Steve Kang was born into a Buddhist home in South Korea and moved to the United States at nine, and in his telling the faith was planted deep long before that — grandparents on both sides, an aunt who became a monk and left her family, a book of chants he read every morning as a kid. He describes spending entire weekends at the temples, even back in Korea during high school, trying to get a Buddhist statue to say something to him, to wink at him, to say hello Steve, and says never once did they ever talk to him. The monks gave him 36 rules; he says he broke them every day, that there was not one day he looked at those laws and said, I live the perfect life. Their remedy was more chanting — sometimes eight hours a day, he says, producing spiritual highs that would just disappear like three minutes later. He had a prestigious college behind him and law school ahead. Then, at nineteen, came the near-death experience he says landed him somewhere he had never believed existed. Kyle and Steve walk the whole arc in order: what karma and reincarnation actually felt like to live under, the conflicting counsel he says he got from the monks — one calling a nightmare a blessing, another calling the same dream a curse — the cousin who told him they had to kill ants so the ants could move on to their next life, the drug use he describes through 1998, and the night his mother, out of options, called a Christian friend. He describes what he says he saw and knew while unconscious, in detail, including what he calls the total absence of hope there. Then the voice, the years that followed, and where he is now: full-time pastor from 2004, missionary work in China, seminary at Talbot, travel to India, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia and the UK, and today bi-vocational — IT sales plus ministry — preaching openly at restaurants, at Costco, at the gym. If you came looking for an ex-Buddhist testimony, a near-death experience and hell testimony, a Korean American conversion story, or a first-person account of spiritual warfare in a family that had never heard the phrase, this is that conversation. Steve closes the episode praying for whoever is listening. The line I keep coming back to is Steve at the temple as a teenager, waiting for the statue to say his name, and it never did. He wasn't lazy about it. He was all in — eight hours of chanting, thirty-six rules, weekend after weekend — and the thing he was talking to had nothing to say back. My prayer is simple: that whatever you are chanting at, striving toward, or trying to earn your way out of, God would interrupt it the way Steve says He interrupted him — not with a rule, but with His own voice. That you'd be met, and not measured. That the hope Steve says is missing in one place would find you where you are. Website: www.allnationsjc.orgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/stevekang97Pastor and Church Planter at OC LA Gospel Community Church (The Well Church)! More from the show and everything free we've built: kylelauriano.com · Start here if you're new to any of this: kylelauriano.com/start-here · If you have a testimony to tell: kylelauriano.com/guest · To support the work: kylelauriano.com/support By testimony, we overcome. — Revelation 12:11
