One of the things I’m thankful for in 2024 is that I published my book, The Happy Deliveryman, in March and my story was featured on a YouTube channel, giving hope and encouragement to many people. To my surprise, I received 300,000 views, more than 500 comments, and several people contacted me through LinkedIn, some of whom emailed me their stories and traveled to Songdo to share their lives with me for a short time. Even though I had never met them, I was able to have a deep conversation and empathy with them because they knew a lot about me through my book and YouTube videos.

And this year, I was grateful to learn from a variety of authors as I listened to more than 50 books on Willa Audiobooks. For humanities classics, I gained life wisdom from reading Chunroe Yokjeong, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; for memorable books, I learned from Seino’s teachings on how to realistically succeed in Korea; the autobiography of a successful global executive, The World is My Treasure Island; and James Dyson, who showed me how to successfully combine innovative technology and design, The Charlie Munger Bible, which was translated late in Korea, but I was able to read it now; The Anxious Generation, which showed me how cell phones are actually harming children; Lululemon, which showed me how core corporate culture can be successful globally; The Art of the Deal, which helped me understand what Trump is about, beyond the American Dream, to make America great; and Trump 2. 0. In addition to this, I also read fun novels like Sherlock Holmes and The Great Leap Forward, exercised in the morning with the Headway app, listened to English book summaries, and learned a little bit of Chinese every day with the Duolingo app in my spare time.

I am also grateful that I subscribed to informative YouTube channels to gain knowledge and gain different perspectives. I learned about Christian beliefs that I should teach my children from Book Reading Lion, discerning current events from the Bible and praying habits from Jesus Wave, and conservative political and historical views based on liberal democracy from GroundC. I also learned about market trends and wealth economics for long-term investment from Economic King Lee Ji-Sung’s channel, how to read stock charts from Alessio Rastani’s channel, and how to analyze Korea’s economy and stock investment strategies from the Korea Economic Research Institute. I learned about the current state of human rights and missions in North Korea from Jisung Lee’s 10,000 Kilometers, and why anti-state forces are pushing them to the far right through the channel of former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, who is proving facts, not conspiracy theories, about fraudulent elections. In particular, Lee Ji-sung is a funny person who communicates live with paid members of YouTube about economic analysis and investment strategies from a humanistic perspective based on Christian values, and Hwang Kyo-ahn is also one of the few good politicians with the right Christian values, so it was surprising that they are close to each other. And Lee Ji-sung recently donated 500 million won to a missionary organization for human rights in North Korea, proving that his words and actions are consistent, and Hwang Kyo-ahn held a press conference about the fraudulent election at the National Assembly Communication Center and proposed a national debate.

Meanwhile, updating myself with various knowledge and new news through books and YouTube channels, organizing them into blogs, and trying to discern them from Sunday sermons has been very helpful for me. Especially when I look back at my past blog posts, I can see that my thoughts have changed a lot, and I have been able to free myself from the form and structure of religion and be free with the word; politically, I have been able to have a correct Christian conservative viewpoint, which is lonely in the left-leaning Korean society; and financially, I have been able to live a more stable and long-term investment life and train myself to pay full tithing. I also realized that while faith, politics, and finances are all different areas of life, they are closely intertwined, and when your religious values, political views, and financial plans are out of sync, your life is bound to get out of balance.

Maybe it was this clash of values that led me to live a contradictory and unreliable life in the past, where I was one of those Christians who prayed in church on Sundays for the next generation while supporting a political party that wanted to enact anti-discrimination laws that would destroy Christian families, or who supported a carbon-neutral green policy based on a fictitious climate crisis, claiming that clearing 194 times the land and forests of Yeouido Square to install solar panels and wind turbines was cleaner than building a nuclear power plant that was three million times more efficient than coal-fired power plants. And it sent a chill down my spine to realize that I had unwittingly imposed these contradictory ideas and unhealthy lifestyles on my own children, almost causing them to leave the church.

But when the light of the first day of Genesis shone on me, life sprang up within me and new thoughts began to work.. It’s not a holy spirit experience, a dream revelation, or the direct voice of God, it’s just the joy and gratitude you feel when you see the same dazzling morning sun rise every day, but differently, and the sunset bathe everything in warm colors. Looking at the world with such vitality helped me to break out of the world of lies that covered my country, the Republic of Korea, just as it did for Neo in the movie The Matrix when he realized he had been living in a virtual world and came out of his system. So the dawn of Christmas in 2024 was special for me, as I greeted the dawn of the Republic of Korea, the only Christian nation in Asia, founded on August 15, 1948, based on a liberal democratic system and constitution that was created through the sacrifices and prayers of countless missionaries. Just like the day the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago, it was recorded as a serene and holy moment, giving thanks and glory to God.