Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong J Kim from Yesterday Today Tomorrow. This is our second program with Dr. Rebecca Price Janney. She is with us, a multi-award-winning author of 28 books. Her newest historical novel, Land of the Morning Calm, is a sequel to her Korean War novel East of the Sun and recipient of three national book awards. Thank you so much for being with us.

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, it's my pleasure, Inseong. Thank you very much for having me.

Inseong J Kim: A theologically trained historian, she is also well-known for the loved Easton series, as well as her non-fiction classics including Great Women in American History and Great Stories in American History as well.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes.

Inseong J Kim: It sounds like you love history.

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, I do. I love history very much. When I was a little girl, my parents were also history buffs and they would buy me a lot of books about historical people. I love biographies. I love to read about people and their place in history, and they told me many stories about things that they had lived through. I was fascinated with it.

Inseong J Kim: Also, you've already been writing professionally at the age of 14, and then by the following year were covering the Philadelphia Phillies. Please share a little bit about that.

Rebecca Price Janney: Well, you may be surprised, but when I was growing up I wanted to be an astronaut. I was very serious about it for years from the age of eight until 14. When I was getting ready to go to high school and spoke with an advisor about what I should study to be an astronaut, she was very discouraging.

There were reasons why I would not have made a good astronaut, but the reason she gave was that there weren't female astronauts at the time and that my math grades were not good enough. I was a little bit downhearted, but she said to me, "Your teachers tell me that you are a very good writer, and I wonder if you have ever considered writing as a profession."

I said, "Well, no, I'll think about it." I went home and prayed that God would show me a sign if I was to be a writer. There came an opportunity for me to enter a writing contest. I said, "Well, if I win, then I think that's my answer," and I won.

I felt that yes, that was my calling. That year, I got to interview one of the astronauts who had gone to the moon. I figured if I couldn't be an astronaut, I could write about them.

Inseong J Kim: Okay, so how did it go?

Rebecca Price Janney: Well, it was wonderful. He was very kind and took a lot of time with a teenage girl to answer my questions about being on the moon. Then I became very interested in baseball and ended up writing for about the Philadelphia Phillies for my local paper. But I was also very interested in politics and history. So when it came time to go to college, I had to decide which will it be. I thought, "Well, I'll always love the baseball, but I think I really need to focus on the history." So that's how that came about.

Inseong J Kim: Not just boring history, you're writing a novel, fiction, and it's beautifully written.

Rebecca Price Janney: Well, thank you very much.

Inseong J Kim: Going back to the 1907 revival in North Korea, how does the Jerusalem of the East become a prison in less than five years?

Rebecca Price Janney: It's hard to believe that a place that was so strong for Christianity became so quickly a stronghold for communism. I think having gone through the response to the COVID pandemic a few years back, I learned how quickly we can lose our freedom.

I had always heard things like President Reagan saying that freedom is always a generation away from being lost. At Memorial Day services, I would hear over and over about how fragile freedom is, and yet I don't think I ever really understood it until we went through that in 2020. Suddenly, it was illegal in some places to go to church, for example, or not to comply with different orders that were coming down from the state and local leaders and even national. So then I understood it better.

Inseong J Kim: That was a shocking time for me as someone like me that came to America for more freedom. It was devastating.

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, it must have been. I remember following a Korean pastor, Che Ahn, in California, who would not close his church and faced penalties and imprisonment. He said something very similar too, that he didn't come here to find a lack of freedom. In the end, he was vindicated and the state of California had to pay him damages.

Inseong J Kim: We're still in America, right? That's great. Like you said, one generation away, we have to keep fighting for our freedom.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes, we do. I think my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. I had many who picked up arms against Great Britain. Throughout my family's history, we've had people engaged in America's wars: the Civil War, the World Wars, Vietnam, and Korea. I like to think that even though I was never in the military, using my writing to enlighten people is my way of keeping freedom alive.

Inseong J Kim: It's powerful because if we don't understand why and how this freedom is valuable, then we're kind of lost in a way.

With the amazing revival, there was one side and then there was other thing happening. Kim Il Sung is the first leader in North Korea, and I was surprised he was the son of a Christian. I heard that he went even to seminary, right?

Rebecca Price Janney: I heard that he was trained in a Christian university, perhaps in the seminary, and that he basically found communism more to his liking.

Inseong J Kim: That's very interesting. So in a very short time, they groomed him to be put in the leadership in North Korea. I heard that Cho Man-sik is a real Christian leader in North Korea. They eliminated him on October 14, 1945, and then put Kim Il Sung as a leader. Ever since then, North Korea changed.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes, one person can do a lot of damage.

Inseong J Kim: And then they were backed by—it's very interesting is they were already grooming him to be a leader. It was not an overnight thing, like "Okay, you, Kim Il Sung, you're going to be a leader of North Korea."

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh no, this took years.

Inseong J Kim: They prepared him to be. So as Americans, we always have to be on guard and be aware that somewhere somebody might be groomed to be, right?

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes. I love the story that I tell in my first—we call my books the series Airs of Freedom series. In the first book, East of the Sun, which takes place during the Korean War, one of the main characters' grandfathers was in North Korea when the war broke out, a pastor and a teacher. He begins the journey down to the South and tries to rescue as many people as he can.

One of the main character's jobs is to try to find out what happened to him. I enjoyed telling the story of how he was actually captured and one of his guards had been one of his students.

I like to tell that part of the story because my professor at Princeton, whom I mentioned in our first hour together, was Dr. Samuel Hugh Moffett. He had told a story about being a missionary and, I can't remember, my husband knows the story a little better than I do, but it was during the Japanese occupation.

He told a similar story of being imprisoned and then he is miraculously released through the influence of someone he didn't really recognize but who had been one of his students and who didn't want to see him harmed. I often will take a story that I've heard and work it into my fiction to give it more of an authentic kind of flavor. Although my books are fictional, a lot of what happens in them is based on real events and real people.

Inseong J Kim: Usually, Koreans make really good drama series. I would love to see this book as a series on a drama. That would be very interesting to watch, a movie or a series to learn about how it happened all the way to 1907, how missionaries went to North Korea and revival happened, and then how transitions to a communist country. All of this would be very interesting.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes, I think so.

Inseong J Kim: So your fiction will be a very strong foundation to have that series because we don't know a lot about—even the Korean War was a forgotten war. The Vietnam War was a long war, so we remembered, but the Korean War is forgotten. We hear a lot about North Korea and Kim Jong Un's stories, but we don't know the real story of how North Korea became a communist country.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes, it's a very important lesson, something very important to know and how dark it can be, oppression in the belief of communism.

Inseong J Kim: What would you share with us, what kind of hope do we have as Korean and American today?

Rebecca Price Janney: I think about something that one of my students said to me when I taught Korean seminary students at the school where I earned my doctorate. I remember they would tell me stories about their families and about being separated by the war and how they had relatives they had not ever known or their parents hadn't seen or their grandparents hadn't seen in years.

Their fervent prayer was that somehow communism would fall in the North and that Korea would be reunited. We would talk about these things, and I remember one day saying to them, "I'm very curious. You have many wonderful seminaries in South Korea. What brought you here away from your families, away from all that is loved and familiar to you? Why would you come here to study?"

They were quiet for a moment, and then one of them spoke up and said, "We remember when Korea had no Christians and Americans brought Christianity to our country. Now America is in trouble, and it's our turn to bring Christianity back to you." I've never forgotten that.

Inseong J Kim: Very well said. I think a lot of Koreans say that when Koreans come to America, the first thing they do is build a church. There are so many Korean churches here because a lot of them, like me, came here to seek more about Jesus, about God. As he found out, there is complacency in Christianity, like there's not much hunger because we're too comfortable here. So what would be a takeaway from this Land of the Morning Calm book for our listeners?

Rebecca Price Janney: I think there's a main theme of hope that in times of confusion and darkness, historically, that's when we've seen revival. That's when God breaks through and things change when people's lives are changed.

I love what happened in America after the Second Great Awakening. This was a revival that began in the early part of the 1800s and lasted for quite a while. Its lead figure—there were many ministers who preached in this time—but the main person who's remembered is Charles Finney. Finney said that changed people, people who are changed by the revival, go out and change their society.

America's society did begin to change, so we saw finally an end to slavery. We saw that there were more institutions to help people who struggled with mental illness, with alcoholism, with helping people achieve all that they could in the God-given talents that they had given them. We saw more participation in the public sphere by evangelical women. I think what I would like people to see in the book is that revival changes people and people change where they live.

I love a story—it's not about the 1907 revival, but all revivals tend to have certain things in common. During the First Great Awakening in the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin was host to George Whitefield, who was the great revivalist of that First Great Awakening. During that time, Franklin noticed that there was a great change among the people in Philadelphia because of the revival.

Because people's lives were being changed by Jesus Christ, people were walking around singing hymns in public. He said he would walk down the street at night and hear hymns being sung inside people's houses, and people were more civil to each other. They were kinder.

I think that this tends to happen. I've read about it in so many places where revival has broken out, that people have changed and the places where they live have changed. I want people to be hopeful. I want them to seek revival themselves and to be touched by God's Holy Spirit.

Inseong J Kim: Yes, it did not happen on the social platform of the influencers these days. It happened with an anonymous person who's really seeking God and desire that God poured out on His spirit. That's how revival started, right?

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes, exactly. I mentioned too before that in 2023 a revival broke out at Asbury University in a very small town in Kentucky. People began flooding this little campus seeking God's presence, and a lot of Christian celebrities wanted to go there. They wanted to film themselves there. The administration of the school said no. There are no stars here except Jesus. So if you want to come and be anonymous, that's okay. But if you want to come and draw attention to yourself, no, we can't allow that.

Inseong J Kim: That's what's exactly happening when revival happened. I heard that even North Korea there's revival happened, there was a woman who was praying and also right after even in the book of John, the woman at the well, the hunger of the truth that she went out.

Rebecca Price Janney: Yes. One thing that I loved in writing Land of the Morning Calm was telling the stories of Korean women who had not historically been treated that well in society. They were an afterthought, if you will. They were more property than beloved, and they lived in fear that something bad might happen to them. Maybe their husband would disown them or evil spirits would get them. When they learned about Jesus and His great love for them, it transformed their lives. They felt loved. They felt like they were worthwhile human beings and valuable, and they went out and preached and they saw revival.

Inseong J Kim: Yes, that was Korean Christian history. The women didn't even have training but the love of Jesus was so fired on their heart.

Rebecca Price Janney: I love that. That's something that the American in the book struggles with. How can an untrained person tell about Jesus? But he learns.

Inseong J Kim: Yes, and I think being a pastor is different than sharing the gospel is allowed by anyone who has a testimony of Jesus, right?

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, for sure.

Inseong J Kim: And I think we should allow more of that. We have a platform, social media, anybody can share their stories and gospel and share their heart. I do believe our time, so many people are yearning for Jesus to intervene our time, right?

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, they are. I agree.

Inseong J Kim: And I'm looking forward to that time soon. Thank you so much for being with us with an amazing book. Tell us a little bit more about where they can find the book and the title of the book.

Rebecca Price Janney: Land of the Morning Calm is the title, and it's available on Amazon. They can find out more about it there and on my website, rebeccapricejanney.com. There are stories there about background stories about the book and about my other novels and nonfiction too.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you.

Rebecca Price Janney: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you for listening to this wonderful novel. Please just go to Amazon and just buy some books and share about this story about what happened in North Korea 1907. Thank you so much for listening. Yesterday Today Tomorrow, we'll be back next week. Thank you.