While we have much to do in South Korea to get ready for a trip across the river to the North some international efforts would be helpful if they led to opening the door. But, can we count on China who profits from the confusion being caused by its vassal state? Can we count on Russia who, even in its strongest days, hesitated in confronting China-----a defanged bear? Can we count on Japan who is hardly more than a paper tiger in this high stake game? Can we count on a pacifying South Korea who has gone belly up to the intimidations of its brothers to the north, declaring that they would not longer confront North Korea economically or militarily and would no longer consider them enemies? Can we count on the United States who is just coming off a Carter/Clinton pacification agreement that ended up promoting a decade of nuclear development? Or, who can have any belief that diplomacy will work with avowed antagonists like Kim Yong Il, even as we are spread thinly in Iraq?

Christians can rarely place their hopes in the politics of men. If we are to hope for a door into North Korea in our lifetimes it will be because we hope in the Lord for his intervention. Our most effective means of getting into North Korea with the Gospel will be through fervent and persistent prayer. God has a long history of tearing defiant men from their exalted places of power. Sometimes it happens over decades. Sometimes, like the Berlin Wall, it happens quickly when no one anticipates it to happen. The tearing down of the Iron Curtain by an unseen hand gives us our only real hope that it can happen again.

A modern train line has been built from Seoul to an elaborate train terminal on the DMZ. A modern highway stops at the river with plans waiting to construct a bridge across the river connecting Seoul to Pyongyang. We must pray that the God of Heaven will break down the barriers into North Korea and will help us prepare to have well trained and able evangelists on the first trains and busses crossing the forbidden zone, preaching the Gospel in a united Korea.

---Truman Scott