I’m unashamedly a fan of Korean dramas (or Kdrama). And I have just completed a 50-episode Queen Seon Duk series recently.

Queen Seon Duk is the first of three female rulers of Silla, one of the three kingdoms in ancient Korea. The drama depicts her rise to power, the challenges she faced and how she overcame them (as was expected of the heroine).

Silla Dynasty Costume

What got me glued to this series is the elaborate sets and brilliant scriptwriting. Historical Korean dramas (also known as sa geuk) are a lot like Russian literature. It provides a peek into the rich texture of a culture and contains perceptive insights on human nature.

Some key lessons I gleaned from the show:
• Every trial is part of a designed course to equip us for our future role.
• When I’ve had it easy, it’s because someone else has done all the hard work. And when I’ve had it hard, I’m laying the bricks and smoothening the path for whosoever will come after.
• Love when put under stress will show its true quality—either it will be found to be nothing more than a hypocritical expression or it will be proven genuine by the self-sacrificing act.
• Leadership is about inspiring a common vision and getting the right people to do the right task.

Though this drama is not without its dramatization of actual fact and reality, what historian Gerda Lerner wrote still holds true. She observed, “ We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.”

For Christians, we know that history is more than a record of past happenings; it is His story—God’s story. In How To Read The Bible For All Its Worth, the author writes, “The Bible contains God’s story—a story that is utterly true, critically important, and often complex. It is a magnificent story, grander than the greatest epic, richer in plot and more significant in its characters and descriptions than any humanly composed story could ever be.”

Before I spend 45-minute watching a fresh new episode of a korean drama, I must spend more time reading my Bible. 🙂