The dawn service had scarcely ended, the incense still warm, when he closed his fingers around my wrist. The heavy Bible shut with the soft finality of a vault door. Without a word he led me to the rear vestry. A single taper at our feet bled crimson over the stone; our shadows climbed the wall like twin apostates.
“I cannot leave you,” he said, and for the first time the phrase sounded less like confession than like a knot pulled tight. Every Sunday I sit in the same pew and drink his sermon. Each verse detonates softly in my chest. When he speaks the word grace his breath grazes my ear; I name the shudder fear, then dutifully record it as rapture.
That day, too, he intoned, “The sinner cannot walk away on her own.”
So he held me. I never learned whether the sentence was Scripture or private litany.
First Praise Sunday
A woman named Yumin wept at the end of the praise-team corridor. Pastor Junhyeok laid a hand on her shoulder; the fingertips trembled almost imperceptibly. Yumin felt the tremor, but her tears blurred everything else.
“Each of your tears becomes a prayer,” he said. Before the echo faded he clasped her hand and led her down to the church basement—among sealed offering boxes, in cold, stale air. He inhaled the faint communion-wine scent still caught in her hair and whispered, “This is prayer for us alone.”
After that, Yumin visited Junhyeok’s study every night following the prayer meetings. A junior vocalist asked, “Unnie, what keeps you so late?”
Smiling with exhausted eyes, Yumin answered, “The pastor says he’s healing my spiritual darkness.” The words slipped out like a promise from the Gospel itself.
A Mother’s Confession
A nine-year-old boy woke nightly from nightmares. His mother, Seonyeong, knocked on the church-counseling door. Pastor Do-hyeong told her, “Your child’s dreams reflect your own heavy heart.”
Instinctively she fell to her knees. She could no longer tell whether the wrong lay in loving someone—or in failing to love at all. Do-hyeong drew a small silver cross from a drawer. “Hang this on your son’s door. I will receive the mother’s prayer myself.”
That night, after the child slept, Seonyeong walked to the pastor’s study. He opened the door with his tie loosened; to her he looked like the outline of a calling.
“It’s a sacrifice for the boy,” she said, voice shaking, and traced a cross on Do-hyeong’s breastbone. Cool fingertips grazed warm skin. In that instant she knew: she could no longer distinguish prayer from desire.
Beneath the Cross
Dawn light drips through a crack in the chapel ceiling. He kneels before me still, two fingers resting on my brow—blessing or curse, the difference no longer weighs. I feel heat bloom from his hand; before it can be named sin I am already dissolved within it.
He said, “You cannot live without me.”
I still do not know whether the sentence is true or false. I only know that every time it pierces me my heart dissolves into tears.
After every soul has gone, I stand alone at the center of the nave. The cross rises, immovable. I walk beneath it and reach out; cold wood bites my palm. At that touch I understand:
Faith is an endless pendulum swinging between terror and craving.
The Christ upon the cross came not to save me, but to show me that I cannot be saved.
I lift my eyes to the dim vault. The incense lingers—prayer, residual desire, the stubborn scent of unabsolved sin. And here, on this stone, I whisper:
“Lord, grant me discernment this night: is the one who loves me Yours, or merely the one who rules me in Your name?”