47 Years

I was crying my heart out as I watched a story on Arirang about the reunion of a family forty seven years after losing contact with each other.

It is about a North Korean guy who studied college in Germany, fell in love with a German lass, married her and had two kids but was sent back to Korea just after the youngest son was born.

After forty seven years, the German wife and the two grown up kids are finally given permission to come to Pyongyang, North Korea to be reunited with their father for twelve days. It is the first chance for the kids to see and create memories with their father and to meet their korean half-sister and a chance for Renate, the wife, to be with the man she still considers her husband.

And so it was poignant, and it spoke of a woman's faith and sustaining love that one day she'd see her husband again. How finally the children are given time to form bonds with their father. It might be their first and last chance to be a family again. A chance that seems like an end and a beginning. I cried because, there is no clearer picture to portray how life is, how it does not always turn out the way we want it. How despite the things we sometimes have to endure to live it, it remains beautiful in its unpredictability and in the unexpected gifts it bestows upon us.

The youngest son, now 47, says how he now believes that if you wish for something hard enough it will eventually come true. Well, this doesn't always pan out but aren't we happy that for them it rang true.