Hakata Letter 84: CU-IN - Here's How I'd Like You to Try It

Hakata Letter 84: CU-IN - Here's How I'd Like You to Try It

You started CU-IN from last Monday through Friday. Thank you for doing the CU-IN I created despite my shortcomings, and for responding with empathy emoticons. However, some of you contacted me saying, "Pastor, CU-IN is harder than I expected," so I'm writing this to offer some guidance.

First, create a CU-IN notebook. While QT has published booklets, CU-IN doesn't have separate booklets. Whether it's a blank notebook or a regular notebook, you create your own notebook by writing down the text and questions yourself. It may seem cumbersome at first, but this process itself is training that makes you think more deeply about the Word.

Second, try playing worship music. If you're having trouble concentrating, try doing CU-IN while playing quiet worship music on YouTube. Continuous worship without lyrics or interruptions, or early morning prayer worship music works well. Amazingly, when quiet worship music flows in the background, concentration improves.

Recently, MIT conducted an interesting experiment. They gave college students an essay-writing assignment and divided them into three groups. The first group had to think and write on their own, the second group could use internet searches, and the third group could use AI. They measured the students' brain activity while they worked on the assignment.

The results were surprising. Students who thought for themselves showed active movement throughout their entire brain. Multiple parts of the brain—remembering, thinking, and connecting—worked together. However, students who used AI showed almost no brain activity. What's more surprising is that when asked immediately after the assignment to "recite sentences from the essay you just wrote," students who thought for themselves remembered almost everything, but students who used AI remembered almost nothing. What AI wrote didn't become their own knowledge.

These days, students reportedly use AI for almost all their homework. One student confessed: "I remember assignments I did without AI later, but I barely remember what I did with AI. In the past, I spent time thinking, but now I ask AI for almost everything, so I feel like my thinking ability has significantly diminished." Paradoxically, MIT—the very hub of AI technology—actually emphasizes education in deep reading and thinking even more. Why? Because the more technology advances, the more important deep thinking ability becomes.

CU-IN is exactly that training. Another study experimented with the effect of "reading while questioning." When they compared people who just read text with people who read while creating questions, those who read while creating questions remembered the content much better. To create questions, you must truly understand the content and organize it in your own language. In that process, the brain awakens and the content is deeply imprinted in memory.

This is what CU-IN is. It's not simply reading the Bible, but training to create questions through the text, think from God's perspective, and share this with others. It's unfamiliar at first and takes time, but this process awakens our brain and develops our thinking ability.

We live in an era where AI creates all the answers for us. But the more this is true, what we need is not quick answers but deep questions. CU-IN is training that develops the power to ask those questions. This process of reading the Word, mulling it over in our own language, and sharing it with family and mokjang deepens our faith and unites our community.

The first week is difficult for everyone. But please don't give up. If you want our children to grow into people who think deeply and judge wisely even as they live in the AI era, and if you yourself want to meet God more deeply through the Word, this small training now will bring great benefit. Let's do this together. (January 11, 2026)

Pastor Kim Juyoung, walking together with you