I spent many of my childhood birthdays swimming in the Yellow Sea, which is a portion of the Pacific directly West of the Korean Peninsula. One year, my eleventh, my uncle RB, who was a pastor visiting us from the United States, gave me an ocean baptism. In retrospect, I highly recommend salt-water baptisms. The tides so actively want to participate in the dunking. Symbolic? I think so.
Almost every summer that I can remember growing up in South Korea, I would go with my family to Taechon Beach, stay in a cabin, build sand fortresses, swim in the ocean, dig for clams, search for shells, and when the rains came, play indoor games like Clue and Monopoly with my brother and sister. Taechon Beach doubled as a military outpost for the South Korean army, and jet planes often roared overhead. Sonic booms became plain as wood rafters, and between the chatting sound of gunfire and the overhead buzzing of the remote control targets, the beach was an overall highly relaxing environment.
Sometimes I would play in the military foxholes, semi-hidden and fortified with sand bags, wondering what it would be like to spot enemy ships from the North. What if I were the first to see them? Who would I tell? Would it be scary or exciting? Sometimes I would walk into town and buy candy from a local shop or fresh peaches from a halmonie carrying my weight in fruit and vegetables atop her head. How did she hold so much at once? Did it hurt her neck? Why were peaches so fuzzy? Sometimes I would lie in a hammock in the back of our cabin and wonder about the pinecones and mushrooms I saw dotting the forest floor. Were they good to eat? Would I die of poison if I tried to find out? How did people safely even discover such things in the first place? Mostly, I went swimming, and when the waves were just right, I’d body surf again and again until the feeling of the water crashing all around me wouldn’t leave, even long after I was warm and dry, back in the cabin eating my mom’s spaghetti.
This year on my birthday I feel the urge to be near water again. Now living in Seattle, I can walk down by the Sound, a very different corner of the Pacific, still salty but with fewer waves. I’m twenty years older than I was the day my uncle immersed me in the waters of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But the tides continue their pull, and I can still feel myself, submerged in surf, crashing all around. Even now as I am warm and dry, preparing to eat kimchi and ramen noodles in my Queen Anne apartment, a part of me will always and forever feel at rest in a hammock amidst the sounds of target practice in Taechon, South Korea. My wondering continues, and like the tides of the sea, the currents of my heart team with a baptismal force that is buoyant and lively and well beyond my jurisdiction.
