In 2023, my name appeared in the Korean press next to words I had spent my career trying to avoid. Criminal. Disgraced. Fallen.
I had founded PeopleFund, Korea's first fully bank-integrated P2P lending platform. We raised over a hundred billion won from Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, and KakaoTax. We held fifty-seven percent of the personal credit lending market. I had served as chairman of the Korea Fintech Industry Association and testified before regulators about laws I had helped write.
Then I lost everything that could be lost publicly.
The mark the world makes
The sociologist Erving Goffman defined stigma as a mark of disgrace that fundamentally alters how the world sees you. He was describing a social mechanism. He was also, without knowing it, describing exactly what happened to me in the courtroom, in the press, and in the months after.
I know what it feels like to be named. To have your photograph next to a headline. To watch the thing you built — the thing that was supposed to outlast you — begin to distance itself from your name.
I also know what comes after that, which is the part the press does not write about.
What prison does
Inland Diaspora Mission is a mission for the men I met in my cell.
That sentence is the most honest thing I have ever said from a pulpit. I said it in Tallinn, Estonia, in the spring of 2026, standing in front of Ukrainian war refugees who had lost everything. And I meant it in a way that surprised even me.
Inside, I met a young man who had grown up in an orphanage. I met a man who had transported drugs because his grandmother was sick and he could not afford the hospital. These were not people who had failed to be good. These were people who had been failed — by systems, by timing, by circumstance — and then marked permanently by a world that has no patience for the complexity of how people arrive at their worst moments.
I was marked too. Different circumstances, same stamp.
The theological turn
The Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 6:17: "I bear in my body the marks of Jesus." The Greek word he uses is stigmata — the same root as stigma. He was referring to the wounds he had received in his ministry. But the word carries something else: the idea that a mark made by the world can be reclaimed, transformed, made sacred.
The risen Christ appears to Thomas with his wounds still present. Not healed. Not erased. Still there — and suddenly the proof of something rather than the evidence against it.
I have spent two years sitting with this image. The wounds that do not disappear. The scars that become the very thing by which you are recognized.
What it means now
I did not start over. Starting over implies that the previous chapters can be discarded. What I did instead was harder: I carried them forward.
한아원, the company I am building now, operates in pharmaceutical distribution, retail pharmacy, AI business automation, and wellness. It generates over 3.4 billion won a month. None of this is because I escaped what happened. All of it is because I did not.
The mission I support — IDM, Inland Diaspora Mission — works with people who are displaced within their own stories. People who have been exiled not from a country but from the version of themselves they expected to become. The theology that drives it is simple: the mark the world makes on you can become the mark of God through you.
I am not here despite what happened. I am here because of it.
That is what stigma to stigmata means. Not that suffering is good. But that it does not get to be the last word.