Is God’s goal for your life synonmous with the American Dream? Listen to this podcast where Dr. Shin share his experience and reflections on Biblical principles related to the notion of upward mobility.

<p>Is God’s goal for your life synonmous with the American Dream? Listen to this podcast where Dr. Shin share his experience and reflections on Biblical principles related to the notion of upward mobility.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Ouachita Hills College

David Shin

Chasing the American Dream

A day in the American dream probably goes something like this.

At your lake house, you wake up around 6am, get dressed and breakfast is ready for you, prepared by the person that works for you at your house.

Then after saying goodbye to your family, you get into your Mercedes, drive to your job where you are hopefully a doctor, a lawyer, a business executive, something of the sorts where you have people working for you.

For lunch, you go somewhere where lunch is quickly prepared for you, and you go back to work before returning home where your kids got back from school, where your spouse got back from work and the house cleaned for you and supper is also prepared for you.

On Sundays, you probably go out in your boat with your family and on vacations you go to Europe and travel around seeing the work done by people from thousands of years before you.

This is probably what most of us want and imagine having.

A comfortable life, where everything is prepared and all you do is casually enjoy life.

And own a nice house, a nice car, and preferably also a boat.

Well, sort of nothing wrong until here in college I took a class on the philosophy of education, and it revolutionized my way of thinking about life and what it's all about.

And so she goes, and tries to backroom somewhere.

An idea that we probably all grew up with is that we go to college so that we can get educated, work a good job, make good money, so that then we can have things served to us.

The problem with this reasoning is that in the end, all you have to show for your education, work and life are all the things that were served to you.

Your spot on the parking lot of contributions to the world is vacant.

Shin and try to clarify this issue with him.

I think growing up the son of immigrants, it's the natural tendency to want upward mobility.

My parents, first generation immigrants from Korea, and in my culture, it's basically you're doctor, lawyer, dentist, or you are nothing.

And I think among my Korean American counterparts and contemporaries that I grew up with, it was all about upward mobility, namely economic mobility.

And so education became the path for that American dream and the actualization of a certain status in terms of vehicles, in terms of cars, in terms of future home.

And so, yeah, I think I had those natural presuppositions, being in America, being the son of Asian immigrants to this country, there's that strong push.

And even in pastoral ministry, I think that that idea still carries over.

No 1 wants that podunk church out in the middle of nowhere.

Everyone wants that large church in Loma Linda or Berrien Springs.

Or you want to be a conference official, or you want to be a GC official or GC president.

I think that these ideas of culture and your family upbringing really lend itself towards upward mobility and the ascendancy model, whether it be economics, whether it be position, status, or even in ministry, it comes to leadership positions so that everyone wants their parents to look at them and say like, oh, you know, that's my son.

And I think that's a big thing in Korean culture, just to be real.

And you find with parents of immigrants, at least I find, like my mom talks to her friends and it's like, hey, what's your son doing?

My son's doing this and he's got 100K nest egg and he's a dentist, he's a doctor, whatever, and then when it comes to me, it's like, oh, he's in self-supporting work, you know what I mean?

Living in a mobile home and getting a stipend annually.

And so there's this tendency, even among parents of immigrants, to kind of like brag on their children.

And the status is basically like, look, my son's arrived based on his net worth, based on his income, and like, what were you doing as a parent that your child should be in this certain predicament that he is?

In secular circles, perhaps it is, but in Christian circles, it's never an explicitly stated thing.

My parents never said to me, I want you to make the big bucks so we can tell all our Asian friends how big of the bucks you make.

But actions and words can have dichotomies.

Even being raised Adventist, I still feel this silent pressure of one-upmanship.

I currently go to a school whose name is an enigma to pronounce or spell.

There aren't too many bragging rights for going here.

And compared to all my childhood friends, the pressure feels real.

When all your childhood friends are going off to become medical or science professionals, while you're in a little missionary college, the pressure feels real even if not explicitly stated.

Compared to my friends, the trajectory of my career is more or less like the trajectory of cinder blocks in the Mariana Trench.

So I think that the cultural presupposition is real.

My own experience has been molded and shaped by culture.

We praise the Lord for scripture that leads us to surrender our presuppositions and our cultural upbringing.

We live in a world where greatness is determined largely by materialistic value.

It's not easy to clear off the underlying edge of materialism, even if you go to church.

It's not even easy to realize that you have those underlying ideologies of greatness.

We might not aspire to become millionaires or billionaires per se, but we sure want to.

I mean, at what point do we ever think we have enough?

I think true Christianity strikes at the heart and reveals the underlying ideologies we actually believe in.

I think when I first came to Watchedale's Academy, that was the beginning of my presuppositional challenge and journey because there's a certain element of egalitarianism here.

It doesn't matter if you're the spoiled rich kid from the suburbs or, you know, the country bumpkin that came here.

It's like everyone is doing the same thing.

Everyone's washing the same dishes and there is no, no caste.

And especially in the circles that we're in, in terms of true education and the idea of manual training and manual labor, I think that was the beginning of my presuppositional revision, because it's naturally assumed in my culture that the white-collar job is you've arrived, and you hire out the blue-collar manual training.

You hire out people to clean your toilet.

But here it's like, everybody's got to clean toilets, you know?

If you've come from a place where intellectual training is the stepstool of greatness, then the idea of manual training is, well to put it bluntly, humiliating.

When was the last time you saw a doctor change the oil in his own car?

But think of it like this, Does the doctor even know how to change the oil in his own car?

We naturally assume yes, after all, it's a doctor, he's smart enough to do that.

But a lot of times, we like to hide our inability to do things with our ability to pay someone else to do it.

The reality that we have no idea how to do some basic and perhaps necessary things is perhaps equally humiliating as having to do those things ourselves.

And I think that was the beginning of like, hey, there is no dichotomy between the manual training and the mental training.

If you go on Google and search for the most famous or successful people on earth, You'll find people who generally aren't doing manual labor.

You'll find actors, politicians, singers, and business people.

You don't find celebrity farmers or famous janitors.

Or a guy that works at a lawn care company that's got a gazillion fans.

And this says something about our culture.

So that was the beginning of this notion that maybe my cultural presuppositions in regards to manual training and the role of servants and custodians.

But that's kind of frowned upon in my culture.

So I think my journey in academy, in Christian schools, Christian education, namely Adventist education, was the beginning of that revision in terms of my cultural presuppositions needing to be surrendered.

There's an annual ministerial meeting we had to be in, in the conference that I was at.

And it's like every 4 years, there's, not every 4 years, but it takes 4 years toward ordination and everyone's on this ordination track.

So everyone gets together, young pastors, and there was a certain group talk that you do in between sessions.

And it's interesting what the talk is like, and these are colleagues of mine, and it's always, someday, you watch out David, I'm gonna be ministerial director, brother, and you're gonna work for me.

And someone else is like, hey, I think you'd make a good secretary or conference president or union or division.

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Chasing the American Dream

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