The Eric Metaxas Show - #217 - Dan Chung

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

She escaped North Korea and eventually reached safety in South Korea. Years later, she still sleeps with her shoes beside the bed because part of her remains prepared to run.Dan Chung, Executive Director of Crossing Borders and author of *A Hard Freedom: The Dreams and Trauma of North Korean Refugees*, joins Eric to share the extraordinary stories of people who have escaped one of the world’s most repressive regimes.Dan describes North Korean women trafficked after crossing into China, a mother whose dying son asked for one final bowl of rice, a young refugee who spent two years unable to leave an embassy, and the lasting trauma many refugees carry long after reaching freedom.Eric and Dan also discuss Christian persecution inside North Korea, reports that the underground church continues to grow despite severe persecution, China’s role in the refugee crisis, and what these stories reveal about freedom, human dignity and the image of God.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🪙 Grace Precious Metals: https://www.metaxasmetals.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Chapter -- Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/🦅 Patriot Mobile -- America's ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider: https://patriotmobile.com/partners/me...🏛️ Socrates in the City CRUISE: https://socratesinthecity.com/cruise/0:00 Dan Chung Joins2:09 The Secret His Uncle Never Told4:35 What Happens After Refugees Escape North Korea7:09 Why One Woman Still Sleeps With Her Shoes On11:28 A Dying Boy’s Final Wish For Rice13:34 How Crossing Borders Helps Refugee Women16:38 Christianity Inside North Korea18:43 Does Persecution Strengthen The Church?22:34 What American Christians Can Learn25:05 Two Years Trapped Inside An Embassy27:07 Where Do Human Rights Come From?35:33 Healing The Trauma After Freedom- -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE:    / @ericmetaxas  #EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Hey, folks, welcome with the program. I have the privilege today of someone, of interviewing someone, talking to someone who has ministered to people who have escaped North Korea. This is almost unfathomable. It's hard for me to think about sometimes. But I'm glad to have on as my guest today, Dan Chung, who is the executive director of crossing borders. He has a new book out called A Hard Freedom, The Dreams and Dreams. the dreams and trauma of North Korean refugees. Dan, welcome on the program.

Thanks for having me, Eric. I, you know, have interviewed Yomi Park, and the stories of what people go through in North Korea is very hard for me to process the satanic evil in that country. How did you find yourself ministering to people who have had the fortune of escaping North Korea? My best friend from college, Mike Kim, took a short-term missions trip right after college in 2001 to Northeast China,

where he met a North Korean refugee, several North Korean refugees. He came back, and he told me their horrific tales, and I just couldn't sleep after that. and Mike couldn't either. He was so moved that he moved out to Northeast China in 2003 on January 1st, and I asked him if I could help him.

That's how we started. Where did you grow up, Dan? I grew up in the Chicago area. I was born in Seoul, South Korea. And, yeah, we moved here to America when I was a couple months old. And did you become a Christian later in life or were you raised as a Christian?

I was raised in the church. My uncle was our pastor and after his death in 1998, we found out that he was also a North Korean refugee. He was a pastor in North Korea's capital city, Pyongyang. I talk about it in my book and he was persecuted. His family, at the time, his family was murdered. as he was hiding under the floorboards of his house as the Red Army was searching for pastors to torture and kill.

How is it possible that he did not share this as a pastor in the United States? He was a man of very few words. I never really had a conversation with him, like a personal more than one-sentence conversation with him. And, yeah, my parents as well. So he'd like to speak about the Bible, and he liked to speak about church matters, but he did not tell us about his history. He only told his sons, and they only told us after he died. Well, again, it's hard for people in the West in America to fathom the horror that people go through persecuted for their faith.

But I think it's important. I think the reason the American church has become so soft. and weak is because we don't tell these stories, because we are unaware of the suffering of Christians for their faith. So you hear these stories. You were a very young man, it sounds like, when you first heard this stuff, and you decided to do something about it.

Yeah. Yeah. When Mike went out, he didn't really have a plan. He just wanted to kind of be there to see what he could do. there was a network of underground church pastors helping these people that were underfunded. They were not organized and he just provided some leadership there. We were 26 years old and most importantly we had the backing of American donors who supported his work and we were able to make a dent at a very young age in this crisis.

So your new book, it's called The Hard Freedom, the Dreams and Trauma of North Korean Refugees. What do you talk about in that book? Well, North Koreans, when they get to South Korea, they are very well cared for. So in order to get to South Korea, you have to get over the border of North Korea into China, usually. and in China, 70% of the women, 80% of the refugees are women, and 70% of those women have been trafficked because of China's one child policy, the country has 35 million more men than women.

These women come in with no human rights. They are not respected at all, and many of them get sold. Most of them get sold. And in order to escape that, you have to take what's called the undergrubes, modern-day underground railroad, which takes you the distance from about Maine to Arizona, where there's tons of ID checks, camera checks, security checkpoints, without ID,

and then get to Vietnam or Laos, and then you have to run an ultra-marathon, about 100 miles through rugged jungle terrain, and finally you get to Thailand, and you have human rights, and most have chosen to go to South Korea. Well, in South Korea, there are about 33,000 North Korean refugees. They get about $20,000 U.S. dollars to start a new life, housing subsidies, job training, medical care. And yet, I would say more than the refugees we minister to in China, the refugees in South Korea are doing worse. even though their material situation is much, much better. And so in 2020, crossing borders started helping in South Korea,

and we noticed that, look, these people are not well. And we realize that it is the trauma that they have incurred from life in North Korea. It's very traumatic, getting sold in China, often going back to a prison camp, camp in North Korea, getting tortured, escaping that, going through the Underground Railroad, and then finally you're supposed to be okay, you know, you have money in hand, you have housing, you're in this modern society, and they are not doing well. So that's what my book is about. So tell us some of the stories of what you've seen, because it's hard for us to imagine. Yeah, so in 2022, I met a woman who I referred to as Becky.

We hold free English classes for refugees, and I happen to be in town, and I happened to be teaching that class that day. And after class, she just opened up to me, and she told me, I am not doing well. I can't sleep. So if you talk to refugee experts in South Korea, they will tell you that most, if not all North Koreans,

the 33,000 North Koreans in South Korea have to medicate themselves just to fall asleep. And she told me that she woke up in the middle of the night, she would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming. And she had two little children, and she would disturb their sleep.

And the only way she could sleep was through medication and by sleeping with her shoes next to her. And she told me that in China, she had to do that, right? because she had been arrested in China after being sold there, sent back to a North Korean prison camp that is, by human rights experts, it's compared to the Nazi prison camp system. But the difference between the North Korean system and the Nazi system is that North Korea has had 80 years to refine and perfect this system. And I call it a torture machine. And that is exactly what it is.

designed to inflict as much trauma as possible onto the inmates there. And Becky was one of those inmates, and she said she was lucky that she only had to spend four months in this prison camp, whereas most people have to spend two years. And so she came back out to China, and that's when she had to start sleeping with her shoes next to her. very practical adaptation in case she gets caught again, she could at least try to run. Well, in South Korea, there's no threat of any police coming in or barging into her door.

The police are there to protect her. She has human rights. And yet, she cannot get over this habit. She has to do it in order to sleep. Why is that? Why do people do that? And that is the very essence of trauma. It's these adaptations that we make as human being.

when we are under severe duress, right? And even when we get out of that duress, we hold on to these adaptations, and they're not practical for our functioning lives in just a normal everyday setting. Well, there's a, I guess it's a good title for your book, A Hard Freedom. I mean, there's so many things that come to my mind.

First of all, the complicity of China in this evil. the complicity of China, of communist China, communist China, Chinese leaders, one of whom was just here in the United States in this satanic evil is extraordinary.

And just to cut in for a second, China through the 2010s represented 70% of North Korea's economy. And yet it was sort of like the tail wagging the dog where North Korea requested or required China Hey, if you want to be our friends, you have to do this for us. And they complied. I don't know why.

Well, there has to be a reason. That's very interesting. Yeah. I wonder. I guess maybe because somehow North Korea, they need North Korea strategically. They do. And that's probably what it boils down to that they have all those nukes, and they're insane. Well, so what are some of the stories that you tell in this book,

A Hard Freedom, The Dreams and Trome of North Korean Refugees? What are some of the other stories that you talk about? Yeah, you know, there's this one refugee that I met several times in China. I call her Margaret. She was in the famine. She had a family of five. So three children and her husband. And she would often tell the story of her two children passed away because of starvation.

About 3 million people died during the famine in North Korea between the years 1995 and 1998, three million out of 21 million people. And two of her children died. her husband died, I think of dysentery, and she had one child left, and she knew he would die as well. And he knew he would die because he told his mother, Mom, before I die, I just want one bowl of rice,

he asked her, and she said, okay. And if you study famines, there's this person in America named Andrew Natsios who studies famine instead. studied the North Korean famine, it's very common that during a time of famine, the price of real estate plummets, right? And the reason why that happens is people are selling everything off cheaply just to get food, just to get money for enough food. And so Margaret told me that the only real possession that she had at the time was her clothing. And so she told her son, okay, I'll sell my shirt off my back so that you can have your dying wish of a bowl of white rice

and he smiled and he played with a button on her shirt for a second and then he died. With nothing, yeah, yeah. What is the work that you do in crossing borders? Because now you're located in the United States. What is the work that you do? Because I want to keep talking about the book of Hard Freedom,

but what is the work that crossing borders does? So we help people like Margaret. She crossed over and she was sold into human trafficking. And we're not sure about how many North Koreans are in China. We think it's tens, if not hundreds of thousands, because we keep on finding more and more. So we have staff in China today on the ground who go and visit these women. They used to be able to meet for worship.

They used to be a community of believers. But China does not allow currently people to meet in groups of more than four people. Even if you're meeting for a family reunion at, let's say, a restaurant, that family of, say, 15 people have to separate into different tables. And many religious leaders have been arrested in China. And so our staff on the ground has a ministry where he visits them and checks in on them. And these women, fortunately, can talk amongst themselves and support one another. And that's over the years, that's what our ministry has developed into just building communities of North Koreans there.

In South Korea, we have an operation called Ellum House. It's a safe house for North Korean women who need temporary housing. And we have people on staff that get them back on their feet, get them housing again, get them their benefits again. and we have free community classes where people can gather together. The point is just to get them together so that they can support one another in China and in South Korea. Today's show is brought to you by Grace Precious Metals. In an industry that can be confusing, Grace believes in doing business differently with Christian values, transparent pricing and a focus on straightforward gold and silver bullion.

not high markup collectible coins. They even publish their spreads directly on their website so you can see the numbers before speaking with anyone. Learn whether physical precious metals may fit your financial plans at metaxusmetals.com. That's metaxis metals.com. I mean, I wonder what your position is on what we can do in the United States. Because hearing about this, the evil, it's very difficult to bear, even if you're not as a hearing about it. I'm assuming that you'd want us to pray for the downfall of the communist regime

in China. That is one of my prayers. You know, the ironic thing about this moment in North Korea is that though they have deep Christian roots and they have worked diligently to try to rid themselves of the scourge of the Christian church, they can't. still can't do it. There are still Christians. And according to organizations like Voice of the Martyrs, the church is exploding in North Korea today. And so... Now, how can that be when you talk about torture camps? I don't get it. Well, the Roman Empire tortured Christians as well. And that didn't stop the church from growing. I think people are just hungry. They are sold this story that Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un are God-like men who are there for their benefit,

but clearly by their actions, they are not there for the people's benefit. And they're looking for a real savior in Jesus Christ. And there is a hunger for that. And people are willing to risk their lives to believe. So the church today has supposedly doubled in size. I understand it's about 200,000 people today, and it's going strong. And so, you know, we often in America here equate freedom with the proliferation of the church. And throughout church history, that has been anything but the case.

Because I love and care for them, I would want them to be free, of course. Right? But God doesn't need that. God doesn't need that to continue to work. I would want freedom so that they can pursue what they want to pursue and live where they want to live, et cetera. But as far as their faith and for the church, I think they're doing just fine.

I'm not sure I'm going to agree with you, Dan. You think they're doing just fine. To be saved is the most important thing in the world. But I think if they'd be doing better if they weren't threatened with being tortured for their faith, I think that would be even better. I think better in what sense? In the most obvious sense.

Can you parse that out? Yeah. Well, I just, there are people that can practice their faith in the United States and without fear of being tortured, without being tortured, without having your family members tortured. I don't think that's too much to add. And how is the church doing in America? Well, that's the question.

But I think that there are many people in America. I mean, that is one of the points that I want to make is that the, the, when you're talking about how's the church doing, that's the big question. What is the church? Yeah. There are people in the American church that are heroic, self-sacrificial in their faith. And there are many that are not. And so I don't think you want a church full of. nominal members who do nothing for their faith and who don't care about, you know, what's going on in the world. So I take your point that, you know, persecution leads to deeper faith where we find faith. But I don't think we want to pray for persecution, right? So it's a little complicated. Yeah, I'm not praying. I'm not advocating that we start getting persecuted here in America. I don't want that. I am not romanticizing persecution. I'm just making the point.

that people often equate spiritual well-being with freedom. And I'm saying God could use either freedom or no freedom. God doesn't need these political structures in order to move. That's all I'm saying. Well, there's no doubt about that, but I still think, you know, it's kind of like saying that, well, people can get saved when they're enslaved. So should we abolish slavery? And I would say, yes, if you believe in the God of the Bible,

you have to work politically to abolish slavery. And even though people can become Christians while they're enslaved. And so I think it's the same thing with the situation in China and in North Korea that, yes, people can be Christians, but I still think those of us who have any kind of power need to do what we can to bring freedom to people so that they are not operating under the circumstances that you. mentioned in China and of course North Korea is much worse, it sounds to me, than China. Yeah. I don't know. China's getting pretty bad too. I absolutely agree with that. I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I think that we should pray for freedom as well. But I don't think freedom equals church explosion or... Oh, no. I agree. I totally agree. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I would think that freedom should lead to church explosion, right? In other words, I would think that it's, and I would say that church explosion should lead to increase freedom. But we know that a lot of times people take faith for granted. They take their freedom for granted. They use their freedom as licensed rather than as actual freedom to do the will of God. Amen. But I think, I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because I think Christians in the West,

especially in America, we need. to hear the stories of suffering, what people suffer for their faith, because I think it speaks to us. I think it's one way that God speaks to us about our own lives and what we're doing with our lives and what our faith is. I think there are many people. I saw something yesterday, which it's almost like it was the Lord's will that I see it before you and I talk. I was so disgusted. I was staggered. It was someone actually, I know the person, a very sweet person. who is, I guess, getting behind some kind of a beverage, some kind of an energy drink. And they described it as a faith forward energy drink.

I think the name of the drink is forgiven or something like that. Okay. And I thought that sums up the horror of shallow American Christianity. And, you know, these are not bad people. These are really good people. sums up things, right? That we're where we are, like, hey, you can use this drink as a, you know, to witness to your neighbor about the crappy shallow Christianity that we can all celebrate in America.

It's so, it's so antithetical to the story of people being tortured for years for the faith of Jesus Christ in North Korea. And so I say all this less to denigrate the shallow Christian faith that we often see in America, then to say that I think a way out of this shallow Christian faith is by knowing the stories of people who are suffering for their faith. We used to tell the stories, you know, Fox's Book of Martyrs used to be, you know, basic reading for Christians because it just changes your relationship to everything. When you know what some people have been through, the hell people are going through today while we're having this conversation. I think it's

I think it's important, which is why, again, I wanted to have you on. Your book is A Hard Freedom, the Dreams and Trauma of North Korean Refugees, and you're the executive director of Crossing Borders. What is the website for Crossing Borders, Dan? It is www.crossingborders nk for North Korea.org. Crossing borders nk.org. Crossing borders nk.org. So the book has only been out a couple of months,

A Hard Freedom, The Dreams and Trauma of North Korean Refugees. So tell us more what you can about what's in the book because I think it's important that we hear these stories. Yeah, it is about the suffering and the hope that people have. And in my book, I talk about this one young lady who in 2008, we had to help personally lead her. her through the Underground Railroad. She was 18 and she was in danger of being sold into human trafficking.

And our missionaries at the time, we had missionaries on the ground at the time, helped escort her into a embassy in Beijing where, you know, embassies are considered little foreign territories, right? So she got into the UK embassy. and she had to wait for two years because although she was able to get into that embassy, she had to still get through Chinese territory to get to the airport, right?

So in that embassy, she gained South Korean citizenship, even though it was from the UK, they made a way for her to do that. And after those two years, in this building, she could not leave the building. She got to South Korea, and she was finally issued an ID card. And that night that she received that card,

she clutched it to her chest and cried the whole night because she realized that what had been taken from her wasn't a simple matter of plastic, right? But it was that her humanity was taken from her. She was not considered a real person while she was in China and her life was changed, and she wrote us this letter, which I published in the book,

and she's just so grateful for the people who helped her, and she lives with that gratitude to this day. You know, I think, I just think a lot about what we're dealing with communist China in this day and age. I don't think people realize that what it is to be in a country that officially says there is no God. And if there is no God, it means you are not created in God's image.

You're nothing. You're a bug. We can torture you, kill you, harvest your organs, sell your organs, do whatever we like. That is satanic. And I think most Americans

have no clue of the contrast of what it is that we're blessed with in this country. Most Americans take it for granted. They wouldn't die for it. They wouldn't fight for it. They don't fight for it. And so I've been talking about that a lot.

It's as dramatic a contrast as there is about defining what is a human being. Are you created in the sacred image of God, which means you are sacred and infinitely valuable to God or you're nothing? That's where atheism leads us, and we need to at least be honest about it. Yeah, the UNHCR defines human rights. It was, for the first time, it was devoid of God, right? And so. When? When was that?

I believe that right after World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt was a part of that definition of human rights. For the first time, it was devoid of God, it just said, people have rights. Well, without the ballast of the divine, that's just an opinion. It's meaningless. It's absolutely meaningless. It's absolutely meaningless. It holds no water. So China is breaking the...

Although it has agreed to this framework for human rights, they break it all the time. And why is that? Well, there's no structure to it. Yeah, it's a circular argument. Humans have rights because they have rights, right? And that logic will not stand. And over the years, it definitely has fallen apart. No, I've been talking about this a lot recently that, you know, people throw terms around.

And you have to know, what does that word mean? So when people say, I have rights, I want to say, what does that mean? Why do you have rights? Tell me why you have rights. Where do you get that idea from? And people just assert it. It's like somebody saying like, oh, racism's wrong. I say, yeah, I agree, except tell me why it's wrong.

You know, because everybody tells you that you should say it. And it's like, yes, you're right. It's wrong. Do you know why it's wrong? Because many people the world disagree with you. Many people believe that racism is right. and many people believe God doesn't exist, and many people believe that rights are an illusion.

So tell me why these things are real. We have to be able to understand that this is the biblical view and this is everything else. And I think people hide behind terms like, I have rights. He's like, well, who gave you those rights? Where do you get them from?

It's very important that we understand it. Yeah, amen. If you look at trauma itself, right, when something wrong has been done to someone, right, like these women, the hundreds and hundreds of women that I've met who've been tortured, who did not know about God, they don't know about Christianity at all or any sort of other religion, and yet the soul cries out that they have been wrong. Why is that?

When North Koreans are taught that they are simply a tool of the government, that they own you, and whatever benefits the government is what we should do. And yet, and yet, they know that they had been wrong. Their souls know that they had been wrong. Why is that? There is an imprint in us, right? It's not just because it's wrong. No, it's because we are created in the image of God

that our souls cry out when we've been wrong. Well, it's proof that we're created in the image of God. That's what's fascinating to me is that there's no, that we're not talking about people's opinion. It doesn't really matter whether you think you're created in God's image. You are, whether you like it or not, you are created in God's image. You are marked by God and you can be the most strident atheist. It doesn't matter.

There's no way of wriggling out of it. If you're a human being, you're created in the image of God. And, you know, as you say, our souls and our bodies testify to this. We can't go along with lies because we're created by the one who is truth in his image. So it's a fascinating concept. And I think that it's something that more and more people need to confront and wrestle with openly and talk about openly because I, again, I'm fascinated. I've just written a book in the American Revolution where they talk about rights coming from God. And I think most Americans still don't understand that. And when people like Eleanor Roosevelt and

others who are effectively leftist secularists, they just, they love the idea of rights. And so they talk about it. And you say, well, I love the idea. too. But on what basis do human beings have right? Just because you, Eleanor Roosevelt, assert it, who are you? Are you any different from Stalin or Mount Satan? What gives you the right to declare that this is true? They're not willing to face that. They're not willing to face that. And there are many people that believe you can have liberty without acknowledging the author of liberty and the author of, well, go ahead. Sorry. It's okay. And that concept is imperialistic without the foundation of the Bible and God, right?

It's you are imposing your belief, which has no basis, onto someone else. And that is imperialism. Yeah. Yeah. Or it's majority rule. They say, well, everybody agrees that racism is wrong. Everybody agrees that we should have human rights. And he's like, well, what if everybody agreed we should.

shouldn't. What if everybody agrees that Jewish people should all Paris? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a fascinating thing and I realize it's kind of funny because I'm always

talking about my book in the American Revolution, but so many people say like, well, America came into being because of the French Enlightenment or it, you know, these ideas come from British common law. And I think, wait a second, that's not true. You don't get You don't get these ideas that we are created by God in his image with these inalienable rights from any other place.

I mean, if you get it through British common law, they got it from the Bible. If you get it from the Enlightenment, would be the Scottish or English Enlightenment, certainly not the French Enlightenment. They got it from the Bible. There's only one place you can get these ideas. You're not going to get them from the Quran. You're not going to get them from anything written by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud. or Darwin, you get them from the Bible. That's the only place.

And so at some point, people need to have a reckoning with what they claim to believe. And, you know, it's wonderful to say liberty is great. But please tell me where you get the idea that we should be free or any of this stuff. So it is very important. And you're looking, you know, you're staring into the abyss in dealing with China and North Korea. and I'm just so grateful for the work you're doing. And I'm glad that you wrote a book because I think that when I interviewed Yolmi Park, I said to everybody her book, it should be mandatory reading. Everybody should know the hell that she has lived through because you really cannot appreciate liberty.

You cannot appreciate any kind of freedom unless you understand that people don't have it. Right now, while we're having this conversation, the people that don't have that liberty. And your book has been out since June. Yep, June 25th. And it's called A Hard Freedom, the Dreams and Trauma of North Korean Refugees. I assume it's available on Amazon. Is there any other place that you'd recommend we go to get it? Amazon or Barnes & Noble, just fine.

We're boycotting Barnes & Noble. Oh, okay. We're boycotting Barnes & Noble, folks. Please make a note of that. I can't get into that right now. Yes. All right. I think they're complicit with the communist Chinese, to be honest.

But actually, let me say that your thesis, I mean, it's more than the thesis is true, but it's fascinating to me that you say that these people are extraordinarily escape North Korea and make their way to freedom, but they're carrying this trauma. And it testifies to what you were saying a moment ago. Because we're created in God's image, we, we, bear these scars which are psychic they are soul scars they are this trauma because you would say well if you're just an animal why you know once everything's fine everything's fine you're you're just material why would it matter why would it matter registers the injustice and that you can't get

rid of it um i assume that a lot of these folks need some kind of deliverance healing prayer i mean these are deep spiritual wounds they need so much uh i i believe they need they need psychotherapy. Biblically based psychotherapy is what I would prefer, but I would say anything that would open them up to at least talking about what they had gone through as a first step. We encourage exercise through our community classes. We have a ton of exercise options for them because it's important to move their bodies. When you're traumatized, your mind, it's incredible how we are built, right? Because if you have nowhere to go, you're trapped and you're being assaulted, your mind will then recede into itself, right? And your mind will go somewhere else to

separate yourself from what's happening to you. Well, if you're traumatized, you're stuck in that recession and you need to be snapped back out of it and reconnected with the present. And so exercise is a wonderful way. that we encourage people to do that. We are developing curriculum for these women to grieve everything that they've lost, right? They are separated from their families. Everything they know and love is back in North Korea,

although their experiences were horrible there. It's still their home, and they still have family there, and there's so much to grieve that they're just not grieving and like my uncle and like all these hardened Korean people that I've met over time, we don't like to talk about our feelings. And so we just design everything to get, draw that out of them gently and to introduce them ultimately to the love of Jesus Christ. And so that's the ministry of crossing borders. That's part of what you're talking. I realize there's a double on tonder in crossing borders because we're not just crossing geographical borders, but we're crossing

borders into freedom in our beings as we heal and as we grieve. Is that information available, any of it on your website, crossing borders nk.org? Absolutely. Yeah. It is. I'm fascinated. We have tons of stories and videos that you can look at for free as well. You don't have to buy the book.

Okay, although you should buy the book, folks. But you should. Thank you. A hard freedom, the dreams and traumas of North Korean refugees. Well, listen, I know there are a lot of wonderful people who listen to this program. If you're interested in bringing health to your church community, to your family community, you need to be familiar with this kind of stuff. A healthy church cannot ignore its suffering brothers and sisters. Amen.

And God wants to bless us in that. that journey of praying for them, sharing their burdens as we're able, participating in helping. However, whether that means giving money to crossing borders, UK.org, or whatever it is, the point is, God calls us to participate in that, and he wants to bless us as we participate. We get blessed. Our faith gets deepened. I don't know anybody out there that wants to raise their hand and say, yes, I'd like my faith to continue to be shallow and surfacy.

That's not God's will. That is not the will of the Lord if you care about the will of the Lord. His will is that you go deeper with him. So Dan Chung, what else can we know about crossing borders UK.org? That's the website, Crossing Borders NK. Sorry. Crossing Borders NK.org. But what else can we know?

We've just got a minute or two left about what you're doing, the work you're doing. Yeah, we have been in existence since 2003. We have very deep roots in the suffering of these people, and we believe we have an expertise on how to handle these situations, especially abused North Korean women. And it is our passion and our joy to do it. It really is extraordinary. I'm very grateful for you, Dan, for the work. that you are doing. I'm glad you wrote this book. It's important to make this information available. And again, I hope people in my audience will get a copy of a hard freedom, the dreams and trauma of North Korean refugees by Dan Chung. And folks, visit crossing borders nk.org. This is important for the health

of the American church that we get involved in this. So Dan Chung, thank you so much. God bless. you. Thank you, Eric. You've often heard me talk about the golden triangle of freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty. And for that triangle to hold, we need access to the truth. Unfortunately, the Medicare system often feels designed to obscure the truth, leaving millions on plans that don't actually fit their needs. That's why I want you to know about Chapter. Chapter is a rare breed in the health care world, a completely independent advisor that puts your interests first. They help you understand your and enrollment options and ensure you're getting the benefits you're entitled to without the typical

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