When I named this blog, I was choosing a metaphor I did not yet fully understand. The Pilgrim's Venture. I knew it was about faith and work. I knew it was about the long walk. What I did not know was how literally I would end up living it.
What a pilgrim is not
A pilgrim is not a tourist. The tourist seeks novelty and returns home unchanged. The pilgrim moves toward something — a destination, a transformation, an answer to a question they may not be able to articulate — and the journey itself is the point as much as the destination.
But the pilgrim metaphor that circulates in Christian culture is usually too tidy. There is a start, a journey, a holy site, a return. The arc is complete. The pilgrim comes back having received something.
That is not the journey I recognize.
Walking without a map
In November 2024, I started a company with a group of people who trusted me after a year that had given them every reason not to. We had a name — 한아원 — and a conviction that Korean wellness could reach the world. We had almost no money and no certainty about what would work.
By April 2026, we had acquired a pharmaceutical wholesale company. We were generating 3.49 billion won a month across four legal entities. We had opened a retail pharmacy that looked nothing like pharmacies I had grown up going to. We had launched a wellness brand, built internal software that had become a product, and begun a mission to people who, like me, had been displaced from the version of themselves they had expected to become.
None of this was planned. All of it was walked toward.
The thing about the long walk home
The subtitle of this blog is "faith, work, and the long walk home." I keep returning to that word home. What does it mean for a man who runs companies in two countries, lives between cultures, and has spent the last three years rebuilding what he lost?
I think home, in the sense I mean it, is not a place. It is a condition. A state of being at rest in who you actually are rather than who you were performing. The walk home is the walk toward that — toward authenticity, toward integration, toward the kind of peace that does not require external circumstances to cooperate.
That walk does not end. The pilgrim keeps walking. The horizon keeps receding. And the walk itself, it turns out, is the point.
Why venture
I chose the word venture deliberately. Venture means both a journey undertaken with risk and a business enterprise. I like that it holds both meanings at once, because I cannot separate them in my own life. Every decision I have made as a founder has also been a decision as a person trying to live faithfully. Every decision I have made as a person trying to live faithfully has had consequences in the businesses I run.
The Pilgrim's Venture is not a metaphor for the blog. It is the description of an actual life being lived.
I do not know where it ends. I am not sure the question matters as much as I used to think it did.
The walk continues.