When writer Suki Kim heard on the news that there had been a break-in at North Korea’s embassy in Madrid, led by a young man named Adrian Hong, she “sat upright.” She had known Adrian for several years. They had crossed paths at a Korean Students Conference in 2003, after which Kim went on to write the book Without You, There Is No Us, about her time as an English teacher in Pyongyang, and Adrian became an activist who spread awareness about human rights abuses in the Hermit Kingdom. Now he was being hunted by two governments. When Kim texted Adrian, he agreed to meet with her at a barbecue restaurant in Times Square. He told her that, yes, he’d led the break-in, but for good cause: He was now a leader of Free Joseon, a secretive international network of activists seeking regime change in Pyongyang:

“Regimes like this…

I love these words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which I first encountered in I Want to Live These Days with You: A Year of Daily Devotions. I will be using some of this in my sermon this Sunday, but I wanted to share it here because I could not find these words quoted anywhere on the internet, and they really deserve to be. So, here are Bonhoeffer’s wise and wonderful words on the importance of paying attention to our souls:

“Like a song from old times, like a medieval image painted on gold leaf, like the memory of childhood days, the sound of the wonderful word of the soul has grown foreign to us. If there is still in our day—in the age of machines, of economic battles, of the reign of fashion and sports—something like the soul, then it’s not just a dear childhood memory like so many others…