Hello, fellow peacemakers!

My name is Yeo Jin Yun, and I’m thrilled to be writing to you from Detroit, MI!

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been curious, and lucky for me, my patient parents obliged to all my questions: Where’s the United States, and why is it so far away from Auntie’s house in Incheon?  Why is the grass green?  What are stars, and how do stay up in the sky for so long every single night?  How come I don’t look like my dolls, with blonde hair and blue eyes?

As I got older, I began to filter my questions and learned when to speak and when to remain quiet, but this insatiable curiosity and innate desire to understand and make sense of the world would remain within arms-reach, safely but accessibly bubble-wrapped in a corner of my mind.

Graduating from Messiah College with a double major in Peace and Conflict Studies and Ethnic and Area Studies with a concentration in Asian Studies, I had the opportunity to participate in the General Board of Church and Society’s Ethnic Young Adults internship and completed an internship at the NAACP.  I finished the program prayerfully and with hopes that God would open doors for where career and calling would collide.  I wanted to remain a learner of the world with my questions, but I also wanted to be in a career that allowed me to love on the world, even in the midst of the messiness and the darkness.

After doing the never-ending cycle of discovering job opportunities that required work experience and then not being able to find actual jobs that would hire me in order to gain that work experience, I eventually found myself working for a company that had nothing to do with my studies or passions.  Even more, this company’s first and foremost priority was to increase profit.

Working close to two years in the for-profit world, I found myself at a place of comfortable stability but also disconcerting exhaustion.  On the outside, I had a stable career, a steady source of income, and medical insurance, but on the inside, I felt drained and exhausted working for a company that had goals and a vision that were so antithetical to mine.  In the rush to find security, like the world says is required after graduation, I had abandoned all curiosity and accepted what it meant to “grow up” and “be an adult.”

Fortunately in the Spirit’s timing, God spoke truth into my life and dismantled the lies of this world.  Once again, my mind was filled with questions and the hope to understand the world and to still love it.

And here I am now, a recently commissioned Global Mission Fellow US-2 who’ll be serving as the Development and Communications Coordinator of MFSA for the next two years.  Many believed I would go the lawyer route because of my stubborn questions and fierce feminism, and perhaps God will open that door post-MFSA.  At this moment, two weeks into my next two years at MFSA and living in Detroit, I’m excited to be joining this community of witnesses and advocates who are energized with the hope of establishing a more inclusive and loving church for all of God’s people and creation.

Yeo Jin Yun is a 2019 Global Mission Fellow (GMF) US-2 commissioned by the General Board of Global Ministries.  Serving the next two years in the position of the Development and Communications Coordinator, Yeo Jin works in collaboration with Executive Director Bridget Cabrera in supporting the works and goals of MFSA by increasing the quality of donor relationships and by strategically communicating with and engaging United Methodists of our ministries via social media and E-newsletters.  Click here to learn more of Yeo Jin’s journey leading to the GMF program and to MFSA and to support her financially, and click here to join Yeo Jin’s adventures in and around Detroit, MI.