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Welcome to another episode of Jubilee Life Coach's Life Blog. My name is Brian Lee and I am the Jubilee Life Coach. And here I share my Christian worldview. I'm a conservative Calvinist, I suppose, a Christian. I'm a pastor, also a life coach. And I'm also a Korean American. And today I'd like to share what I saw on YouTube. An interview with a Korean poet. His name is Nate Ju. He's a poet. And he's, I think, I believe in his in his 80s. And this poet is someone that I've I've always liked. And the interview kind of opened up my eyes. So I wanted to share this with you. So let me begin. A poet nearing 80, it says the sight of an audience frightened him. So it looks like that he had some sort of a panic attack. Nateju spent 43 years as an elementary school teacher. He entered Korean letters in 1971 and became beloved for a poem of 24 syllables. Now, about three years ago he stopped lecturing. His own word for it burnt out. Audiences frightened him. People holding two copies of his book for signing frightened him even more. He wanted to run off mid-lecture. He canceled half a year of engagements and says, without drama, he that he took a good deal of criticism for it. Now Brenda Brown would call that admission courage rather than weakness in her book Daring Greatly 2012. Now what interests us here is what came next. Something set him back on his feet. So what was it? What made this poet who had been in public life for more than 40-50 years of his life easily, who had a burnt out and who had a sort of a panic attack? What made him come back? Well, it was the grace of a diagnosis. The book that he reached was written by another Korean author. His name is Peng Chal Han, and the book was called The Burnout Society. The Burnout Society. It was a thin volume, barely over a hundred pages. And the poet puts it plainly, hurting without knowing why is unbearable. Hurting without knowing why is unbearable. Naming the hurt is what makes examination possible, and examination is what makes treatment possible. So for him, this book was not the treatment, it was the diagnosis. Hans's diagnosis runs like this. We drive ourselves. He calls it self-exploitation. The exploiter and the exploited share one body. So there is no one left to protest to. The poet said the sentence hurt to read, to admit. He was inflating himself. He was demanding of himself what he did not have. So he rested for six months and the rest brought him back. All of that is accurate, and all of it needs one more step. Now rest is good, but there there are two kinds of rest. One kind just simply refills the battery, drained, so recharged, recharged, so spent again. This rest never interrupts the performance system, it rather extends it. As Han observes, even wellness can serve to soothe the performing self back into production. The other kind is Sabbath. Sabbath is not simply a recharge. Sabbath leans on work already finished. The Christian Bible, the commandment in Exodus twenty is not a productivity regulation. It rests on the declaration that creation was complete, and Psalm 127 verse two is even blunter still. It is vain to rise early and sit late, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. Jesus' invitation sits in the same place. Matthew 11 28 records Jesus saying, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Then notice what follows. He does not say drop the yoke, he says take his yoke. The load does not vanish, the owner of the load changes. The opposite of self exploitation is not idleness, no, it is having a different master. So some books, the poet says, only open to you once you have aged into them. Lao Tzu's Tao Te Cheng is one. Around fifty he says it enters the heart even when the mind cannot follow. The lines he loves are the ones whose arithmetic fails. What is bent is whole. In Chang Tzu there is the usefulness of the uselessness. The performance society prices everything by so-called usefulness. Lao Tzu unsettles that pricing and the unsettling is genuinely good, but it stops there though. If usefulness is not the ground of worth, Lao Tzu does not say what it is. An accurate indictment is still only an indictment. It is not a foundation. Um The poet talks about this. A small spring flower grows in the yard of his literary house. A stranger's a stranger sees a weed, but the poet sees something he waits for every year. Hence his line What I cherish is a flower, what I dislike is a weed. He attributes it to it is a lovely sentence and turned over a cold one. If my affection sets the value, then when my affection cools, then the value also goes with it. So when the one who cherishes runs dry, the cherished thing becomes a weed once again. You see that gaze is the first thing burnout takes. Isaiah chapter 40 calls us grass without softening. All flesh is like grass, and its beauty the flower of the field. Now that does not sound like comfort, yet in Isaiah 43, the same God says, You're mine. You are precious in my eyes and honored, and I have loved you. Yes, we are grass, but we are cherished grass. Worth still comes from the one who looks. Only now the one who looks is not me or you it's God, which means my exhaustion cannot move the price. So around fifty, the poet had lost his way and found it again, um and he uh gives credit to uh Thoros Walden. Uh three sentences uh he has kept by heart, and that was enjoy the land but own it not, and let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport, and when the thunder comes and others flee to carts and sheds, take shelter under the cloud. Now about the third he is very honest. He has memorized it and he does not know what it means to take shelter under the cloud. You see, all three it sits in the same paragraph of the chapter called Bake a Farm. But there is a next sentence the poet did not quote. Thoreau frames these words as spoken to him by an inner voice, and that voice immediately adds Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. You see, that is Ecclesiastes twelve one. Thorough called the voice his good genius. Scripture supplies the name. So sheltering under the cloud was never a mystical maxim. It means the storm is not aiming at you. That is not its errand to thee. You need not live crouched under a cart, preserving your life. You may stand in the open because the sky belongs to him and not to you. So standing at the shelves in the interview that is, the poet reaches for Su Dongpo, who said of Wang We's work that there is painting within the poem and poetry within the painting. If a poem raises no image, the poet explains it is not a poem. Then he reads Herman Hesse, a short piece from 1900, clouds move over the sky, wind crosses the field, and through them wanders a mother's lost child. And in the last line the speaker says his distant home must be somewhere beyond the mountains. You see the poet sums essay up this way A poet's task is not to show the road but to awaken longing. And then longing is a way of speaking about lack. Where lack appears, a road appears. An accurate observation. But does lack make the road or does it let us recognize a road already there? Well, Ecclesiastes 3 11 says, God has put eternity into the human heart. The lack is not a malfunction, it is design. Hebrews eleven calls the faithful strangers and exiles on the earth and says they desired a better country. Gerhard As Voss noticed one detail here. The patriarchs went on living in tents inside the land of promise. They arrived and still did not settle. In the book Grace and Glory, published in 1922. So Hesse's last line is half right. Home is not somewhere beyond the mountains. It is prepared. Longing does not build the road. Longing is the sign that the road exists. Well, thanks for joining us. Um once again in my homepage, JubileeCoach.com, I have the blog. Um and in the blog there is the YouTube uh interview that I am talking about. I hope you get a chance to visit my homepage and go to the live blog section. And also in the live blog section, I also have several questions that I ask as a Jubilee life coach. So thank you so much, and um until next time, Godspeed.