Good morning, everybody. Happy Day of All Things. I’m very happy to see you here on this beautiful Belvedere Estate. It reminds me of the good old days of the 1970s, when we had many of our church celebrations here together with our True Parents. We thought, “Why not bring back a little bit of that happy memory? Many of you now have kids, so why not celebrate together with our families here on this gorgeous day?”
I don’t want to take too much of our time because today really should be a day of celebration, with festivities and activities. But I want to kick off this wonderful day by thanking our Heavenly Parent, truly thanking our True Parents and thanking everybody here who could make it so that we can celebrate together as one family and remember that we are so blessed to be living at this time when we can walk, breathe, and even dance with our True Parents.
It’s not every day that we have True Parents with us here while we are alive, so compared with the millions who have come before and the millions who will come after, we are truly in a blessed situation. Today is supposed to be a “day of all things.” What are we celebrating? God’s creation. When you look around you at the beautiful trees and see the ground you’re sitting on and the flowers that are blooming, you realize that you can experience a bit of the divine, of His eternal power and His eternal grace in the beauty and the majesty of things around us.
When I look at creation, the beautiful sky and the majestic trees for example, I’m always astounded at how much love and detail God put in each tiny single leaf or each blade of grass. There’s so much care and so much beauty in the intricacies that make up this beautiful picture that many of us experience every day. I’m always reminded that God, as omniscient, as omnipresent as he may be, he too, just like us, needed love. He wanted to experience love. So the reason why he created the universe and his first son and daughter, Adam and Eve, was so that he could realize this love.
Our True Parents have come as the first perfected Adam and perfected Eve, venturing into this dangerous territory of creating ideal families. I’m sure all of you are in the process living with and dealing with all the things that come with a family. I’m always reminded that I really need to be truly grateful for this chance to develop and grow these incredible human beings who are my children. All of you are on this path and have the blessing of raising such a wonderful family.
So as we enjoy this day and as we remember God in the beauty and majesty of his creation, I would like to remind everyone that you are truly loved and you are truly blessed. So we need to walk away from this day not just realizing the things that maybe we took for granted but also realizing that everything that God touched has his signature and His signature is a signature of true love.
Each family is God’s incredible creation, and all the beautiful children you have through you are really God’s handiwork. All of your children are so special and so talented. As I went around the country and got to know lots of them by name, I realized even more how incredible and gifted these children are.
We as loving parents and as a loving community need to do our part in nurturing and educating the young people of our movement, because they are our future, in understanding the concept of gratitude. We need to guide them to understand it not just intellectually; we must help them practice gratitude in their daily life by starting with the simple things, like cleaning up their room, taking care of their things, honoring their parents. Truly our community is great because we have the best of the East and the best of the West. I know that in many Eastern countries you’re not supposed to directly address your parents, or even hope for a conversation. But because of the Western members that have come into our community, conversation is very much encouraged; maybe our Eastern brothers and sisters can learn from that.
But also Western brothers and sisters can learn the importance of honor, duty, and respect from our Asian brothers and sisters. Embrace within your own family this mixture of understanding and conversation, along with the vertical, which emphasizes the importance of duty, honor and respect for an elder. This means that you don’t call your mother by her first name. You call her Mother, you call her Omma, or whatever is appropriate in your language. But you honor her, and you honor your father. This can be seen in the way you treat them, the way you greet them. It’s not just “Hi, Mom,” “Good-bye,” Mom, “Thanks, Mom.” It’s “Thank you, Mother. Thank you for taking care of us, for loving us.” It’s the simple show of gratitude, through various attitudes that we can express to one another, that can create an incredible environment in a family. It’s these little things that make a world of difference.
Just as the trees are growing on this beautiful estate, as we grow and become more majestic each day, let us not forget to be humble before our Heavenly Parent; let us not forget to be humble before our ancestors and our parents. If you are as majestic and as handsome and beautiful as you think you are, you have Heavenly Father and your parents to thank.
I’m truly hoping that we as a community can be a joyous community, truly enjoying each other’s company and not always suffering under the weight of the providence or providential time limits. Let’s take a moment on this beautiful day to realize what God has already given us. And if you take this moment to realize what God has given you through your children, you’re going to realize that you are the luckiest man or luckiest woman living.
Brothers and sisters, as our church grows and as we move on from the First to the Second and now the Third Generation, I want to remind you of the story in Luke 5:3, when Jesus came upon the Sea of Galilee and said to Simon Peter, “Put out to deeper waters.” I’ve already spoken about the meaning of deeper waters before. But here’s another way to look at it. Here was a bunch of fishermen fishing in the Sea of Galilee, and they were probably expert fishermen. They had been doing it their whole lives. Then here came a stranger called the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and at the end of a very long and arduous day in which they caught nothing, Jesus said, “Let’s put out to deeper water. Get the boats and let’s go back out.”
I bet you some of these professional and seasoned fishermen probably looked at Jesus like, “What is he talking about?! What does he know about fishing? What does he know about what we do best?” But in the end they decided to go out with Jesus. And when they united in faith, what happened? When they believed in Jesus Christ, what happened? They received so much reward. They caught so many fish that the boat was sinking from the weight of all this blessing that God gave them because these seasoned professionals decided to believe and unite with Jesus.
This story is very pertinent to our situation as we transition to future generations. The First Generation did an incredible job of bringing the movement along, bringing many great victories such as the many CARP activities that helped bring the Berlin wall down. It was my brother Hyo Jin Nim whom my father sent to Berlin to say, “Bring this wall down.” And shortly thereafter it did come down.
It was the seasoned First Generation who became such masters at producing the great events that brought thousands to stadiums and so many successful Universal Peace Federation events where we preached the message of peace and tried to get people involved in what my father was doing. But perhaps a representative of the Second Generation is going to come in the form of somebody who’s new to your profession. If you are really good at event planning, it might be somebody different who says, “You know what? Maybe we should do it a different way.” Or it might be your children, when you’re fundraising with roses, who say to you, “Did you ever think about combining flower selling with a little bit of music?” It’s a different twist on a good idea. That’s what the Second Generation is here to do.
I know that when the True Children started coming onto the scene, we found that there were a lot of great accomplishments made by the First Generation totally uniting with our True Parents. But we also know that for many years we haven’t been catching any fish. We’ve been doing something else, concentrating on saving the world. Many times we’ve neglected our communities or neglected the internal aspect of our movement.
The Second Generation of the True Family believe that we need to take the good ideas, the good foundation that the First Generation has laid already for us and add to it a new task of inviting the world to come and recognize the greatness of our True Parents in a new way. This might be with a different kind of music than we’re used to, or with a different kind of celebration, focusing more on loving each other than all the judgment that many of the First Generation went through.
Just as the fishermen in the end united with Jesus Christ, and based upon this substantiation of faith, God was able to work miracles based upon that unity, we are fishermen who will receive great bundles of fish as a huge reward.
Part of my job is not just being the senior pastor of Lovin’ Life Ministries; I’m also running the entertainment company that was started by my older brother, Hyo Jin oppa. As I come in contact with the movers and shakers of the entertainment world, I’m realizing that these people are ready to hear the message of our True Parents. Even in my simple conversation, when I give them a cursory overview of the Principle and a simple understanding of what True Parents are all about, they really get excited. The concept of creating a generation of peace is something that they have dreamt about.
Many times I think when we as the Second Generation look at our parents and the way things have been done, we think, “Oh, it’s not too exciting.” We have to be careful, as the Second Generation, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many wonderful things that our First Generation have done. Now the only thing we need to do as the Second Generation and the Third Generation is to build upon that and take our movement to a whole new level.
Just the other day in Times Square I saw something really funny. A huge placard asked the question “What’s your cult?” So the young people are asking each other, “What’s your cult?” I thought I’d never see the day when such a question would be asked because we were called a cult so many times and it was such a negative word. But look at what the young kids are doing! They’re taking a negative word and putting a new spin on it, making the negative actually cool.
I feel as if the time is right to take the old understanding of what Moonies was all about -- a cult, really negative, something that separated the family, separated everybody from society, and was almost like an isolationist community -- into something that’s really hip, cool, and cutting edge. You see these examples of the outside actually tapping into the universal energy that’s moving through all of us because God is working through all of us each and every day. We just need to take a moment and breathe, inhaling and exhaling, to realize that we’re breathing in God every day.
As difficult as our lives may be, God, is giving us these little clues all around us, saying, “Come on brothers and sisters, you’ve got to finish the race. You can’t quit before the finish line. After the finish line, not only are you just done for the day but we’re going to celebrate each other and celebrate God for the next millennium.”
A lot of interesting things are happening that I wish I had time to share with all of you. But I feel the sense of something changing in my profession, the entertainment world. I feel God is working his mysterious magic every day. God is working this magic through each of you seated here. We really need to honor each other by recognizing God for giving us this incredible thing called life.
Part of the reason I think a song called “Never Too Late” might be worth thinking about is that in Asia, especially Korea, the biggest problem for young people is suicide. People are simply giving up. Many of them are committing suicide because of a broken heart, because they feel there’s no hope for love. Without love, what’s the point in life?
But True Parents are here, brothers and sisters. They have come to tell us that the divine is within us, that God lives within us. And we as sons and daughters of God need only to practice a grateful attitude, truly appreciating that the glass is half full, not half empty. Even when we feel incredibly lonely, or when we are confronted with an incredible obstacle such that it seems like no amount of effort will bring a victory, it takes just a couple more minutes of extra effort, or a couple more seconds of believing that will help us round the corner and realize that God never left us. If anything, we are the ones who have turned away from God.
So brothers and sisters, happy Day of All Things. I hope you can celebrate this day together with my family. Young people, truly honor your parents and your elders. I’m in your group, brothers and sisters. We can take great pride in invigorating a generation of youth that is coming up right behind us and really is going to take our movement to the next level.
A rocket blasts off in three stages. The First Generation is like that initial, brutal, aggressive blast that takes the rocket up only a mile. But, Second Generation, what are we going to do? We’re going to extend the trajectory from the First Generation, but we’re going to go faster and more efficiently, and we’ll do it a little bit more effectively. If the Second Generation can do our part, then our kids will come along and take the rocket to the moon and back.
So God bless, have a great weekend, and have a wonderful Day of All Things.
