bins for trash they can sell. Most long for their mothers who have either taken the Underground Railroad and have found greener pastures or have been captured by the Chinese police, sent back to North Korea and have never been heard from again. All North Korean orphans suffer in some way, shape or form at a young age.

David Brooks of the New York Times published an article titled “What Suffering Does.” It is an interesting reminder about how suffering can be used to bring meaning and purpose in a person’s life.

He says that suffering “means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.”

Though the North Korean orphans in our care have suffered much in their lives, we have hope that they can use this pain as a vehicle to do good. The best way we see this happening is through a vibrant relationship with Christ.

Haneul is on the path to redeeming her experiences. In 2015 she was reunited with her mother in South Korea. She goes to school and is very happy, according to our missionaries who visited her in 2016. 

As we pray for the innumerable North Korean orphans lost in China, let us remember the importance of suffering, that the deeper it is, the more capacity people have to redeem it. It is our hope that these children can take the deep reservoir of their experiences and unleash it back into the world to transform it.