Easter Story

Let me tell a story about a lady named Margaret Ault who was determined to wait for the right man to come along to give her heart to. When she had all but given up that love would ever come her way she met Hyung Goo Kim & soon they were in love. After several dates Hyung Goo delicately told Margaret he has HIV. Here's her response: "I had never met anyone whom I liked half so much as I liked him. I had never met anyone who made me feel so whole, who was such good company, whose interests paralleled & complemented mine the way his did. He was a musician, he was a scientist, and he was a thoughtful & committed Christian. He was handsome, funny, considerate, creative. He owned a tuxedo, for goodness’ sake. And he was going to die of AIDS…Now I’d met someone I liked, & we were definitely not going to live happily every after. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut by the biggest boot in the world."

They married, attended grad school at Duke & fell in love with the campus gardens. Everyday they would walk together in those gardens. They learned the name of every plant, named the ducks, sort of 'took over' the gardens like they belonged just to them. They even took on a 'reconstruction project' in one of the gardens, just because they loved them so much. In those gradens nothing mattered, they were at peace with their life; and their love grew.

A few years later Hyung Goo died & Duke constructed a rose garden his honor. On Margaret’s return trip the garden she had these thoughts: "Where peonies were promised, there were only the dead stumps of last year’s stalks; where day lilies were promised, there were unprepossessing tufts of foliage; where hostas were promised, there was nothing at all. And yet I knew what lushness lay below the surface; those beds that were so brown & empty, & to the unknowing eye, so unpromising, would be full to bursting in a matter of months. Is the whole world like this? Is this what it might be like to live in expectation, real expectation, of the Resurrection?" The answer is yes!

PJ