Here's a footnote on the Korean situation that may be of interest

Here's a footnote on the Korean situation that may be of interest. When I was Asia copy editor at CSM in the mid-1980s, the South Korean dissident and opposition leader, Kim Dae-Jung, was a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. He was in political exile and visited the Monitor in part to express thanks for reporting on his situation by Elizabeth Pond nearly ten years earlier.

Kim was a leading political figure opposing the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee and nearly defeated him for president in 1971. Two years later, he was kidnapped from his hotel room in Tokyo and threatened with death. In meeting with CSM editors, he credited Beb Pond's reports for keeping his case before a world audience and rallying international support for his safety. A devout Catholic, Kim asked to visit TMC after his visit to the Monitor. I accompanied him on the tour, and in walking through the Original Edifice he was especially moved by the stained glass window depicting the verse from Isaiah showing the lion and the lamb co-existing peacefully. He said this Bible verse meant much to him during his years in prison, and he looked at it for several minutes with reverence.

Returning to Korea two years later, Kim was thrown back in jail, but eventually was elected president and won the Nobel Peace Prize for the first summit meeting between leaders of the two sides. His “Sunshine Policy” of reaching out to the North was very controversial and not wholly successful, but it broke the ice on north-south relations and set a precedent for the most recent breakthrough.

Here's an interesting excerpt from Kim's Nobel speech (quoted from Wikipedia):

"I have lived, and continue to live, in the belief that God is always with me. I know this from experience. In August of 1973, while exiled in Japan, I was kidnapped from my hotel room in Tokyo by intelligence agents of the then military government of South Korea. The news of the incident startled the world. The agents took me to their boat at anchor along the seashore. They tied me up, blinded me, and stuffed my mouth. Just when they were about to throw me overboard, Jesus Christ appeared before me with such clarity. I clung to him and begged him to save me. At that very moment, an airplane was sent down from Heavens by the almighty God Himself to rescue me from the moment of death."

It's not clear what he's referring to in the last sentence, and there's more to tell of this history, for sure. In praying to “renounce oppression, aggression and the pride of power,” as you invited us to do last year in specific relation to the Korean situation, it's reassuring for me to know that such complex and seemingly remote circumstances are not out of reach of Mind. They are fully and powerfully within the scope of prayer and fasting for peace.