After a long time, I attended the dawn prayer service and listened to the sermon by the pastor who came from San Francisco, USA. The moment I heard that voice, memories of the past came vividly to mind—attending Onnuri Church in San Jose and cutting through the dawn air. From the ‘Daniel Dawn Prayer Meeting’ where I aimed for 21 consecutive days of attendance to the 40-day dedicated prayer meeting, the memory of driving down Highway 280 every dawn, determined to never miss a day, is still vivid in my mind.

Looking back at the sermon notes I wrote back then, I see traces of how persistently I clung to my earnest prayer requests. When prayers were answered, I would return to the dawn altar like the Samaritan leper who, as the only one among ten, came back to Jesus to give thanks and glory. I would shed tears of gratitude. I remember the moment I received a unilateral contract termination notice from a major client I was responsible for, during the economic crisis triggered by the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis, when corporate bankruptcies and layoffs were rampant. This hardship came less than a year after I had left a large corporation to be stationed overseas as an expatriate with my young son and wife. Sitting alone in the vast, empty office, utterly bewildered, I felt compelled to visit the dawn altar every day out of sheer desperation.

But at the end of that wilderness, a miracle occurred. At a game conference, I was fatefully connected with Disney. After over six months of intense negotiations, development, and testing, we completed the collaboration game. After the project wrapped up, I can never forget that moment during a Seattle business trip, when I spotted the promotional banner for the game on Verizon’s menu at the Space Needle Tower restaurant. Without realizing it, I shouted ‘Hallelujah’ and offered a prayer of thanks. That moment was the most beautiful scene in the movie of my life. Today, I engraved that earnestness and gratitude back into my heart, rising at 4:30 AM to start the day energetically with a dawn prayer service.