Sorokdo Story

In the old days, I went to church diligently and tried a lot to live a clean life by reducing my sins. I was spiritually ‘partial leprosy.’

 

As a child, I heard many bad rumors about lepers, so I was scared. When the lepers clapped, they clapped with the back of their hands. If a leper had a diamond ring on their finger, it was understood that there was no meaning to it. A leper has no fingers, how can they wear a diamond ring?

 

When I was in college, I went on a field trip to Sorokdo. Sorokdo is a peninsula in Goheung-gun, Jeollanam-do in Korea. It is a sanatorium for lepers established in 1910 by Christian missionaries. It is said that during the Japanese colonial period, Korean lepers were segregated to Sorokdo. When they parted from their families, they thought everyone had abandoned them. After hearing their stories, it was said that they were separated from their families and were forcibly quarantined there. Even lepers themselves were separated into positive and negative groups. Negative patients had been healed, or were healed, while positive patients remained sick. Positive patients ended up in the hospital, while negative patients lived in their own homes and farmed on the island. When entering the hospital, a warning was given. Students with weak hearts were prohibited from visiting. The lepers in the hospital were blind, and some were also missing their hands, feet, or even their legs. So it seemed that at that time, they were attached to the thigh with something like rubber. To me, the patients with severe leprosy at Sorokdo Hospital looked so lonely and so sad. The only wealth they had was an ugly body. It seemed like they were expecting a new body in heaven.

 

In Leviticus 13:13 of the Bible, there is a saying, “... the priest shall examine him, and if the disease has covered his entire body, he is to pronounce the infected person clean. Since it has all turned white, he is clean.” Did priests examine leprosy in the Old Testament in Israel? Were they certain in judging partial lepers and forcing them to live outside their villages because they are unclean? Because full-body lepers are clean, they are supposed to live in their villages. Since full-body leprosy means a person is clean, it should be possible to live in the village with everyone else. Strange. It is something different from our medical common sense in this day and age. Later, I learned that leprosy was a sin in the Bible. When God sees us humans, humans are 100% sinners. In other words, people knew that they were sinners who had no choice but to go to hell. We know in our hearts that when we become 100% a sinner, we become 100% righteous. Leprosy has spread from head to toe. 

 

Whole-body leprosy is an inability to see the eyes, dislocated joints or distorted faces. Would you be pretty with makeup on, and would you wear a diamond ring on your finger if you didn’t have a finger? So, I came to realize in my heart, ‘People have no hope on this Earth, but only hope in heaven!’ When the whole body lepers go to heaven, they will have a new body, not a dirty body, and live in the love of God and the bridegroom Jesus. Some people live on this Earth, but there are people whose hearts are set with hope in heaven.