Brenda (right) with Elsa at an Elim House outing.
Crossing Borders’ mission is to show the compassion of Christ to North Koreans and their children. Part of this is to quietly sit with them and listen to their stories. As North Korean refugees under our care have shared thousands of stories of trauma and suffering, we often walk away confused as to how to help them. Most of the time, there is little we can do but listen. We experience a similar dilemma when we try to pray for them. Sometimes, we don’t know where to begin or what to say as we often are shocked at the tragedies that each of these people experience.
Elsa, one of our Elim House staff, experienced this recently with Brenda, a resident in our shelter since December 2023, when Brenda revealed more details about her two sons. Facing starvation in the late ‘90s, Brenda decided to leave her youngest son with her husband at home while she and her eldest son left home to find food. After traveling quite a distance, Brenda and her oldest found a way to make money by carrying coal by foot for three hours a day. On other days, they would beg for food from anyone they could find. Her son had to watch his mom get beaten many times as they begged. During the years that they lived like this, the winters were the hardest to endure in the cold with no shelter. Sometimes they would find shelter in caves.
When Brenda finally saved some money, she returned to her home only to find that her youngest son had wandered out of the house looking for food. He never returned. Brenda said that North Korean parents would lock their young children in their homes as they left for days in search of food. If the parents died along the way, the children were later found dead in their homes. In Brenda’s case, her husband had locked their son in their home as he also went in search of food, but their son found a way to escape and then went missing.
Trying to make the best of her tragic circumstances, Brenda poured all of her meager resources into her eldest son, who got back on track with his studies and eventually enlisted in the North Korean army. Brenda thought they would treat him well there, but her son became malnourished due to lack of food and was often beaten. He left the army and disappeared. Brenda thinks he purposely did not tell her where he was because he no longer wanted to be a burden. The last time she heard from him was through a letter he sent. He informed her that he had joined the military, his ribs were broken, his internal organs were damaged and he was suffering from the buildup of fluid in his abdomen.
After hearing this, Elsa, our shelter manager, left work and went to her church’s weekly prayer meeting where all she could do was cry for an hour as she thought about the hardships Brenda shared. As she communed with God during this time, she felt incredibly blessed to be able to hear such stories and privileged to be in a position to pray for Brenda.
How do you pray for someone who has endured such suffering and who continues to relive her trauma on a daily basis? In the gospel of John, when Lazarus has died and before Jesus goes to him, the Bible says that Jesus wept (John 11:35). This incredible detail demonstrates to us God’s very real presence in the midst of our sorrows and grief. Though Jesus knew he would bring dead Lazarus back to life, he demonstrated in this moment his profound humanity, connection and indisputable presence by weeping alongside Mary, Martha and the other mourners.
So while we often find ourselves unable to even put together coherent sentences to pray for our refugees who have endured horrific trauma, we take comfort and find peace in knowing that Jesus knows every detail that has happened to them and that he sits with them in their grief. And when we cannot muster the words to pray, Romans 8:26 offers great reassurance that, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (ESV).
