Own It: Liberate, Receive, and Uplift

In Jin Moon
August 12, 2012
Unification Theological Seminary

How is everyone this morning? The band was great, wasn't it? It's so beautiful this morning, and I'm delighted to be here with all of you. I don't know if you had a chance to attend the talent show yesterday, but I've had the good fortune to see some of the great talent from our community. I was very much entertained and stimulated, wondering how many more years it will be before I can see these kids on stage expressing themselves in such a beautiful way. I was so proud of everybody.

Celebrating the Youth of Our Community

I sincerely would like to offer congratulations to the three winners we had yesterday. They were awesome. Henry Legay won First Prize, and Second Prize went to the One Pulse dance troupe from Chicago, led by Lena, who just recently gave birth, by the way. She was dancing up a storm on stage, and everybody had so much spirit. I just turned to somebody last night after seeing the program and said, "You know, I'm always thinking about how we can encourage our community to be the best that they can be, and we are very much in communication with the Japanese movement after finishing our youth concert there. They want to go global in the sense that they want have more and more of the international community represented at the youth concerts."

So, I very much encouraged the thought of having our international community celebrate wherever these youth concerts are held around the world. When we have them here, it will be great to see some of the great talent that I saw in Japan the last time I was there. Then the next time we perform, I'd like to bring the best of America together with me to share with the Japanese brothers and sisters, who have struggled and fought to be proud Unificationists for the last 40 and 50 years.

How wonderful if the kids would practice and hone their craft and talent so we can share this beauty with our Japanese community! Hopefully in the future if Europe and other countries of Asia and Australia pick up on this concept of youth concerts for world peace, we'll be a community that celebrates our youth and the beauty of our community all around the world every year. How beautiful that would be.

Then the Third Prize winner was Jeff Jacobs. He came to know our community because he just happened to be invited to Lovin' Life. He was invited to perform at Open Mic, and then the rest is history. I got to hear him perform, and he was fantastic. So, congratulations again to the three top winners!

Of course, it goes without saying that I would like to congratulate all of the other performers on stage as well. You had a great spirit, and we felt the love in the audience. I felt like even though we were all jam-packed into what was the old gym of the old seminary and the heat was overbearing, the spirit was so inspiring that I just could not help but be excited at seeing our young people.

That's the incredibly wonderful thing about our community because no matter where we go in the world, the international community -- all different races, backgrounds, and cultures -- is represented. Truly it is the beauty of the Blessing that our True Parents bring to this world that has allowed all of God's children, the international community, to graft onto the true lineage and become part of this one family of God that we're talking about.

We know that even though our True Parents are not here, their hearts and their prayers are very much with us every Sunday. Whenever I get a chance to talk to my father and mother, they're always asking, "How are the American young kids? How are they doing?" I always have to answer, "I'm terribly inspired and terribly hopeful about the future because what we're creating together through the Lovin' Life Ministries, together as a community, is something that is extremely beautiful.

The Supportive Spirit of the Sports Festival

The first-generation has laid an awesome foundation for all of this by living a life of sacrifice, giving themselves over the years, and walking the walk with our True Parents, while never leaving their side, unlike the 12 disciples of Jesus. Our parents, our elders walked with our True Parents during the difficult times, protecting them and keeping them safe so they can continue the good work. Now it is our chance and opportunity to own up and own it, to claim our own destiny and become eternal, divine, and inspired sons and daughters of God. This is our time to be responsible and own our own destinies, having an attitude of gratitude and going forth to create something that the world has never seen before.

The world has never seen Unificationist-born children before. You guys are special. You guys are prepared, handcrafted literally, unique individual specimens of our Heavenly Parent. It is our community's blessing to grow together with all of you. Last night when I arrived I asked Jaga, "Tell me about how things are going at Sports Festival. You have over 600 kids here. Have you had any incidents, or is there anything I need to be concerned about?"

He said, "You know, In Jin Moon, it's just amazing. We have over 600 kids participating in competitive sports, but I have been so amazed at the great attitude that all the kids and families had this year." He said, "When we started working together with the Sports Festival a couple of years ago, there was a lot of competition, and sometimes the competition tended to veer toward the aggressive. Many times it almost broke out into a fistfight. But this year everybody is so supportive; everybody is here to have a great time, to fight the good fight, the competitively healthy fight. But everyone is incredibly supportive."

I said to Jaga, "Jaga, give me an example." He said, "Well, you know, ultimate Frisbee is a fantastic game, a really competitive game. The emotions can run incredibly high, and of course there are some teams from certain districts that are very good. They just reign over everybody else. Then of course there was one team that was more like a neophyte team just coming into their own -- learning the rules and learning how to play. But," Jaga said, "in the past perhaps the really good ones would have definitely lorded it over the not-such-good ones. Or maybe the competition might be a little bit bitter, or not supportive at all." But Jaga said he was so inspired watching our kids because the really good team members, on their own time, were there helping their opponents with the game, with the tips, being encouraging and supportive.

I said, "Wow, if we can carry forth this kind of attitude, not just on the competitive battlefield of games but into our own lives, into our own families, into our own community, our movement is going to be unbelievably powerful and beautiful at the same time."

Ralph Walso Emerson

A long time ago, Emerson said to a particular individual, "What you are speaks so loud that I can't hear a word you say." Meaning that what we are speaks so loud -- like, "I am a fantastic athlete: Eat it up." Or, "I am just so awesome, don't you envy me? I am just this incredibly wonderful, powerful person." The way one carries oneself speaks louder than the good words that the person wants to share with the other people. Sometimes our persona, our sense of ourselves, or perhaps our arrogance speaks so loud that many people don't hear what we're saying.

But isn't it great if we are a community that's emphasizing and practicing living for the sake of others? Andrew Love did a fantastic job of MC-ing the talent show yesterday and he kind of jokingly called our community a church of acronyms: BCSF; LLM; GenPeace, where P stands for eternal parent; E stands for we are eternal sons and daughters of God; A stands for living a life of altruism; C stands for really experiencing and living a life of compassion; and E stands for excellence, internal and external excellence.

We can laugh that we are a church of acronyms, but those acronyms are about inheriting the spirit of God and true love. Our church and our life are really about inheriting the true love of God and making love, life, and lineage flesh, substantiating it in our lifetime, building our own beautiful family and offering something beautiful to the world in the form of our children, who are our future. Our children, if they can be raised well and if they can be empowered and inspired, will be the ones safeguarding, inspiring, and guiding the next millennium into the world of peace and harmony.

Liberating Our Parents and True Parents

Right now we have a huge and profound responsibility at task here. The astounding thing about the Sports Festival is we have a chance here to not just express ourselves in terms of our competitive games but to celebrate our community by coming together and reminding ourselves how uniquely blessed we really are. We are sitting on the ground at the Unification Theological Seminary that our True Father purchased and founded more than 30 years ago. He wanted this place to be the birthplace of all future leaders. He wanted the seminary to promote, nurture, and inspire the future leadership of the world. He wanted great ministers to be coming from here.

Now our True Father has given us at Headquarters the green light to develop this area, to develop this seminary into a four-year college program that emphasizes service for others. We want to create a program that is academically excellent but also stresses the internal excellence of being God's children and living for the sake of others, teaching the importance of service, contributing, and volunteerism. God's children are not born on Earth just so we can obey and follow. We were all created to become leaders in our own right. We were created to be proactive, to give something back, like the example I saw in the talent competition.

Every one of you is blessed with a special talent or gift that needs to be shared with our community or with the larger world. So if we can work on ourselves and work on honing our craft, then we are well on our way to owning it, to taking charge of our destiny, holding on, and driving our own horns of destiny into the world that we not only see, but that we are in the process of creating every day.

We need to answer as a religious community the important question, "How do we own it? How do we go about owning it? How do we take our own horns of destiny and become the kind of people that we want to be?" I hear a lot of conversations in different districts and with different people that I meet. One of the questions that people seem to love to ask me is, "Please tell me what I should do. Please tell me what I would be good at." These are highly talented, well prepared, and well-educated second-generation wanting God to tell them exactly what they should do.

But let's remember that the motto for this year is "The Liberation of True Parents." How do we as children liberate our parents from their responsibilities of always guiding us and always taking care of us? We do that when we as children decide today that we're going to grow up. We're not just going to be dependent, but we're going to be independent individuals with an attitude of gratefulness. And with that attitude we're going to decide for ourselves how we want to contribute to the world with the set of gifts, talents, and passions that were placed in our care.

Heavenly Father is not saying, "Just follow and obey." Heavenly Father is saying, "Inspire me, my sons and daughters. Inspire me with how awesome you can be. Instead of waiting for me to give you guidance, tell me what you would like to do, and therefore I can give you feedback." Our Heavenly Parents created Adam and Eve because they wanted to love and be loved. They wanted to experience how it feels to be loved because Heavenly Father and Mother were terribly lonely without their children.

We as parents don't want our kids to obey and follow us forever. Obeying and following the parent is immensely important in the early years of life. When you go to kindergarten, everything is, "Do what the teacher asks you to do." But when you start going past high school, and you're looking toward college, college professors are going to look to you to see what you want to major in, what you want to study, what turns you on, what gets you excited so much so that you want to contribute back to the academic community that you come from.

We as parents want our children to lay a great foundation by following and obeying, but we also want them to come to a time of maturity when they decide, "Parents, I want to liberate you from having to worry about me all the time. I want to liberate you by saying, 'I'm going to own it, I'm going to own my life. I'm going to be responsible for my life. I'm not going to be this unfocused, immature, lost individual who's just flowing wherever the water flows; wherever my friends go, that's where I go. I want to be the kind of a person who knows what I want to be, who knows that I am good, that I am gifted, and that I am talented.'"

The balance that we as parents also want our children to own is the knowledge that regardless of how marvelously good we are, we are that good because of our Heavenly Parent's gift to us of that talent, so we are not to become boastful and abuse the talent God has given to us. We want our children to own the knowing that we are to use our talent and our individual gifts to contribute back to society and the world and, therefore, to take an active role in our life of faith and a proactive role in our lives and in our Unificationist community.

Receiving God and Our Parents in Our Hearts

When I think about how I go about owning it, I think about three different things. The first thing I say to myself is, when I really want to own something I realize that I have to receive it in heart. Most of us in our community know God. We know God exists. We know that the Divine Principle is a wonderful thing. We know that our True Parents are the Messiah; they're the Second Coming; they come bearing the gift of the Blessing; they come with the breaking news; they come to encourage all of God's children to be the best that they can be. We know all of this.

But when our Heavenly Father asks us to think about actually owning it, owning our destiny, he is saying, "Don't just know me. Don't just know yourself." I know myself as a Unificationist, you know yourself as a Unificationist; you know yourself as a blessed child, or you know yourself as that first-generation, or you know yourself as that new member or a friend of the Lovin' Life Ministries.

But God is asking you and me to do more than just know. We need to go a step further because knowing God, knowing our community, knowing who we are is just the beginning. What really makes it ours, what makes it our own is to receive it in heart. There's a difference in just simply knowing rationally or logically that God exists, and there's a difference in receiving God in your heart as your Heavenly Parent.

Likewise, there are different ways of knowing that True Parents are the Second Coming, are the Messiah, are the prepared man and woman who can stand in the victorious position, reclaiming the original position that Adam and Eve should have substantiated many years ago. Knowing True Parents in our heads, in our logical way of thinking, or knowing the Divine Principle because we are such educated readers and we have memorized the Divine Principle is not enough. To really own it in our lives, we have to receive it in our heart.

What does receiving it in our heart mean? It implies an intimate, loving relationship with God, with our True Parents, our True Family, and with our own parents. If I were to approach any of the second-generation seated here in the congregation in front of me and ask a certain child, "Who is your father? Who is your mother?" the child will say, "Mommy," and "That's my daddy." The child knows who the parents are.

But if we as blessed children really want to own who we are, it's simply not enough to know that he's my daddy, she's my mommy, and he and she are my Heavenly Parents, and he and she are my True Parents. We need to go a step further. We need to own it by receiving God, True Parents, our parents, and our community in our hearts. We need to have an intimate relationship, a loving relationship with our parents.

When a child goes through the growth stages, at one everything is father and mother; they can do no wrong. But then the growing child goes through the rebellious teenage years when everything wrong is "My parents." But then once they get blessed and have kids of their own, they realize, "Gee, the way I love my kids is the way that my parents love me? Wow. I never knew."

So as we journey on through life, we realize that it's not simply knowing who my parents are, but realizing my parent as heroes in the sense of providential history. "My parents have done something that the twelve disciples of Jesus could not do. They may look a little gray; they may look a little wide; they may jiggle a little bit, but they are those awesome gladiators who have fought together with our True Parents, fighting every battle because they wanted to make the world a better place."

When I hear the word receive, to my Korean ear it kind of sounds like two words. Re means to do again, and ceive, means to sift through. We as the second-generation and the third-generation need to sift through and break the mold of our negative thinking. For many of us who have grown up in this movement, we don't realize how blessed we are until we've grown and had a chance to live elsewhere, and then come back to our community and realize how awesome it is. Many times we are so blessed spiritually but not physically and materialistically that we grow up resenting our parents for not being fiduciarily responsible, for not taking care of the family as much as they should have or could have or would have.

But we need to realize who they are in the context of providential history as the people who have built the basement on which the second- and the third-generation will build God's house, God's temple. And we are not just to build God's house, but we are to encourage all of humanity to live in it, inspired and empowered and truly nurtured by the message that our True Parents bring.

The Whole World in a Community

Many of the blessed children have negative concepts of what our church is all about. I know that a lot of blessed children have actually left our communities and are now in the process of coming back; they are being re-associated through Lovin' Life Ministries. They come back and they're like, "Whoa! What's taking place in our community?" Well, what's taking place is basically the diamond was always there, and we're just getting rid of the soot, the dust, and the stuff that has accumulated over the years.

There is something marvelously brilliant, pure, and beautiful about our community that you cannot find elsewhere. And although many people may look at me and think, "She lived in a bubble her whole life; she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth; she went to the best schools; she probably doesn't know what it means to hold down a job," well, I do, and I did not live in a bubble. Most of my friends are outside people, so I'm pretty much a good litmus test as to how a person outside of our community will react or respond to some of the things that take place in our community.

When they come at my invitation and visit our community, one of the things they always say is that they're just blown away. They say, "You guys have the whole world in your congregation." I say, "Yep. It's not just Asian; it's not just black; it's white, too, and all different races and all different backgrounds. And because we of the second-generation were raised with an understanding of the Eastern tradition as well as the Western tradition, we combine good qualities from both traditions. The Eastern tradition gives a great backbone to our community in terms of understanding the importance of respect and honor -- respect of an elder, respect toward tradition, respect toward the heritage that we come from. But at the same time, from the Western tradition we have an understanding of the importance of reaching out and expanding beyond our own community to share the breaking news with the rest of the world."

Our children are profoundly blessed in that they are some of the most respectful teenagers my dear friends have ever met. My friends say, "How do these parents educate these kids? They actually look into your eyes when you talk to them. They're not saying, 'Yeah, yeah, what? What?'" And it's true. You're not calling your parents Julie or Dave. It's "Daddy, Mommy; Father, Mother." You listen with your eyes. You love with every sense of your body. How does that happen?

That happens because the East and the West came together. What our True Parents represent is so beautiful because they're not working off the weaknesses that each culture or background has. Instead, they're creating an amalgamation of all the different strengths that each culture or religion has to offer to all of us and allowing us to experience it in our lifetime as that part of the community. So it's really quite beautiful.

Gratitude in a "Great Attitude"

Sometimes, it takes somebody coming from the outside to remind us how awesome we are or how awesomely blessed we really are. I remember having a conversation with the director of the education department, Heather Thalheimer. She's doing a phenomenal job of creating an educational curriculum that takes a child from infancy to young adulthood. This is something that we've been working on for a long time.

She said, "In Jin Moon, now that you're responsible for GPA, what is it that you see for blessed children? What is GPA to you?" I said, "GPA for me is GenPeace Academy, and I don't subscribe to the view that we are so special as blessed children that we need to keep ourselves insular or we need to keep ourselves in a bubble. If GPA can be a great organization, or a great school or academy that prepares young people for a successful, prosperous, and fulfilled adult life, then what is good for blessed children should be good for anybody else."

The convention in our movement has been that blessed children were blessed and left blessedly anointed in their own academies and workshops, but I am encouraging our community to do something different based on the view that if we are truly a gift unto the world, what we create for our own children should be just as good for anybody else's children.

I have realized in my experience that many of our second-generation have been quite insulated and protected so they don't realize what they have until they see the experience of the first-generation joining our church, coming and studying and working together with them, saying, "Oh my God, this is awesome. This is really kick-ass." Then our kids start to look around. "What? You think my community is kick-ass?! Says who?" "Says me. You know, I come from a different community and this is really awesome. I want to be a part of the community."

It's that injection of the new into what we just wanted to keep for ourselves that inspires our kids. It brings freshness. It brings new blood. It brings a sense that, "Yes, we are blessed. And you know what? If we don't realize it today, we're going to realize it later because this new guy John, or this new girl Sarah is telling me."

So what we create today is not just a gift to our own communities; it's a gift to the world because that's the vision that our True Parents have. They did not come to just found our own little religious community. They came to be the True Parents for all humankind.

As we grow together, sifting through those elements that we want to keep and letting go of those elements that we do not want to keep, we need to keep in mind that the most important part of the process of owning it is our sense of gratitude, our "great attitude." And we can have this great attitude because fundamentally all of us are here to love and to be loved.

Deciding to Share, Learning to Live

I know that a lot of you who are here this weekend, including those 150 candidates for the Blessing workshop, are wondering, "How do I own my life? How do I make it my own and really feel responsible and inspired?" The first step comes in not just knowing who you are as a Unificationist, but in really receiving it in your heart by starting that loving, encouraging relationship with God, True Parents, your parents, and our community that puts us on the road to everything we want to accomplish.

The second thing that I always remind myself of when I want to tell myself I need to own it on this day is that not only do I need to receive God or our True Parents in my heart, but I need to realize the reason why we receive them. When we watch the Olympics that are going on just now and we see these incredible athletes doing unbelievable things on the "battlefield" of these competitive games, we realize that they went through a lot during many years of devotion, dedication, and persistence.

We also realize that regardless of what they have chosen, whether it's a team sport or a singular sport, whatever they have done, they have done it because their ultimate goal is to share their talents with the world. God created his children and her children because God wants to love -- not just to give love but also to receive love. God is waiting to be loved spontaneously from the heart by his and her children. True love doesn't arise because we were told that we have to love God or that we have to love True Parents. True Parents are waiting to be loved naturally by you and me. They love us forever, and consistently. They have done so throughout their lives. But nothing is more satisfying to a parent than a child loving the parent back.

We can see this in the stories of Keroro, the green frog animation in Japan. Keroro is so cute and so green. He has such bright eyes. But this adorable little frog never wants to listen to his parents and never wants to do what his parents ask him to do. Every time his loving mother asks, "Keroro, please do your homework." "No." "Keroro, please take your vitamins." "No." "Keroro, please practice." "No."

But Keroro's mom and dad are waiting for their child to grow up and to love the parents back on his own. And that's where this beautiful thing called sharing comes into play. Regardless of how awesome we are as individuals, we can't really love ourselves, can we? If we have to live our whole life loving only ourselves, that would be pretty much analogous to an eternal prison.

But the thing about love is, when we really love something, we want to share it with our world. We want to share it with that special someone. We want to share it with our family. That's what makes it beautiful. Sharing is so important because in the act of sharing we can practice give and receive action. We can practice breathing. When we receive the heart of God, we are deciding to own our life by breaking the mold of what we knew before -- perhaps the negative concepts -- and by being a responsible and inspired human being to say, "I am going to contribute this to society and the world."

When we decide to share, we go a step further. Not only are we breaking the mold of how it used to be, but we're learning how to live. We're learning how to breathe. When we breathe, we breathe in and we breathe out. We stop living when we cease to have this give and receive, out and in, action going on with your body. No matter how powerful, rich, and remarkable we are, if we only just suck air in, sooner or later we're not going to be that healthy, awesome individual that we can be. We're going to suffocate by breathing in only one way. On the other hand, if we only exhale, exhale, exhale, dying for the sake of others, then there won't be any self left to give any more.

In this time of the settlement, when we're moving from the wilderness mentality to the settlement mentality, we have to think of a healthier and more organic way of living. We do that by sharing, yes, by living for the sake of others. We do that by not becoming a stagnant pool of water. We know that if there's only an inlet into a pond, that pond is soon going to turn into a swamp. But if we percolate the pond with oxygen and if we create an outlet so the water can be circulated and filtered through in this motion of life, the pond can be continually regenerated. And from that small pond of water incredible organisms can grow, and the astonishing beauty of nature can be experienced.

In other words, it's the act of living, or the act of flowing that encapsulates what sharing is all about. Imagine, for example, a weird, freaky moment when every human being seated here before me except for you suddenly experiences a blackout and everybody disappears at the same time, so there is nobody left anywhere in this beautiful tent on these beautiful grounds of UTS. Imagine that suddenly everybody is gone. If so, can we truly be happy? If we experience a freak-out like that, can we really be happy?

Now imagine that that happened not just for three seconds or three hours. What about for three days? What about for three weeks? What about for three months? It's very difficult to be happy on our own because we were made to love and to be loved. We were made to share, to give and receive, to flow with the waters in and out, to keep that life force or the life energy moving through all of us.

Uplifting Each Other

We can see in Michael Phelps an example of the third aspect of how we can go about owning it, how we as a community can control the horns of our destiny. What did Michel Phelps win? He won 22 medals at the Olympics. It's absolutely unbelievable for just one man. But if we look at somebody like that, we see that he obviously is world class. He knows he's good. But his goodness, his talents, and his gifts are so apparent to anybody that there is no need to boast. There is no need to judge. There is no need to condemn.

In other words, the third element to really owning our lives is the importance of uplifting each other. We need to uplift, encourage, and inspire each other. So what is one of the first things that Michael Phelps does after he wins the Gold Medal, other than come up on the front of Kellogg's Life cereal? Other than that, what does he do? He immediately goes to his community; he visits the children's center; he visits the YMCA; he encourages the young people, "You can be better than me." He's not going to go to these centers and saying, "I'm Michael Phelps. What more do you need to see? You want to touch my medals? Here, but don't come too close. No thumbprints or fingerprints." Does he do that? No.

He visits, and what does he do? He inspires the young people to be better than he is. It's going to be a long time before somebody is better than he is, but he inspires every child to dream -- to dream to be great someday, to be better than the person that you see standing in front of you. I am just waiting, dear community, for your children to relieve me of this pulpit. Think about the kind of future leadership that will be coming up from our community if we can be a community that supports and uplifts.

For those of you who have obvious and astounding talents, please share them with our community without being boastful, without being top-down. If we're really good, we don't have to spend a whole lot of time with self-promotion. It's obvious. Goodness is obvious. Skill and talent in people are obvious and don't need many words. As Emerson says, "What you are speaks so loud that I can't hear what you're saying." Meaning, what you're saying is not important; it's how you carry yourself as a person that speaks louder than anything in the world.

Everything Is "Happy" and "Go"

We remember when our True Parents were encouraging the young people of our community with the ideas that you've got to challenge yourself; you've got to go fundraising, go to the limit, see what your limit is, and break through by going to the zero point and starting over to build something marvelous.

One of the things that our True Father encouraged everybody in our community to do is to look at the ocean as a huge source of food in the future. So he invested heavily into fisheries and the different ways we can package and market fish, and at the same time encourage a healthy way of eating. In the 1970s when I first arrived here, the big deal was McDonald's and hamburgers. When people thought of America, they thought of hamburger, French fries, and Coke. But with the good work that our True Father has been doing, when you ask the hip and cool young people nowadays what food is their favorite, they say "Sushi"; they say "Sashimi." It's a healthy way of living that our True Father encouraged.

Back in those days Father was challenging all of us to confront our characters out on the open sea because that's a situation that can easily become one of life or death. You don't know what the ocean is going to do, so you have to be prepared at all times; you have to be on guard. Even though the creation is beautiful, you have to be focused on why you are there.

One of the things that True Father loved to do was to give audacious providential names to the different businesses and organizations that he created around the world. When Father was doing tuna fishing in the summers in the late 1970s, he had a whole fleet of small boats that together with his different teams he designed, manufactured, and test-drove himself. These boats were unbelievably fast and extremely maneuverable.

The problem with the small boats back in those days is that they weren't stable, so when you made a quick turn, they could be turned over. But Father is not just our True Parent; he's a scientist. He's an engineer by trade. So he developed an amazing rudder; he designed a boat that cuts the water in a very smooth way so you barely feel the turn. That boat is almost unstoppable in the sense that you don't have to worry about it flipping over when you're making quick turns on the open sea, even with heavy or very high waves.

I remember once when the Japanese leaders asked Father, "Father, this is really an awesome boat that you created and we're manufacturing. What are we going to call them?" Father said, "Mmm, Good – everybody knows what good means – 'Good Go.'" Father said, "Good Go." Father didn't say, "Good Stay." What Father was saying is, "Go, spread the Gospel, spread the breaking news." The first two letters in Gospel are G-O, go.

Gospel is not asking us to stay put, to stay in our comfort zone, to stay where everything is hunky-dory. Gospel is asking us to volunteer, to contribute, to provide a service to humanity, to be a proactive agent of change. Don't just "Good Stay," but "Good Go." Go unto the world; go unto our communities; go unto our universities; go unto our schools; go unto the field of the Olympic Games; and be a "Good Go-er. Be the best that you can be. Win the Gold, like Michael Phelps, but without having to boast how awesome you are or what an outstanding community you come from.

When we apply ourselves to something that we've been gifted with, like a great talent or a great blessing -- whether we are more computer savvy than others or are more artistic than others -- let's go with our community behind us. Then when any of us accomplishes our greatness, people will say, "Ah, they are really 'Good Go's' because they come from a good community; they come from a good family. They are "Good Go's" because they are becoming a good child of God.

God is asking us, "Don't sit pretty." Every day that our True Parents are here with us is an opportunity for us to share the breaking news. We need to share the gift of the Blessing not just with our own families but with the rest of the world. So even as we educate, share, and uplift the young blessed candidates for the future Blessing, we cannot just stay insular. We cannot just stay in the protective bubble of our community. We need to invite the world in. We need to seek the world to share the breaking news.

Our True Father didn't just name these boats Good Go. He created Go Travel, Go World, Happy Go. Everything is happy. Happy True World Foods. Everything is "happy;" everything is "go." What are our True Parents saying? They are telling us that we need to own it. We need to realize who we are and decide to receive our Heavenly Parent, our True Parents, and our community in our hearts; we need to be the empowered human being who decides to love every day and to share this gift to love with others in our community and in our lives. We need to be the Good Go vehicle wherever we go, the vehicle and instrument that uplifts each other and does not condemn or judge. Condemning and judging are what insecure people tend to do. If we really know we're good, we don't need to condemn or judge. The only thing we would want to do is to uplift.

The Outstanding Children of Our Community

When we look at different aspects of society, we find that it's the compromised individuals who cannot find themselves uplifting others. Look at dictators. They tend to be the most compromised individuals of the world. Even though they promise freedom and equality for all, their actions speak louder than words. What they are speaks so loud that we cannot hear what they are saying. They speak the jargon or the lingo of freedom and equality, but they do not live it.

The astonishing thing about True Parents is that they're asking us to own it, to be the responsible child. They are asking us to own and drive our horns of destiny, to be who we want to be. Let's not tell our families and friends, "I can't be great because my parents weren't rich enough. I cannot be great because I couldn't find a practice room. I can't be great because I don't have money to go to the school that I want to go to." If there's a will, there's a way. If we're talented and we're grateful, there's really no limit to what we can become.

The Sports Festival is a time on this beautiful summer day to come together and celebrate each other as part of this international community. But this is also a time when we can inherit a bit of healthy competition, so that we can helpfully and in a loving way compete with each other to be the best that we can be, by assuring that we don't say or think, "Nah, nah, nah, you can't be better than me," or, "You're not as good as me; why do you do it like that?"

Instead of parents talking to our kids, saying, "Why can't you be like Cathy? Why can't you be like John? Do this and do that." Instead of talking to our kids that way, can you imagine what our child could do if we parents would say, "You can be whatever you decide to be, but let me make it very clear that you are to have no rose-colored glasses in what you want to accomplish. If you want to accomplish and work for your passion, I will support you, provided that you work hard."

There are two different ways we can speak to our children, and there are two different ways we can speak to our parents. We can speak to them respectfully, or we can speak to them, screaming at them. Many children say to me, "My parents don't listen to a word I say." I ask, "What have you tried to share with your parents?" One of the children said, "I just got really mad last night because my parents did this, this, this, and this." So I said, "Well, here we are in this international community where we have the melding and the wedding of not just Eastern sensibility but also Western sensibility. What if you try again to talk to your parents, and this time you do it without volatile emotion? Do it respectfully; do it seeking support and guidance. Try again, and I promise you, if you do so, your parents will be your biggest fans and supporters."

As we move forward, one of the most important things we can do is to uplift each other in our daily lives and also every week, every month, and every year. I can see, just in the course of the last few years, how outstanding our children have been. Our children are giving valedictorian speeches on campuses. They're taking control over their lives. For Seijin Tranberg, I can very much see a political career.

One after another, our kids are stepping up to the plate: They're owning it, and they're deciding not to be complainers and not to be only good say-ers. But they're deciding, "I want to be that Good Go. I want to be that Good Go boat that is not going to topple over on the high seas, that is going to make the sexiest turns that people and the world have ever seen, and go with the greatest speed and with the greatest excitement because we are truly blessed."

Brothers and Sisters, let's thank our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. Let's thank our True Parents. Let's thank our parents and our community. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for participating in this sports festival. God bless.

Notes:

2012 Unification Church Motto

This year's motto is "天地人참父母勝利解放完成時代" translated as "Era of the Victory, Liberation and Perfection of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth, and Humankind" 

Blessed Culture and Sports Festival in 2012 - In Jin Moon Highlights Importance of Culture

Blessed Culture and Sports Festival in 2012 - In Jin Moon Highlights Importance of Culture

Lovin' Life Sunday Sermon for August 5, 2012

In Jin Moon

1. Wow! Such beautiful faces in front of me! How is everybody?

2. So much has been happening the last couple of weeks. We've had the Lovin' Life Camp and Dave Hunter and his team and all of the volunteers are doing a fantastic job with the high school kids and now with the middle schoolers.

3. And we've also had my younger brother (Kook Jin Moon) here, touring the country in eight different cities. He really came to provoke all of us to think about what freedom and responsibility really means. I am so proud of our American team for taking such great care of him. Everyone from Joshua Cotter on down to all the District Pastors and all the brothers and sisters who came out, really in support of True Family. I want to thank you.

4. We have been continuing our great fight on the issue of religious freedom that is taking place in Japan. As you know 4300 of our brothers and sisters of the past three decades have been abducted and incarcerated and have been abused during their time in captivity. So, a couple of years ago my brothers and I, we decided to really do something about it, and help put an end to the atrocities that are taking place in Japan and really American members and the American team that I have here in the United States, together with our friends in ACLC and different ambassadors for peace, they've done a phenomenal job of really accompanying me together, visiting Capitol Hill, visiting all the different Congressmen and Congresswomen and Senators – really imploring upon them that what is taking place in Japan needs to be stopped.

5. A couple days ago we had the Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill and we had an opportunity to really hear from such distinguished panelists such as Dr. Rhodes who was the former director of the Helsinki Human Rights Commission. We also had Tina Ramirez there who is the director of the Becket Foundation, and of course the lovely Ms Porter who is a longtime veteran of Capitol Hill and the founder of the Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights and Religious Freedom. These people, together with us, are really highlighting the atrocities that are taking place in Japan and really helping us fight to put an end – so that we as Unificationists all around the world can be proud of our faith, can be proud of our True Parents, can be proud of our blessed life – so that every Unificationist in the world can be allowed the freedom to love life.

6. When we had talked about what is going to be the slogan for Lovin Life Camp this year, we all thought that "Rebel with a Cause" was a highly interesting and an inspiring slogan to think about. Because, really, what we are attempting to do in sharing the breaking news is to break the mold of what's been done before. And with the advent of our True Parents, the first man and a woman who have really perfected themselves and now stand in the position as the true example that all of humanity can follow. They are the ones coming with the great gift of the Blessing through which all of God's children can really graft on to the true lineage and leave the satanic lineage that has dominated human kind for thousands and thousands of years. In a way, having our True Parents here is an incredible blessing. It's an incredible time for us to exercise our freedom to really be responsible eternal sons and daughters of God.

7. When I hear the word freedom, I often like to say the way the Asian ear hears the word freedom – it's made up of two words in my ear; the word free and dumb. So there is a certain kind of responsibility when we are being free, not to do things that are not smart for us – dumb things. Many people think that when we are young we can pretty much do whatever we want, that we will live for ever. It doesn't matter what everyone else is thinking as long as we think that we are free and we are wanting to exercise our freedom.

8. But you know, at the congressional briefing Dr. Rhodes said something that is very important for all of us to think about as young people when we are contemplating on the word freedom. He said that, "my freedom ends where your freedom starts." Meaning, we are free, and we can be free citizens of this country in so far as it doesn't infringe on the freedom of others. So, in a way, the work that we're doing to really liberate our Japanese brothers and sisters is to allow them the freedom to exercise their faith without having the deprogrammers infringing on their right to freely exercise their faith in the way that they would like as proud Unificationists.

9. And so when we think of ourselves as a member of this community, the worldwide community really wanting to live under the banner of One Family Under God, what are our True Parents really asking all of us to do? Here we have the freedom to be that eternal son and a daughter of God, but Father and Mother have emphasized over and over again that you cannot really have freedom without an understanding of responsibility. In a way, we are free to live our lives in a good way – and not in a dumb way, by exercising our responsibility, by in a way, owning up to all that we were meant to become.

10. As a mother of five, when I gaze into the audience and I see these bright young faces, they are the promise of our future, they are our future. And whatever we can do to inspire them, to empower them, to nurture them to be that proud and confident son and daughter of God is really our privilege as parents.

11. But, we realize that in our desire to be and to create this one family under God, we realize that there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And that's why we need that true example of our True Parents. Because when we look at their life, when we look at their life of faith – True Father for over 93 years and our True Mother for over 70 years, there are a couple of things that we can learn from their good example.

Oscar Wilde

12. One of the things that always struck me about Father is that he is a man who never stops dreaming. In a way, in the words of the wittiest and the most amusing English writer that I like to call one of my favorites is Oscar Wilde, and he said something a while ago, "a dreamer" – or how I understand a dreamer is – a dreamer is a visionary, a dreamer somebody who thinks of something better than what we are faced with or what we are smack immersed in. And to me True Father is really that dreamer because he offers all of humanity a vision of how we can create this ideal world of peace, ideal world of true love. It's his dreams, and not just his dreams, but his actual work in substantiating that dream that has inspired me in my life. And so Oscar Wilde says, "a dreamer is one can fined his or her way by moonlight. And he is punished, because he dares to see the dawn before the world."

13. In a way our Father is this visionary that humanity has been waiting for. He is the man with a purpose, he comes with a vision and he teaches us by example. And he together with our True Mother dares to dream of a world that is better than we found it. Dares to dream of a world where true love reigns supreme. Dares to dream of a world where all of God's children have equal divine worth and value. Dares to dream of a world where we can contemplate, and not just contemplate, but do the active work of building ideal families – which is not an easy thing to do.

14. And, in a way, he is punished because he dares to see the dawn. He sees, he knows what needs to be, he knows what needs to be accomplished. And he is misunderstood because he can see the dawn before the rest of the world.

15. When I was coming back from my brothers Freedom Society Speech I bumped into one of the 2nd Gen – and one of the 2nd Gen said to me, "you know I really love Lovin' Life." And I said, "That's a good beginning." Usually when people come up to me it's full of constructive criticism or complaints, but this young person just came up to me and said, "I really love Lovin' Life!" Wonderful! And this person said, "But sometimes I am just really not sure if Father is the Messiah." And I said, "you too, Uh? Well join the club."

16. The fact that we ask questions every now and then is a healthy thing. It means that we are always reflecting, we are always wanting to grow, we are always wanting to explore and ask the very difficult questions that confound us or sometimes puzzle us, and dares to find, or be courageous enough to seek an answer.

17. And I said to this person, "we've all been there in our life of faith. We've all questioned – is True Parents, or Father, really the Messiah? How do we know he's the real deal? He is the real McCoy? How do we know he's not a fake? How do we know it's not a sham? How do we know it's genuine?" Well I said to this young man, "you know, 2000 years ago we had Jesus Christ and a lot of people believed in him. In the time that Jesus administered to the people, which was less than three years. Can you imagine? Jesus administered to the people less than three years? And that has changed the world." But think about it. In his time, there were people who believed – like the 12 disciples. And there were people who didn't believe. And there were people who believed, like Judas in the beginning, but was so certain that Jesus could not be the Messiah, because he was looking at Jesus through his physical eyes, not his spiritual eyes. So perhaps Judas started criticizing or misunderstanding Jesus Christ for breaking out in anger at the Temple, perhaps associating with people that were not of the best caliber, perhaps doing things that were revolutionary. In a way, Judas who once was a believer, was so certain and so convinced that Jesus was not the Messiah – that in the end he ended up selling Jesus for a chunk of change. And I'm sure Judas, if I had a chance to interview him at that moment, would have probably said to me, "yes, I initially thought Jesus was the Messiah, but because of A, B, C, in my mind he is not the Messiah and he is a danger to our society and therefore I shall sell him to the authorities."

18. In a way, Judas, in his own mind was being incredibly smart – he thought. "I have perhaps evidence, A,B,C as to why he cannot be the Messiah." He was so certain that Jesus was not the Messiah. But, what does human history reveal to us? Regardless of whether Judas was certain that Jesus was not the Messiah, the fact remains that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. He was the son of God who came to deliver the breaking news 2000 years ago, but was cut short because people simply could not unite or believe in this person that we call the Son of God.

19. So I said be careful to this young person in being so certain, in thinking that Father is not the Messiah. Perhaps God doesn't give us the Messiah that we want. It's not us who picks the Messiah, it is God. And in God's eyes God will work through the Messiah that He wants to work through. And as long as our True Parents are the messianic figures that God wants to work through, He will and She will continue to do so.

20. So we may have our questions, our doubts, or perhaps our ventings – that I am so smart, I am so well-versed that I know True Parents are not the Messiah. But just because you or I think so, doesn't mean that they are not the Messiah. And in this way we have to realize that, regardless of how awesome we think we are, we are always on the road of growth and learning. That's what makes human life beautiful. It's not static. It's not a petrified form of existence. We are constantly growing. And so during our growth don't be so quick to judge or to become arrogant, thinking that because of my reasons True Parents are not the Messiah. Because, even if you or I think that they are not, guess what? They are and they continue to be because God ordained and blessed them and anointed them as such.

21. And history is long. Our life is long. And humankind has many many different cycles that we need to, kind of, go through. But the incredible thing about our True Parents, our Father and our True Mother, is they are incredibly consistent. Our Father, once he made up his mind at 16 years of age, younger then you guys, when our Father met Jesus Christ on the hills of North Korea and Jesus asked him to please carry on my mission – Father was younger than some of you. But once he committed, once he said yes, Father never ever wavered. And our True Mother, once she has decided – she's never wavered. And that's why they are our True Parents and that's why we all aspire to be like them. And that's why they continue to be our guiding light in these difficult times.

22. But when they've come with this breaking news, you know, and we want to share with the world what the breaking news is, what is it? Yes it's the news that the Messiah is here. Yes it's the news that they bring the gift of the Blessing. But what is really our end goal in life. As human beings what do we want to accomplish in our lifetime? If you really kind of narrow it down to what is really important, it's really to love and to be loved. And it's to experience the building of an ideal family through which we can experience and build the Four Position Foundation, have beautiful kids like all of you, and work together – meaning we grow together, we cry, we laugh, we expand together as a family – to become that awesome family which will be an incredible cornerstone or the building block for an incredible society, nation, and world.

23. So, many times when I hear different people talk about, "what is the ideal world going to be?" Many times people are talking in terms of systems – "we need to create this kind of a system because that is the perfect system to have an ideal or one family under God." But the incredible thing about True Parents is that it's not the system that is going to create something ideal. It boils down to you and me. It's the individual. It's the kind of a person that we decide to be today that is going to determine what our world is going to be like tomorrow. And therefore mind over body, you know, victory over ourselves, work on ourselves in preparation to meet that beautiful spouse. And then when you meet the beautiful spouse, knowing that the other is fully committed with your understanding of what the Blessing is, and I cannot stress this more emphatically enough – because many times people don't come to the Blessing with the same sense of what they want. Many times people don't know what they want. But if we come to the Blessing with the same commitment, same understanding of what we want to accomplish together in life then we can start the work of actually creating that building block that will become an integral part, and an important part of the society, nation, and world.

24. And so the incredible thing about our True Parents, is that, yes we want to change the world, but how do we change the world? We change the world by changing ourselves. And as numerous scholars, and numerous psychotherapists and counselors and sociologists and psychologists have discovered – that our True Parents are really right. As Patterson (?) says, it's got to be the family. The family needs to be fixed in order for the world to be fixed, if you will. In a way, a lot of the ills of society and a lot of the ills of the world stem from the family. And so when Father and Mother says that family is where the true rubbing takes place, where we grow as people, where we grow as mature citizens of this world – they are not saying something that is meaningless. They are saying something that is extremely, extremely profound.

25. For me, when I think about the family, for me a family is kind of like a team. I'm sure at Lovin' Life Camp, you had different teams representing different tribes, representing different nations – and you kind of have to learn how to work together. And the most important thing about a team is the sense of a common purpose. We all have to have common purpose. And when you look at a football team or a soccer team or a dance team or even a Lovin' Life Tribe team – you realize there are a couple of things that come into play that make it a successful family or a successful team. And this is what our True Parents have been trying to teach us to their own example.

26. In a way our True Parents stress the importance of having a common goal. We all have to agree on what we want to accomplish in our world, in our lives – that we want to create this incredible Four Position Foundation, we want to experience building this ideal family. And guess what; building an ideal family is not easy. It needs cooperation. It needs commitment.

27. In a way, when I think about having a common purpose, or like a mission statement, I think of an example of cross training. We have the summer Olympics going on and you see all these athletes who are training their whole lives to compete at the Olympics, to compete for the gold medal. And you realize that they've given up their free time, they've really given up all the other things that they might want to do to really accomplish this goal. And, they together with the other team members, are there representing their country, representing the families that they come from. And you realize that, when you watch a team – there are a couple of things that come into play. They have a common purpose. They are there to win the gold, to represent their family, to represent their country, and so they are going to cooperate. They are going to commit to each other that they are going to put up the best fight that they possibly can. But in preparation for that common goal you realize that they've gone through many many hours of cross training.

28. What is cross training? It's slightly different from running or doing aerobics or doing lifting weights, or doing one type of exercise – in cross training you are exercising different parts of your body at the same time. So, in order to compete, or be at your highest fitness level, all of these athletes go through cross training. In a way it's like bearing a cross in order to train to be that gold medalist. But you're not just exercising one muscle, you're not just exercising two muscles. You are working on exercising all your different muscles, to kind of work together, to be that superior athletes.

29. In a way, family is kind of like that. In order for a family to be an incredible team – every muscle, or every member of the family needs to be exercised. Every member of the family must cooperate together with an understanding that we are committed to each other – to win the gold, or to win, or to accomplish whatever goal we set out to be. And then we realize that, if you want to be a really excellent team on the battlefield, if you will, or if you want to be a really awesome family – you have to have the same direction.

30. Just like the two legs work in conjunction with a body to point us in the direction that we are going. If we want to go straight both are legs need to go straight. If we want to go straight but our left leg is wanting to go this way (she points) and only our right leg is wanting to go that way, guess what, we're not going to get very far. In a way, we have to approach our common goal with the same direction. We have to be pointed in the same direction.

31. And then, this kind of begs the answer – what does same direction mean? Does that mean that we are all just legs? Does that mean that we are all the same? No! We are not talking about duplication here. The thing about the family, and the thing about the team, that makes it beautiful and incredibly powerful is that we are all different. We are all different. We are not duplicates of each other. A sibling is not a duplicate of another sibling. Or a child is not a duplicate of a parent. We are not like the Federal Reserve board where they print money. Human beings are not printable, like the way money is. Each human being is an eternal, and the divine, and the unique handiwork of God.

32. So, God is not asking us when we are in the effort to build the family, a wonderful family – be the duplicate of your parents, or be the duplicate of your sibling, that everybody in the family is the same. That would be really boring, actually, and quite tragic. And the beauty of the family is that everybody is different, everybody is unique. The beauty of a loving husband and wife is that husband and wife is different. It's male and female. It's male and female, two different people, but wanting to walk the same direction, towards a common purpose. Not being duplicates of each other.

33. And I think in a community like our movement we have to understand this unique handiwork of God in an individual setting, in a family setting, also in a community setting as well. We have to realize that each family is unique. Each family is a special handiwork of God. Each family should not be a duplicate of another. It should not be like printable Money – all ideal families with the same, act the same, behave the same, only have the same strength. If that is what an ideal world is, I don't want to be a part of that ideal world. It's boring. It's nothing special. But each family has its own dealings within the family that help make it become an ideal family, as each member of the family being different, not duplicates of each other, continue to rub up against each other to make everyone better.

34. Likewise, in a community like our movement, your family is going to be different from my family. Your problems are going to be different from my problems. But, the big question is, not are we the same duplicates of each other, but whether we are going in the same direction with a common purpose. That's what creates an incredibly powerful team and an incredibly powerful family.

35. Another thing that a successful, or a really awesome team and a family has, is this thing what I call common purpose – same direction, but different strength. What I mean by different strength is that in order to be truly powerful in our lives we have to kind of come together with an amalgamation of all our strengths. Every human being has strengths and weaknesses. We are not all perfect. We are working on ourselves in each of our lives. And we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. The beauty of LLM, the beauty of loving each other and nurturing each other and empowering each other is to understand that we all have shortcomings. But at the same time, we all have incredible things that we can contribute to the betterment of the whole.

36. And so, the fact that we are not all Korean – can you imagine if our community was all Korean because our True Parents are Korean? We will not be strong, we will not have strength in diversity. But what creates our community to be such a vibrant community, and a strong community is that we have international presence here. Every culture, every race, every different kind of background is represented. And as long as we continue to really honor and celebrate our differences and realize that God gave us our differences so that we all have different strengths, thank God! If we all had the same strengths we are not going to be too powerful or too strong as the movement. But you know, some people like Heather Thalheimer, – she is better equipped to deal with the Department of Education. For instance, Philip Schanker, he is very equipped to deal with the Blessed Family Department. Somebody like Debby Gullery is better equipped to be a really wonderful Counselor. Someone like Tom Walsh is better equipped to work for Universal Peace Foundation. Likewise everybody that is represented in our community has incredible strengths, that when we can bring together and work together as a team – makes our team that much stronger, that much greater.

37. And so, can you imagine if we were putting together a soccer team and our True Parents started Wangoo Sports Festival and every year we are sending athletes over. And so, as the senior pastor I have to think every year what athletes I'm going to send over. Can you imagine if we are sending over a soccer team and in that team everybody is a goalie? That team is not going to do too well. Or everybody plays offense or defense. What if everybody only plays defense? Are we going to be a proactive or a successful soccer team? The reason why a soccer team is powerful is because you have a goalie. You have somebody whose strength is manning the ball. You have the offense player who is really great getting out there to make the plays happen. And you also have defensive players who are really great at protecting our goalie. These are different strengths. They are not the same. But when they come together that's when the magic happens.

38. Amongst all of you who are seated here at Lovin' Life Camp, you are going to realize that I am better at something than my brothers and sisters, my sister might be better at something than me. But instead of thinking, "oh, I'm not good enough, or that person gets all the blessing. How come I'm not good at that?" The important thing about life is that God made all of you just as special as the person seated next to you. All of you are divine beings with an incredible talent and incredible promise, and incredible blueprint. And it is our job as parents to help you find your passions and your talents. And it is our job as a community to help empower you so that you know you can be the best that you can be. But you seated here in the front should celebrate that fact that you are different from each other and realize that, perhaps what you are not good at is something that maybe the other might be good at, and by coming together and working together we can create an awesome team or an awesome family.

39. So, when I take time out to look at my kids – and I realize that all five of them are incredibly different – all of them are different. It's like the five nations coming together. It's like five different soccer teams coming together. They are all very different, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. But I realize, just like a really beautiful jigsaw puzzle, they are so different, but when they can work together they create a beautiful picture. And I think that's what our Heavenly Parent up in heaven wants to see. In a way, celebrating our differences, celebrating our diversity knowing that our strength comes from our uniting with our True Parents – bringing all our differences united under our True Parents and our Heavenly Parent, understanding that we desire to walk the same path – not being duplicates or carbon copies of each other but finding what our calling is in life and being courageous enough to live it, not just talk about, but to live it, and own up to our destinies, which is there for us to grasp.

40. And that reminds me of something that I often think about. God bless my older brother Hyo Jin Opa who really founded the Manhattan Center here that you are seated in. My older brother was almost like a larger-than-life kind of a character. He was really fun loving, very loud, very masculine. He was very testosterone driven. And so when my father put my older brother as the head of CARP he envisioned what might be the best way to educate the Blessed Children. And he is so masculine, just so powerful that – and he is going through his growth stage too trying to figure out what he wants to do, what his identity is, what does it mean to be a true son of God, how does he want to, what kind of a leader does he want to be, how does he want to educate the Blessed Children – and every leader has their own idea as to what might be the best way to educate Blessed children. And my older brother was no exception.

41. One of the things that he used to do is, because he was so masculine it was almost like he was the boss. When the boss walks into the room, not just your head, but all of your body needs to know the boss is in town! So regardless of what you were doing, if the boss enters you get up. And you bow and you stand like this (she stands with her head lowered).

42. And I don't know how many countless meetings we had with Blessed Children where I would be going back and forth from my studies at Columbia University – and many times I would drive him to East Garden and around the pool there would be a bunch of Blessed children all standing like this (heads down) and my brother talking up a storm. And they're all standing like this. And I remember many times my brother would say we are all going out to eat something, why do you come? And my older brother's favorite food was Chinese food. And he is one of these types of people that has his favorite. So you can go to all the different restaurants but he is going to order the same thing all the time. You know we are going to have hot and sour soup, because that's his favorite soup. You know we're going to have fried rice, usually chicken fried rice. And you know we're going to have orange beef. So whenever he invited us to restaurants it was always Chinese, because that was his favorite. And it was always going to be hot and sour soup, chicken fried rice, and orange beef.

43. But this one day my brothers came up to me and my brother said, "In Jin, In Jin we are all going out to eat." And I said, "Chinese? I just had Chinese food maybe I will stay." "No were going to McDonald's." Okay that's different. French fries and big Mac every now and then that's a wonderful change. I said, "Okay I will come." And about 20 Blessed children came along so we were like a convoy in our cars and we all followed the boss to McDonald's. And the boss parked and we all parked around him. We all got out and the boss came out of the car and we all followed like this (with heads down). And we basically took over this poor McDonald's. It was almost like an invasion. And at that time when we had Blessed children workshops it was mostly Asian kids, because the American blessed kids were quite young, so it looked like Asian invasion taking over McDonald's. And so everybody was watching, what's going on, who are these people? My brother said, "Okay, who wants to eat?" And everybody raised their hand. And then he had one Blessed Child who was working, kind of like a right-hand person, "okay, go order 20 quarter pounders with cheese, large french fries, large coke." That was it. And so there were 25 people, mind you, but the understanding of BCs back then was, unite. You don't say anything. You eat what's given. And so, whether you liked quarter pounders or not that's what you're going to get. Whether you like large french fries or not, that's what you're going to get. Maybe you can't drink Coke but that's what you're going to get. And so I said, "I don't really want to drink Coke. Is it all right if I have filet of fish because I had a big Chinese lunch?" And I will never forget that day, because these Blessed Children who were seated like this (heads down) waiting for their quarter pounder and french fries to come, they all went (she raised her head in astonishment). "What?" And they looked at me and then they looked at my brother and then looked at me. And they were looking at me like, holy cow your head is going to be decapitated. And guess what, the boss decapitated my head. And the boss gave me a lecture on unity. And he went on and on and on – and I almost had an out of the body experience. Because, I was thinking "okay I am being decapitated here seated at McDonald's because I wanted a filet of fish, not a quarter pounder with cheese." I was asking God, "is this what unity is all about? Do we really all have to be duplicates of each other? Do we all have to be the same? Because, if that's the case I'm not sure if I want to belong to this movement." This was my honest feeling. But I was the younger sister and so I just respectfully listened. But I said, "Okay, I don't really have to eat." By the time it was finished I was not feeling well.

44. That example was something that kind of stayed with me throughout the years. And so in our efforts to really kind of be a unified family, be a unified community – there is kind of like this pressure to always be the same, always dressed the same. I think you guys look great in red T-shirts by the way (the members of Lovin' Life Camp were all wearing red camp T-shirt). It's wonderful to have a feeling of solidarity. But imagine if it wasn't just the red T-shirt. Imagine if you look the same, if you talked the same, if you liked the same things. Maybe some of you like Nine Inch Nails, but maybe some of you like Beyonce, maybe some of you like a Mariah Carey, maybe some of you like Jack White. You know, people like different things. And many times we like different things because it's a unique expression of who we are. And so unity doesn't mean that we are all becoming paper cutouts of each other like cardboard sheets of each other. Unity means coming together in heart.

45. In a way when Father and Mother come to teach the world and share the breaking news and really urging all of us to unite with our Heavenly Father to unite with our True Parents, to work together. They're not asking all of you to be carbon cut outs of our True Parents. Yes they are our symbol, they are somebody we should aspire to, but we need to celebrate our own uniqueness. You can contribute something to the movement that perhaps Father and Mother didn't have time to do, because you are different, because you are unique, because you are that incredible handiwork of our Heavenly Father.

46. And it's no different from, you know, my growing up in this church where everything was unison, everything was unison prayer, everything was unison singing, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. And I often wondered am I allowed to sing something different. Do I always have to sing the 30 Holy Songs that I know by heart? Can I praise God singing something different? Can a new song become a Holy Song?

47. In a way, when you listen to music the thing that makes music beautiful, for instance – you have a certain number of keys on the piano. But when you play the same note all the time, it can have a certain kind of rhythmic beauty to it. Perhaps it's meditative, perhaps people like the constancy of hearing a certain note, but you hear it long enough and it's going to feel like Chinese water torture working on you – like a droplet of water slowly killing you away. But the reason why music is beautiful is that it's not only one note that's being played. In a way there is incredible strength in unison prayer. It's wonderful. You can feel the energy. You could feel the inspiration. Everybody saying and singing the same thing, it's wonderful. But sometimes strength does not equate to beautiful. Sometimes we need to hear a bit of harmony. And how is harmony created. Harmony is not created by playing the same note. Harmony is created by playing different notes together at the same time.

48. And so in music it's harmony that gives depth that gives expensiveness – the feeling of all encompassing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's so majestic. It's so all-encompassing because it's a full power of harmonic plays, of different people singing different parts, and coming together as that incredible choir. It's everybody's singing different notes at the same time that produces incredible harmony. And unison is strength, but we cannot run our movement just on the strength. We need harmony. We need the beauty of being able to be expansive, be able to celebrate our differences and yet work together. In a way, we have to be like a beautiful choir, each of us singing different parts, different notes – but sung together, become this incredible human experience or a divine experience through which we can share the breaking news with the rest of the world.

49. And so, when I think about having a common purpose. When I think about having a common purpose of each and every one of us having this opportunity to build the ideal families of our own – we really need to understand that in our effort to accomplish the goal we cannot lose sight of, sometimes, our own shortcomings in succumbing to our own arrogance in thinking that we know best. We have to, kind of leave ourselves open for God to work through. As parents, have to leave ourselves open for our children to work through. We can grow and learn through our children. And the children must leave themselves open and wide for the parents to work through.

50. And that reminds me of this one story. I was having a conversation with this one person. This person had a really incredibly difficult time with his father. They all wanted to accomplish the same thing. They wanted to be the best Unificationists. But they had different ideas about going about it. And the father was very adamant – you listen to me. And the son was very adamant. Perhaps the son was a rebel with a cause, wanting to do something different, wanting to maybe express himself being a Unificationists in a different way. They butted heads for so long. But one afternoon before the son was to go off abroad for his missionary work, the father and son came together and they had a melting of hearts and a sharing of hearts. The father, maybe perhaps said to the son, words that he never said before – "I'm really proud of you. I'm really proud that you are making this big step, you're going into ministry, you're really going to serve the world, your going to work on yourself and I'm just really proud that you turned out so fine." And perhaps hearing the father utter these words really melted the son's heart. And the son said, "you know dad, for a long time I've really wanted to rebel against everything that was you. You symbolized everything that I wanted to rebel against. But I realize at the end of the day, that you and I, even though we are different, different people, not duplicates of each other – I realized that we want the same things in life, that we are faced toward the same direction. Thank God we are different but we are pointed and looking towards the same direction." And the son said something that really liberated the father's heart. The son said to the, "you know dad, I have many times judged you, and in a way many times I have not forgiven you for the difficulties that I felt I've had to face in my life with you, but I realize that as I grew older that you were a better father to me than your father was to you. And for that I am incredibly grateful."

51. In a way, the child realized that despite the shortcomings of the father, this father lived his whole life wanting to better the world that his son, or his other siblings, came into. In a way, the father may not be perfect, and you know what – your parents are not going to be perfect in your eyes. But you need to understand that you are here because your parents had the courage to dream of a world that was better than their own.

52. As Oscar Wilde said, it is the dreamer who dares to see the dawn before the world wakes up to it. In a way, many times our parents dared to see the dawn. They see what you can be even before you realize what you are capable of. And therefore, they are persecuted and judged. In a way, Oscar Wilde said something else. He said you can be sure of one thing, we start out loving our parents then we end up judging the bleep out of our parents and we never forgive them for their supposed atrocities.

53. But we realize, that as we grow older, that they have tried their best to be a best parent to you. And likewise, regardless of what takes place in the family, we all have to realize that perhaps our parents are doing a better job than perhaps their parents are doing. And so our parents may not be perfect but at least we are facing the same direction. We are looking towards accomplishing the common purpose. We are different but we are faced the same.

54. And therefore it is of most importance as we go forward in our movement, and as we look towards the next millennium, that we learn to be thankful for this generation that came before us. Because without them none of us would be here. And of all the wonderful friends that you got to meet at Camp, none of them would be here without our True Parents and our True Parents would not be here without God. So, we have to have an incredible feeling of being grateful for the sacrifices that have been made, but at the same time realize that now this is our time. This is our time to be that rebel with a cause, dare to be different, to be courageous, to love – basically saying to the world – the world teaches us that money, power, and knowledge are the most important thing – but God and True Parents teach a that the most important thing is true love. The most important thing is to know how to love and be loved in the most beautiful and harmonious way. That's what we're all about.

55. And so, we have to liberate our parents. But the parents, at the same time must also be cognizant of the fact that perhaps we can learn some of our greatest lessons from our kids too and thereby grow together.

56. And that leads me to this passage in the Bible. In Isaiah 40:31 it says, "Those who await upon the Lord shall renew their strength." And how do they, how do we, renew our strength? We renew our strength in realizing that we are an international community and that we need to celebrate the differences and diversity's that exist within our community, realizing that when we combine our differences under the unity of our True Parents we become an incredibly powerful force of true love.

57. And if we can renew our strength, our strength that is derived by different people coming together in unity, in the spirit of true love – then we realize, the Bible continues to say, "We will mount up with wings like eagles." In a way, wings like eagles – eagles learn how to fly through trial and error. It's the mother eagle that pushes the young birds out of the nest. They fall to their death many many times, almost, before they learn how to fly. In a way, their wings are earned, in that a lot of effort needs to go into it.

58. So in a way we fly together. We mount up with wings like eagles, we are pointed in the same direction. And we shall run, not grow weary, and we shall walk, not growing faint. Meaning we will soar, we will do all that we accomplish not being tired, because we have the cooperation and the commitment of each other, different members of family, different members of the team wanting to work together to accomplish a common purpose.

59. And in that way we walk, we face the same direction, we grow together, we laugh together, we cry together, we learn from each other, and we empower each other, and we continue the good work of uniting with our True Parents. Because they really are the hope of humankind.

60. When you look at the true family, many people go "Wow! True family is so different!" Thank God we are all different. We are all different. But when we can come together with our strength, that's when we create an incredible team. And because we have such a wonderful coach in our True Parents we are here to be victorious. We are here to win. We are going to play some really good games on the field, because we are here to win and we're going to win the gold medal at the Olympics. And if we can empower the young people to realize that this time is their time, this time is their time to exercise their free-dom, to be responsible young and mature adults so they can truly work on themselves to become internally and externally excellent. Then the world is truly your oyster.

61. So, our True Parents, they are always praying for all of you. They know that you guys are awesome, they know that you guys are beautiful, they know that you guys are divine, they know that you guys, we, are the eternal sons and daughters of God. So, as we think about the big picture that's really think about how we are going to get to that big picture – by realizing that we have to be our own agent of change, and to really work on ourselves, and really express and develop the God-given strength, or perhaps our differences, that truly makes us incredible when we come together. And if we can do that, then our church will not just be considered a successful new religion, we are going to be a way of life for the next millennium. And people will truly understand what it means to love life, what it means to really enjoy living in the age of the settlement when we have the chance and an opportunity to do something, that in a way, Jesus Christ 2000 years ago did not have a chance to do – which is to create an ideal family together.

62. So brothers and sisters have a great week! Please celebrate our differences! Please celebrate our common purpose! Please celebrate our desire to look towards the same direction together and unify under our True Parents and our Heavenly Parent!

63. God bless and have a great week

Notes:

Isaiah, chapter 40

1: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

2: Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for all her sins.

3: A voice cries:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

4: Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.

5: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

6: A voice says, "Cry!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

7: The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;
surely the people is grass.

8: The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand for ever.

9: Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
"Behold your God!"

10: Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.

11: He will feed his flock like a shepherd,
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.

12: Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?

13: Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD,
or as his counselor has instructed him?

14: Whom did he consult for his enlightenment,
and who taught him the path of justice,
and taught him knowledge,
and showed him the way of understanding?

15: Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
behold, he takes up the isles like fine dust.

16: Lebanon would not suffice for fuel,
nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

17: All the nations are as nothing before him,
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

18: To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?

19: The idol! a workman casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold,
and casts for it silver chains.

20: He who is impoverished chooses for an offering
wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skilful craftsman
to set up an image that will not move.

21: Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

22: It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

23: who brings princes to nought,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

24: Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

25: To whom then will you compare me,
that I should be like him? says the Holy One.

26: Lift up your eyes on high and see:
who created these?
He who brings out their host by number,
calling them all by name;
by the greatness of his might,
and because he is strong in power
not one is missing.

27: Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
"My way is hid from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God"?

28: Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.

29: He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.

30: Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;

31: but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint. 

Celebrating Our Differences

In Jin Moon
August 5, 2012

Wow! Such beautiful faces in front of me! How is everybody? So much has been happening in the last couple of weeks. We've had the Lovin' Life Camp. Dave Hunter, his team, and all the volunteers have done a fantastic job with the high school kids, and now with the middle schoolers. We've also had my younger brother touring the country in eight different cities, provoking all of us to think about what freedom and responsibility really mean. I am so proud of our American team for taking such great care of him -- everyone from Joshua Cotter on down to all the district pastors and all the brothers and sisters who came out in support of True Family. I want to thank all of you.

We have also been continuing our great fight on the issue of religious freedom in Japan. As you know, 4,300 of our brothers and sisters over the last three decades have been abducted and incarcerated and have been abused during their time in captivity. So a few years ago, my brothers and I decided to do something about it and help put an end to the atrocities that have been taking place there. American members and the American team here in the United States, together with our friends in ACLC and different Ambassadors for Peace, have all done a phenomenal job of accompanying me in going to Capitol Hill, visiting various congressmen, congresswomen, and senators, and imploring them to take action to help stop what is taking place in Japan.

A couple of days ago we had a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, with the opportunity to hear from such distinguished panelists as Dr. Aaron Rhodes, former director of the Helsinki Human Rights Commission; Ms. Tina Ramirez, director of the Beckett Foundation; and Ms. Kathryn Cameron Porter, a long-time veteran of Capitol Hill and the founder and president of the Leadership Council for Human Rights.

These people, together with us, are highlighting the atrocities taking place in Japan and they are helping us fight to put an end to them so that we as Unificationists all around the world can be proud of our faith, proud of our True Parents, and proud of our blessed life -- so that every Unificationist can be allowed the freedom to love life.

My Freedom Ends Where Your Freedom Starts

When we talked about what was going to be the slogan for Lovin' Life camp this year, we all thought that "Rebels With a Cause" would be a highly interesting and inspiring slogan because in sharing the breaking news we are attempting to break the mold of what's been done before. Here we are, living in the time of the advent of our True Parents -- the first man and woman who together have perfected themselves and now stand in position as a true example that all of humanity can follow. They are the ones coming with the great gift of the Blessing through which all of God's children can graft on to the true lineage and separate from the satanic lineage that has dominated humankind for thousands and thousands of years.

Having our True Parents here is an incredible blessing, and now is an incredible time for us to exercise our freedom, to be responsible eternal sons and daughters of God. When I hear the word freedom, I often like to say that my Asian ear hears the word freedom as though it's made up of two words: the words free and dom. So there is a certain kind of responsibility when we're being free. There is a responsibility not to do things that are not smart for us, dumb things.

When we are young, we tend to think that we can pretty much do whatever we want, that we will live forever, and that it doesn't matter what everyone else is thinking as long as we think that we are free and we are exercising our freedom.

But at the congressional briefing, Dr. Rhodes said something that's very important for us to all think about as young people when we're contemplating the word freedom. He said, "My freedom ends where your freedom starts," meaning that we are free insofar as it doesn't infringe on the freedom of others.

So the work that we're doing to liberate our Japanese brothers and sisters is to allow them freedom without having the deprogrammers infringing on their right to freely exercise their faith in the way that they would like as proud Unificationists.

When we think of ourselves as members of the worldwide community wanting to live under the banner of One Family under God, what are our True Parents asking all of us to do? Here we have the freedom to be an eternal son or daughter of God, but Father and Mother have emphasized over and over again that we cannot have freedom without an understanding of responsibility. We are free to live our lives in a good way and not in a dumb way, by exercising our responsibility, by owning up to all that we were meant to become.

Oscar Wilde

A Dreamer Who Sees the Dawn

As a mother of five, when I gaze into the audience and see these bright young faces, I see them as the promise of our future. They are our future. And whatever we can do to inspire them, to empower them, to nurture them to be a proud and confident son or daughter of God is our privilege as parents. We realize that in our desire to be and to create this one family under God, there's a lot of work to be done, and that's why we need the true example of our True Parents. When we look at their life of faith -- True Father for over 93 years and our True Mother for over 70 years -- there are a couple of things that we can learn from their good example.

One of the things that always struck me about Father is that he is a man who never stops dreaming. The wittiest and most amusing English writer that I like to call one of my favorites is Oscar Wilde, and he said something profound. He said that a dreamer is a visionary. A dreamer is somebody who thinks of something better than what we are faced with or what we are smack immersed in. To me, True Father is that dreamer because he offers all of humanity a vision of how we can create the ideal world of peace and true love.

It's not just his dreams but his actual work of substantiating that dream that has inspired me in my life. Oscar Wilde said a dreamer is one who can find his or her way by moonlight, and he is punished because he dares to see the dawn before the world.

I see our father as the visionary that humanity has been waiting for. He is the man with a purpose. He comes with a vision and he teaches us by example. And he, together with our True Mother, dares to dream of a world that is better than we found it, dares to dream of a world where true love reigns supreme, dares to dream of a world where all of God's children have equal divine worth and value, dares to dream of a world where we can contemplate -- and do the active work of building ideal families, which is not an easy thing to do.

We have seen that he is punished because he dares to see the dawn. He sees and knows what needs to be. He knows what needs to be accomplished and he is misunderstood because he can see the dawn before the rest of the world.

Messiah or Not?

When I was coming back from my brother's Freedom Society speech, I bumped into one Unificationist-born youth, who said to me, "I really love Lovin' Life." And I thought, "Oh, that's a good beginning." Usually when people come up to me, it's full of constructive criticism or complaints, but this young person just came up to me like this: "I really love Lovin' Life." I said, "Wonderful."

But this person continued, "But sometimes I'm just not sure if Father is the messiah." And I said, "You too, huh? Well, join the club." The fact that we ask questions every now and then is a healthy thing. It means that we're always reflecting; we always want to grow; we always want to explore and ask the very difficult questions that confound us or sometimes puzzle us; and we dare to be courageous enough to seek an answer.

I also said to this person, "We've all been there in our life of faith. We all have questions, 'Is Father really the messiah? How do we know he's the real deal, he's the real McCoy? How do we know he's not a fake? How do we know it's not a sham? How do we know it's genuine?'"

I said to this young man, "Two thousand years ago we had Jesus Christ, and a lot of people believed in him in the time that he ministered to the people, which was less than three years. Can you imagine? Jesus ministered to the people less than three years, and that has changed the world. But think about it. In his time there were people who believed, like the 12 disciples, and there were people who didn't believe. And there were people like Judas who believed in the beginning, but then became certain that Jesus could not be the messiah, because Judas was looking at Jesus through physical eyes, not spiritual eyes.

"So perhaps Judas started criticizing or misunderstanding Jesus Christ for breaking out in anger in the temple, or perhaps for associating with people who were not of the best caliber, or perhaps for doing things that were revolutionary. Judas, who was once a believer, was so certain and so convinced that Jesus was not the messiah that in the end he ended up selling Jesus for a chunk of change. And I'm sure that if I had a chance to interview Judas at that moment, he would have probably said to me, 'Yes, I initially thought Jesus was the messiah, but because of A, B, C, in my mind he is not the Messiah, he's a danger to our society, and therefore I shall sell him to the authorities.'"

Judas must have thought he was being amazingly smart. Perhaps he thought, "I have evidence A, B, C as to why he cannot be the messiah." He was so certain that Jesus was not the messiah. But what does human history reveal to us? Regardless of whether Judas was certain that Jesus was not the messiah, the fact remains that Jesus Christ was the messiah. He was the Son of God who came to deliver the breaking news 2,000 years ago, but was cut short because people simply could not unite with or believe in this person whom we call the Son of God.

So I said to this young person, "Be careful in being so certain that Father is not the messiah. Perhaps God doesn't give us the messiah that we want. It's not we who pick the messiah. It is God. And in God's eyes, God will work through the messiah that he wants to work through. And as long as our True Parents are the messianic figures that God wants to work through, he will and she will continue to do so."

So we may have our questions, our doubts, or perhaps our venting that, "I am so smart, I am so well versed that I know True Parents are not the messiah." But just because you or I think so doesn't mean that they're not the messiah. We have to realize that regardless of how awesome we think we are, we are always on the road of growth and learning. That's what makes human life beautiful. It's not static. It's not a petrified form of existence. We are constantly growing.

We Determine Our Present and Future World

During our growth, it's important for us not to be so quick to judge or become arrogant, thinking that because of my reasons, True Parents are not the messiah. Because even if you or I think that they're not, guess what? They are and they continue to be because God ordained and blessed them and anointed them as such.

History is long; our life is long; and humankind has many different cycles that we need to go through. But the amazing thing about our True Parents, our Father and our True Mother, is that they are marvelously consistent. When my father, our Father, met Jesus Christ on the hills of North Korea and Jesus asked him to please carry on my mission, our Father was 16 years old. But once our Father made up his mind at 16 years of age, younger than some of you guys, he was absolutely committed. Once he said yes, Father never wavered.

And our True Mother, once she decided, she's never wavered -- and that's why they are our True Parents. That's why we all aspire to be like them, and that's why they continue to be our guiding light in these difficult times.

They've come with this breaking news, and we want to share with the world what the breaking news is, what is it? Yes, it's the news that the messiah is here. It's the news that they bring the gift of the Blessing. But what is our end goal in life, as human beings? What do we want to accomplish in our lifetime?

If you narrow it down to what is really important, it's "to love and to be loved." And it's to create an ideal family through which we can experience and build a four-position foundation, have beautiful kids like all of you, and work together. This means that we grow together, we cry, we laugh, we expand together as a family to become the awesome family that will be an unshakable cornerstone or building block for an astounding society, nation, and world.

When I hear people talk about what the ideal world is going to be, they are often talking in terms of systems. "We need to create this kind of a system because that is the perfect system to have an ideal or one family under God." But the audacious thing about True Parents is that it's not the system that's going to create something ideal. It boils down to you and me. It's the individual. It's the kind of a person that we decide to be today that is going to determine what our world is going to be like tomorrow.

It's mind over body; victory over ourselves; work on ourselves in preparation to meet that beautiful spouse, knowing that the other is fully committed and resonant with our understanding of what the Blessing is. I cannot stress this emphatically enough because many times people don't come to the Blessing with the same sense of what they want. Many times people don't know what they want.

But if we come to the Blessing with the same commitment, the same understanding of what we want to accomplish together in life, then we can start the work of creating that building block that will become an integral and important part of the society, the nation, and the world.

The audacious thing about our True Parents is, "Yes, we want to change the world, but how do we change the world? We change the world by changing ourselves." And as numerous scholars, psychotherapists, counselors, sociologists, and psychologists have discovered, our True Parents are right. As Robert Pattinson says, "It's got to be the family." The family needs to be fixed in order for the world to be fixed, if you will. A lot of the ills of society and a lot of the ills of the world stem from the family.

So when Father and Mother say that family is where the "true rubbing" takes place, where we grow as people, where we grow as mature citizens of this world, they're not saying something that's meaningless. They're saying something that is extremely profound.

A Family with a Common Goal

When I think about the family, I think of it as being kind of like a team. At Lovin' Life Camp, you had different teams representing different tribes and different nations, and you had to learn how to work together. The most important thing about a team is its sense of a common purpose. We all have to have common purpose. When you look at a football team or a soccer team or a dance team, or even a Lovin' Life tribe team, you realize that there are a couple of things that come into play that make it a successful team -- or a successful family. And this is what our True Parents have been trying to teach us through their own example.

Our True Parents stress the importance of having a common goal. We all have to agree on what we want to accomplish in our world and in our lives: We want to create this enduring four-position foundation by building our own ideal family. And guess what? Building an ideal family is not easy. It needs cooperation, and it needs commitment.

When I think about having a common purpose or a mission statement, I think of an example of cross-training. Right now the summer Olympics are going on and we see all these athletes who have trained their whole lives to compete for the Gold Medal at the Olympics. We realize that they've given up their free time; they've given up all the other things that they might want to do to pursue this goal.

And they, together with the other team members, are there representing their country and the families they come from. When we watch a team, we see that a couple of things come into play. The team members have a common purpose. They are there to win the gold, to represent their family, and to represent their country, so they are going to cooperate, they are going to commit to each other that they are going to put out the best fight that they possibly can. But in preparation for that common goal, they've gone through many hours of cross-training.

Cross-training is slightly different from running or doing aerobics or lifting weights or doing one type of exercise. In cross-training, you are exercising different parts of your body at the same time. So in order to compete or be at their highest fitness level, all these athletes go through cross-training. It's a bit like bearing a cross in order to train to be a gold medalist. You're not just exercising one or two muscles; you're working on exercising all your different muscles to work together so you can be that superior athlete.

A family is like that. In order for a family to be an outstanding team, every muscle or every member of the family needs to be exercised. Every member of the family needs to cooperate together with an understanding that we're committed to each other to win the gold, or to win -- or to accomplish whatever goal we set out to achieve. Then we realize that if we want to be an excellent team on the field, or if we want to be an awesome family, we have to have the same direction, just as the two legs working in conjunction with the body point us in the direction that we're going. If we want to go straight, both our legs need to go straight. If we want to go straight, but our left leg wants to go this way and only our right leg wants to go that way, guess what? We're not going to get very far.

Each Family Is and Should Be Unique

We have to approach our common goal with the same direction. We have to be pointed in the same direction. And then this begs the question, "What does same direction mean? Does that mean that we're all just legs? Does that mean that we're all the same?" No. We're not talking about duplication here. The thing about the family and the thing about the team that makes it beautiful and supremely powerful is that we are all different. We are all different. We're not duplicates of each other. A sibling is not a duplicate of another sibling, or a child is not a duplicate of a parent. We're not like the U.S. Treasury, which prints money. Human beings are not printable the way money is. Each human being is an eternal, divine, and unique handiwork of God.

So when we are in an effort to build a wonderful family, God is not asking us to be the duplicate of our parents, or the duplicate of our sibling. God is not asking that everybody be the same. That would be boring and quite tragic. The beauty of the family is that everybody is different, everybody is unique. The beauty of a loving husband and wife is that husband and wife are different. It's male and female, two different people, but wanting to walk in the same direction toward a common purpose, not being duplicates of each other.

In a community like ours, we have to understand this unique handiwork of God in an individual setting, in a family setting, and in a community setting as well. We have to realize that each family is unique. Each family is a special handiwork of God. Each family should not be a duplicate of another. Our families should not be like printable money with all ideal families looking the same, acting the same, behaving the same, and having the same strength. If that's what an ideal world is, I don't want to be a part of that ideal world. It's boring. It's nothing special.

Each family has its own dealings within the family that help make it become an ideal family, as members of the family each being different -- not duplicates of each other -- continue to rub up against each other to make everyone better.

Similarly in a community like ours, your family is going to be different from my family. Your problems are going to be different from my problems. The big question is not whether or not we are the same, duplicates of each other, but whether or not we are going in the same direction with a common purpose. That's what creates a supremely powerful team and a supremely powerful family.

Same Direction but Different Strength

Another thing that a successful or awesome team or family has is what I call same direction but different strength. What I mean by different strength is that in order to be truly powerful in our lives we have to come together with an amalgamation of all our different strengths. Every human being has strengths and weaknesses. We're not all perfect. We're each working on ourselves and we all have strengths and weaknesses.

The beauty of Lovin' Life, and the beauty of loving, nurturing, and empowering each other is to understand that we all have shortcomings, but at the same time we all have amazing things that we can contribute to the betterment of the whole. The fact that we are not all Korean is a strength. Can you imagine if our community were all Korean because our True Parents are Korean? We would not be strong. We would not have strength in diversity.

What creates our community to be such a vibrant and strong community is that we have international presence here. Every culture, every race, every different kind of background is represented. We need to continue to honor and celebrate our differences, realizing that God gave us our differences so that we all might have different strengths. For this, let us thank God. If we only had the same strength, we could not be so powerful or strong as a movement.

The strengths of different people mean that they are best suited for different roles in our community: Heather Thalheimer, for example, is better equipped to deal with the Department of Education; or for instance Philip Schanker is better equipped to deal with the Blessed Family Department; Debby Gullery is better equipped to be a wonderful counselor; and Tom Walsh is better equipped to work for the Universal Peace Federation.

Everybody in our community has his or her own outstanding strength, so when we can bring our strengths together and work together as a team that makes our team that much stronger, much greater. As you know, our True Parents have started the Wongu Sports Festival and every year we're sending athletes over. So as the senior pastor I have to think every year about what athletes I'm going to send over. But can you imagine if we're sending over a soccer team and in that team everybody is a goalie? That team is not going to do too well. Or everybody plays offense or defense? What if everybody only pays defense? Are we going to be a proactive or successful soccer team?

One reason a soccer team is powerful is that it has a good goalie. You have somebody whose strength is manning the goal. But you also have offensive players who are great at getting out there and making the plays happen. And you also have defensive players who are great at protecting your goalie. These are different strengths. They're not the same. But when they come together, that's when the magic happens.

All of you from the Lovin' Life camp who are seated here are going to realize, "I am better at something than my brothers and sisters. My sister might be better at something than me, but instead of thinking 'I'm not good enough,' or 'That person gets all the blessing,' or 'How come I'm not good at that,' the important thing about life is that God made all of us just as special as that person seated next to me. We all are divine beings with an audacious talent, a brilliant promise, and a marvelous blueprint."

It is our job as parents to help you find your passions and your talents, and it is our job as a community to help empower you so that you know you can be the best that you can be. But you seated here in the front should celebrate the fact that you are different from each other, and realize that perhaps what you're not good at is something that maybe the other might be good at, and by coming together and working together we can create an awesome team or an awesome family.

When I take time out to look at my kids, I realize that all five of them are wonderfully different. It's like five nations coming together, or five different soccer teams coming together. They're all very different. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses. But I also realize, that just like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle, although separately they are so different, when they can work together, they create a beautiful picture.

I think that's what our Heavenly Parent wants to see: celebrating our differences, our diversity, knowing that our strength comes from uniting with our True Parents, and bringing all our differences united under our True Parents and our Heavenly Parent. We are to desire to walk the same path, not being duplicates or carbon copies of each other, but finding what our calling is in life and being courageous enough to live it -- not just to talk about it but to live it, and own up to our destinies, which are there for us to grasp.

Unity in the Form of Big Macs and Fries

And that reminds me of something that I often think about. God bless my older brother, Hyo Jin oppa, who founded the Manhattan Center here that you're seated in. My older brother was almost a larger-than-life kind of a character. He was very fun-loving, very loud, very masculine, and he was very testosterone-driven. So when my father put him as the head of CARP, my older brother envisioned what might be the best way to educate the young Unificationists. He's so masculine, just so powerful -- and he was going through his growth stage too, trying to figure out what he wants to do, what his identity is, what does it mean to be a true son of God, what kind of a leader does he want to be, how does he want to educate the young Unificationists.

Every leader has his or her own idea as to what might be the best way to educate Unificationist-born youth, and my older brother was no exception. Because he was so masculine, it was almost like he was the boss. When the boss walks into the room, not just your head but all of your body needs to know the boss is in town. So regardless of what you are doing, if the boss enters, you get up, you bow, and you stand like this.

When I was going back and forth from my studies at Columbia University, I don't know how many times I would drive in to East Garden, and around the pool there would be a bunch of blessed children all standing like this. My brother would be talking up a storm and they'd all be standing like this.

Then I remember many times when my brother would say, "We're all going out to eat something. Why don't you come?" My older brother's favorite food was Chinese food, and he's one of those types of people who definitely has favorites. We can go to all the different restaurants but, regardless, he's going to order the same thing all the time. We would know that we're going to have hot and sour soup, because that's his favorite soup. We're going to have fried rice, usually chicken fried rice, and we're going to have orange beef. So whenever he invited us to restaurants, it was always Chinese because that was his favorite, and it was always going to be hot and sour soup, chicken fried rice, and orange beef.

But one day my brother came up to me and said, "In Jin, In Jin, we're all going to go out to eat." And I said, "Chinese? I just had Chinese food. Maybe I'll stay." He says, "No, we're going to McDonald's." I thought, "Okay, that's different. French fries and big Macs every now and then, that's a wonderful change." I said, "Okay, I'll come." About 20 young second-generation Unificationists came along, so we were like a convoy, a couple of cars, and we all followed the boss to McDonald's.

The boss parked, and we all parked around him. We all got out, and the boss came out of the car and we all followed like this. We basically took over this poor McDonald's. At that time, when we had workshops for second-generation Unificationists, it was mostly Asian kids because the American Unificationist-born youth were still quite young, so it looked like an Asian invasion taking over McDonald's. Everybody was watching: "What is going on? Who are these people?"

My brother said, "Okay, who wants to eat?" So everybody raised their hands. He had one second-generation Unificationist who was acting as a right-hand person, and he says, "Okay, go order 20 quarter-pounders with cheese. Large French fries, large Coke." That was it. There were 20 people, mind you, but the understanding of the second-generation Unificationists back then was, "Unite. You don't say anything. You eat what's given." Whether you like quarter pounders or not, that's what you're going to get. Whether you like large French fries or not, that's what you're going to get. Maybe you can't drink Coke, but that's what you're going to get.

I said, "I don't really want to drink Coke." I said, "Is it all right if I have filet of fish, because I had a big Chinese lunch?" And I could never forget that day because these second-generation Unificationists who are seated like this waiting for their quarter-pounder and French fries to come all went – "What?!" They looked at me and then they looked at my brother and then looked at me. And they were looking at me like, "Holy cow! Your head is going to be decapitated." And guess what? The boss decapitated my head. The boss gave me a lecture on unity and was going on and on and on.

I almost had an out-of-the-body experience because I was thinking, "Okay, I'm being decapitated here, seated at McDonald's because I wanted filet of fish, not a quarter-pounder with cheese." And I was asking God, "Is this what unity is all about? Do we really all have to be duplicates of each other? Do we all have to be the same – because if that's the case, I'm not sure if I want to belong to this movement." This was my honest feeling. But I was a younger sister so I just respectfully listened. But I said, "Well, okay, I don't really have to eat." By the time it was finished, I was not feeling well. But that example has stayed with me throughout the years.

Beyoncé Knowels

Unity Means Coming Together in Heart

In our effort to be a unified family and a unified community, there's a kind of pressure always to be the same, always to dress the same. I think you guys look great in red t-shirts, by the way. It's wonderful to have a feeling of solidarity, but imagine if it wasn't just the red t-shirt. Imagine if you looked the same, if you talked the same, if you liked the same things. Maybe some of you like Nine Inch Nails, but maybe some of you like Beyoncé, maybe some of you like Mariah Carey. Maybe some of you like Jack White. People like different things. We often like different things because it's a unique expression of who we are.

Unity doesn't mean that we are all becoming paper cutouts of each other, like cardboard sheets of each other. Unity means coming together in heart. Father and Mother come to teach and share the breaking news. They are urging all of us to unite with our Heavenly Father and our True Parents, and to work together, but they're not asking all of us to be carbon cutouts of our True Parents. Yes, they are a symbol, they are two people that we should adopt as our guides, but we need to celebrate our own uniqueness.

You can contribute something to the movement that perhaps Father and Mother didn't have time to do -- because you are different, because you are unique, because you are that astonishing handiwork of our Heavenly Father. This is no different from my growing up in this church in which everything was in unison. Everything was unison prayer, everything was unison singing from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, and I've often wondered, am I allowed to sing something different? Do I always have to sing the 30 holy songs that I know by heart? Can I praise God singing something different? Can a new song become a holy song?

When we listen to music, we realize that either constancy or variety can make music beautiful. A piano, for instance, has a certain number of keys, but when you play the same note all the time, it can have a certain kind of rhythmic beauty. Perhaps it's meditative, perhaps people like the constancy of hearing a certain note. But if you hear it long enough, it's going to feel like Chinese water torture working on you, like a droplet of water slowly killing you.

Music is more richly beautiful when it's not only one note that's being played. There is tremendous strength in unison prayer. It's wonderful. You can feel the energy and inspiration of everybody saying and singing the same thing. It's wonderful. But sometimes strength does not equate to beautiful. Sometimes we need to hear a bit of harmony.

And how is harmony created? Harmony is not created by playing the same notes. Harmony is created by playing different notes together at the same time. In music it's harmony that gives depth and expansiveness -- the feeling of all-encompassing, like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's so majestic and all-encompassing because it's expressing the full power of harmonic plays, of different people singing different parts and coming together as that masterful choir. It's everybody singing different notes at the same time that produces exquisite harmony.

Unison is strength, but we cannot run our movement just on strength. We need harmony. We need the beauty of being able to be expansive, being able to celebrate our differences and yet work together. We have to be like a beautiful choir, each of us singing different parts, different notes, but our singing together becomes this supreme human experience or divine experience through which we can share the breaking news with the rest of the world.

When I think about having a common purpose of every one of us having the opportunity to build ideal families of our own, I realize that we need to assure that in our effort to accomplish the goal we don't succumb to our own arrogance in thinking that we know best. We have to leave ourselves open for God to work through. We have to leave ourselves open for others to work through. We as parents have to leave ourselves open for our children to work through. We can grow and learn through our children. And we as children must leave ourselves open and wide for our parents to work through.

A Parent and Child Who Face the Same Direction

That reminds me of a story I heard from one young man who had had a painfully difficult time with his father. They both wanted to accomplish the same thing, they wanted to be the best Unificationists, but they had different ideas about going about it. The father was very adamant, "You listen to me!" And the son was very adamant. Perhaps the son was a rebel with a cause, wanting to do something different, wanting maybe to express himself as a Unificationist in a different way. So they butted heads for a long time.

One afternoon before the son was to go abroad for his missionary work, the father and son came together and they had a melting of hearts and a sharing of heart. The father may have said to the son words that he'd never said before, "I'm really proud of you. I'm proud that you're making this big step. You're going into ministry; you're going to serve the world; you're going to work on yourself; and I'm immensely proud you've turned out so fine."

And it seems that hearing the father utter these words melted the son's heart and the son said, "You know, Dad, for a long time I've wanted to rebel against everything that was you. You symbolized everything I wanted to rebel against. But I realized at the end of the day that you and I -- even though we're different people, not duplicates of each other -- want the same things in life. We are faced toward the same direction. Thank God we're different but we are pointed and looking toward the same direction."

And the son said something that liberated the father's heart. The son said to the father, "You know, Dad, I have judged you many times and just as often I have not forgiven you for the difficulties that I felt I've had to face in my life with you. But I have realized as I have grown older that you were a better father to me than your father was to you, and for that I'm immensely grateful."

The child realized that despite his father's the shortcomings, his father had lived his whole life trying to better the world that his son or his other children came into. The father may not have been perfect -- and you know what? Your parents are not going to be perfect in your eyes. But you need to understand that you are here because your parents had the courage to dream of a world that was better than their own.

As Oscar Wilde says, it is the dreamer who dares to see the dawn before the world wakes up to it. Our parents often are the ones who dare to see the dawn. They see what you their child can be even before you realize what you are capable of, and therefore, they are persecuted and judged.

Oscar Wilde also said something else. He said you can be sure of one thing. We start out loving our parents, then we end up judging the bleep out of them, and we never forgive them for their supposed atrocities. But we realize as we grow older that they have tried their best to be good parents to us. Likewise for us today, regardless of what takes place in the family, we all have to realize that perhaps our parents are doing a better job than their parents may have done.

Our parents may not be perfect, but at least we're facing the same direction. We're looking toward accomplishing the common purpose. We are different but we are facing the same way. Therefore, it is of utmost importance as we go forward in our movement and as we look toward the next millennium that we learn to be thankful for this generation that came before us because without them none of us would be here. Of all the wonderful friends that you got to meet at camp, none of them would be here without our True Parents, and our True Parents would not be here without God.

So we have to have a profound feeling of gratitude for the sacrifices that have been made, but at the same time we have to realize that now this is our time. This is our time to be that rebel with a cause, to dare to be different, to be courageous, and to love. The world teaches us that money, power and knowledge are the most important things, but we need to say to the world that God and True Parents teach us that the most important thing is true love. The most important thing is to know how to love and be loved in the most beautiful and harmonious way. That's what we're all about.

Thank God We're All Different

So we have to liberate our parents, but the parents at the same time must also be cognizant of the fact that perhaps we can learn some of our greatest lessons from our kids, and thereby grow together. And that leads me to Isaiah 40:31, which says, "Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength."

How do we renew our strength? We renew our strength in realizing that as an international community we need to celebrate the differences and diversity within our community, and when we combine our differences under the unity of our True Parents we become an immensely powerful force of true love. If we can renew our strength that is produced by the different people coming together in unity in the spirit of true love, then, as the Bible continues to say, we "shall mount up with wings as eagles."

Eagles learn how to fly and then soar through trial and error -- watching their parents fly, hopping around in the big nest while flapping their wings, hopping and flapping their wings to reach the next nearest perch, and gradually extending their range. Their wings are earned in that a lot of effort needs to go into it, and they need to learn from their parents. For ourselves, we fly together -- we mount up with wings as eagles -- when we are pointed in the same direction. We "shall run and not grow weary;" we "shall walk and not be faint" -- meaning we will soar. We will do all that we accomplish, not being tired, because we have the cooperation and the commitment of each other -- different members of our family, different members of the team -- working together to accomplish a common purpose.

In that way, we walk facing the same direction. We grow together; we laugh together; we cry together; we learn from each other; we empower each other; and we continue the good work of uniting with our True Parents because they surely are the hope of humankind.

When you look at the True Family, many people say, "Wow, True Family members are so different from each other." I say, "Thank God we're all different." Yes, we're all different, but when we can come together with our strength, that's when we create an outstanding team. And because we have such a wonderful coach in our True Parents, we are here to be victorious, we are here to win. We're going to play some really good games on the field. We're going to win the Gold Medal at the Olympics.

If we can empower the young people to realize that this time is their time, this time is their time to exercise their freedom to be responsible, young, and mature adults so that they can work on themselves to become internally and externally excellent, then the world is truly their and our oyster.

Our True Parents are always praying for all of you. They know that you guys are awesome; that you are beautiful; that you are divine. They know that we are the eternal sons and daughters of God. So as we think about the big picture, let's think about how we are going to move toward that big picture by realizing that we have to be our own agent of change, working on ourselves, and expressing and developing the God-given strength, or perhaps our differences, that truly makes us awesome when we come together.

If we can do that, then our church will not just be considered a successful new religion. We are going to establish a way of life for the next millennium, and people will understand what it means to love life, to enjoy living in the age of the settlement, when we have the chance and opportunity to do something that Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago did not have a chance to do, which is to create an ideal family together.

So brothers and sisters, have a great week. Please celebrate our differences. Please celebrate our common purpose. Please celebrate our desire to look toward the same direction, together and unified under our True Parents and our Heavenly Parent. God bless, and have a great week.

Notes:

Isaiah, chapter 40

1: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

2: Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for all her sins.

3: A voice cries:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

4: Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.

5: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

6: A voice says, "Cry!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

7: The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;
surely the people is grass.

8: The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand for ever.

9: Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
"Behold your God!"

10: Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.

11: He will feed his flock like a shepherd,
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.

12: Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?

13: Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD,
or as his counselor has instructed him?

14: Whom did he consult for his enlightenment,
and who taught him the path of justice,
and taught him knowledge,
and showed him the way of understanding?

15: Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
behold, he takes up the isles like fine dust.

16: Lebanon would not suffice for fuel,
nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

17: All the nations are as nothing before him,
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

18: To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?

19: The idol! a workman casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold,
and casts for it silver chains.

20: He who is impoverished chooses for an offering
wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skilful craftsman
to set up an image that will not move.

21: Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

22: It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

23: who brings princes to nought,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

24: Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

25: To whom then will you compare me,
that I should be like him? says the Holy One.

26: Lift up your eyes on high and see:
who created these?
He who brings out their host by number,
calling them all by name;
by the greatness of his might,
and because he is strong in power
not one is missing.

27: Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
"My way is hid from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God"?

28: Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.

29: He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.

30: Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;

31: but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.  

In Jin Moon Briefs Capitol Hill on Japanese Kidnappings

In Jin Moon Briefs Capitol Hill on Japanese Kidnappings

Lovin' Life Sunday Sermon Notes for July 22, 2012

In Jin Moon

1. (Loud applause) You certainly know how to blow away your Senior Pastor this morning! Thank you. It's really good to be back.

2. We just came back from Korea a couple of days ago and I had the great privilege of spending Friday afternoon with the Lovin' Life Camp. I really want to thank them for allowing me to feel like an 18-year-old for about an hour. They were so gracious and so cute. It's always kind of an interesting experience for me to see the young kids, because even though I'm in a body that belongs to a 40 some year old woman, I still really feel young at heart. I still feel as if I am 15 or 16. I realize that they are looking at me as the senior, Senior Pastor. Although I feel quite junior in my spirit. But you know, it's such a wonderful thing to see these beautiful children, all different colors, different shapes – so much promise of things to come.

3. When I look at them I really see the future of our movement. But not just our movement, the future of the world. And I feel if we keep on this course of doing really good work, of building great families, building great communities – then truly the next millennium is really going to be, and it's not just lip service, it's really going to be a world of peace, love, and harmony.

James Holmes (left) and his lawyer

4. I got to spend a little time with lovely children on Friday. But we also know what has happened in Denver. This young, 24 year old James Holmes decided to take it upon himself to play the Joker on the opening night of the new Batman movie – and decided to take away the lives of 12 people. And he wounded 58 people.

5. When I hear things like this on the news I cannot help but wonder, I wonder what kind of a role model James Holmes had in his life. If only he could have had a wonderful role model like the ones we have in True Parents. I wonder how different his life would have been. Because many psychologists and sociologists have studied human behavior over the years and have studied human character and the way character develops, and they have pretty much concluded that the most important type of learning is observational learning. It's not what we're told, it's not what is said to us, but it's what we perceive or what we've observed in the course of our lives that really models for us the kind of people we want to be. I think that is the reason why our Heavenly Parents, up in heaven, really wanted to send us a wonderful role model in the form of our True Parents.

6. We've had wonderful men and women throughout the history, providing good role models for many of us, but very few times in history have we had a couple, a beautiful man and a woman, a beautiful partner that can really show us what a loving couple, or a loving parent is all about – that kind of gives us a glimpse into what our Heavenly Parent is like, up in heaven. What is it about True Parents that makes them so loving, so encouraging, so empowering, so inspiring? What is it about their relationship?

7. As we observe them, as the children of God, really yearning to inherit this true love of God and really yearning to be like God, yearning to be like God through the example of our True Parents, we realize that we've been afforded an incredible gift in our lifetime, the gift of an incredible role model that we can look at, that we can aspire to, that we can follow, that we can be guided by, and that we can be inspired by.

8. I realize, every time something like this takes place, like the Columbine school shootings or different shootings on different college campuses – of really misguided youth, wanting to let the world know they exist. In this sea of human beings how do you stand out as somebody to be remembered? I think for a lot of these young people, this young man in particular, he was in the process of leaving his PhD program in neuroscience at the Colorado University. And so something must have happened in his course of study that made him realize that perhaps his dream of getting a PhD, perhaps his dream of becoming that incredible academic or scholar and getting a fine job at a university, was coming to a close. So I'm sure he was fighting with himself trying to kind of see, "how can I leave my mark? I can leave my legacy? How can I be remembered?"

9. And sometimes when we're going through the zest of life or sometimes through desperate measures, we don't always opt toward the most positive way to go out with a bang. Sometimes young people want to go out with a bang by destroying other people. If you cannot have it yourself then might as well make it so that the other person cannot have it as well. So when we are miserable, we are going to make sure we inflict misery on others.

10. This is the reasoning why our True Parents teaching of really living for the sake of others is an incredible philosophy that we need to keep in mind whenever something like this takes place. Because, we realize, what they are teaching us to do is, regardless of how difficult or miserable or what a suffering state we happen to find ourselves in at that moment, and we may be tempted just like James Holmes to say, "you know what, I'm miserable, I'm not going to be successful in life, I'm not going to have the love of my life, I'm not going to have and become that big powerful person at this moment – so, might as well go out with a bang and take everybody with me."

11. Instead of thinking like that, our True Parents are encouraging us to think about the other. In a way telling us, regardless of how difficult our situation is, how do we learn how to be happy for others – even though we may be in a difficult situation, we may be going through this period of misery – how can we learn how to be happy for others? How can we learn how to wish well on others? How can we learn how to love others, despite our own suffering? This is what the philosophy of living for the sake of others teaches us how to do.

12. And through the guidance of our True Parents through the example of our True Parents we realize that our life, here on earth, is really an opportunity to leave something beautiful behind. Meaning, that our end goal is not just to settle down with a fine wife or a fine husband, even though that would be a lovely thing to do, but really the goal in life is to become that parent, to experience God's parental heart, to finally understand what God must have been feeling when he created Adam and Eve, to finally experience what God must have been feeling when he first gazed into his beautiful son and daughter's face. What God must have been feeling as a parent when he looked upon his children and wanted the world for his children, this is what we are meant to experience in our lifetime.

13. And we are given a certain allotted time in life. When we are young we think life lasts forever, but when you really think about it, life is quite brief. It's not that long. One of the foremost ministers, Billy Graham, used to say that one of the first things that hit him whenever he found himself at a pulpit looking into the audience of men and women who had gathered to come and hear him speak – one of the things that hit him all the time is that life is brief. The brevity of life – he could be standing at the pulpit one morning, one moment, and how he could be gone the next.

14. In a way, the desire to really make this time count, to make our life count, to be that kind of a family that can really raise beautiful children, so that the children that we leave behind are so much more beautiful, so much more well positioned to do well in life, then the children that we found ourselves to be when we first came into this world.

15. As we go forward in our movement, and as we go forward in thinking about – how do we really practice this life of living for the sake of others? -- One of the things that the Bible teaches us comes to mind. The Bible says in Luke 21:28, "lift your head up high, because the redemption draws near." "Lift your head up high because the redemption draws near." What this passage is saying to all of us, God's children, is that God is basically saying, "Look to God, children." Whenever we are in a sea of difficulties, sea of problems, in a sea of our circumstantial situations – you know, instead of looking at ourselves or looking down at our problems, lift your head up high and look to God.

16. What God is asking us to do is, as the children of our Heavenly Parent, number one, God is asking us to look at ourselves from God's perspective, to look at our situation from God's perspective. In a way, had James Holmes taken the time out, not to just look at his situation from his own perspective, but perhaps from a bird's eye perspective, but even better yet from God's perspective – he could not do what he really did, what he carried forth.

17. He was wrapped up in his own situational pain. He wanted to be remembered in this endless sea of mindless faces. He felt lost. He felt unappreciated. He felt unheard. He wanted to be seen. And he thought that, perhaps, (the way) he could finally be heard and seen is to go out in a bang the way he did, to take other lives with him, to play God, to play Joker if you will.

The Joker

18. I think in his mind, and his intellectual understanding of his own life, he was thinking that somehow he was the character of Joker in the Batman series. Anyone who's read Shakespeare over the years has known, and is well aware, that sometimes the character of the fool in different plays or different settings, is really the only one who knows the truth, is really the only one that understands the truth. But by acting silly, but by acting crazy, but by acting insane – to provoke a man and a woman to think about the important matters at hand. Or the fool's job is to provoke people's way of thinking in the King's court. And so some of the things that perhaps the king is not aware of, the fool usually knows. He parades the truth in such a way, in a playful or zany or crazy way, then he's not going to get his head chopped off by the King, but it's going to make the people think.

19. I think James Holmes, in his own delusional mind, was thinking, I want to play the Joker. I want to play the fool. I want to, in a way, teach the truth of life – perhaps that life is tough, perhaps that life is miserable. And, hopefully provoke a response in the people to think about their lives, to think about what life is all about. Perhaps he thought he was a kind of a messianic figure of some sort.

20. If he, being engulfed in his own perspective, of himself, vis-à-vis the world, really were in a situation, or in an opportune setting where he could take himself out of himself and see himself from God's perspective, then from God's perspective he would have known that he is God's eternal son, that God has given him the gift of divinity, that God wants for his son an empowered and an inspired life, and that God wants his son to do his best, finding his passions, utilizing his talents, giving back to his community so that he'll be remembered for something that he created in his lifetime, and hopefully leaving a beautiful family behind. And, had he thought about his moment of difficulty from God's perspective, then, in a way, the end result would have been very different than the ones we heard about on CNN.

21. The Bible Luke 21:28 is reminding us of just that. Regardless of what circumstances or difficulties, that we all find ourselves in from time to time, we need to learn how to look to God. We need to look to God and realize that God's perspective might be slightly different from our own. We might be looking at the glass, thinking that it's half empty, but God might be looking at the glass seeing that it is half full.

22. When we look at the different boulevards and avenues of New York City, because we are an art student and we want to make a painting on perspective, we realize that we, from our vision, have a certain perspective on how we are going to draw those buildings. But if we take ourselves, to look from a different perspective, for instance, if we were in a plane or riding in a helicopter and we were looking at the city from top down, we realize that our perspective on the same location is going to look very very different. Likewise, when we can learn to look from God's perspective, and not be defined by our own perspective all the time – we realize that God has a purpose for all of us. There is a reason why we are here. And, no matter how difficult life can be, we have a reason why we need to treat our life with gratitude, with respect, and with care, and create something beautiful and leave something beautiful behind.

23. When I spent time at UTS with the Lovin' Life Campus, I realize, "Gee these kids are so different." Because they are not only the handiwork of God, but they understand, or they are coming to understand that they are eternal sons and daughters of God, that they have a purpose for why they are here. They have a reason to exist. And they understand the meaning behind all the things that have taken place, in terms of their parents, having gone through all those sacrificial years in the wilderness.

24. So, even though the Lovin' Life Campus, at different moments in our lives (we) might have looked at our parents as "Wow, what a bunch of losers." Why are you laughing? You are laughing because you thought it. And I am laughing because I thought it too. I thought, "What losers my parents are. All they care about is the providence, all they care about is the mission. What about money power and knowledge? What about all these things? Why does my Father where the same 70s polyester shirt day in and day out, decade after decade. In terms of the fashion he is a fashion victim. In terms of fashion is a fashion loser." But looking from God's perspective, I realized, "Oh my goodness! I thought he was a fashion victim, caught in the 70s polyester shirt, but I realize he is the Lord of the Second Advent that we've been waiting for!"

25. "Oh my goodness. I thought my parents were losers because they can't make ends meet. How many times have we stood in line for food stamps? How many times have we suffered because we couldn't pay for the gas in the car? How many times did I wish I could have been born into a different family?" But looking at it from God's perspective we realize, "Oh my goodness! My loser parents are actually incredible heroes of history! They have done what the 12 disciples of Jesus could not do. The 12 disciples of Jesus did not stand by the son of God when he was crucified on the cross. But our parents – maybe our parents are not that beautiful or not that handsome. They don't have bodies like Mr. Universe or Ms. Universe. Maybe they look kind of plane. Maybe they look old and tired. But oh my God, looking from God's perspective! They are like Batman and like Superman and like Apa Man. And they are here fighting the Vikings. They did what the disciples of Jesus could not do. They stood by our True Parents during the time of the wilderness, 40, 50 years. They stuck to our True Parents like the way a leech sticks to your leg. They just wouldn't let go and they just never gave up, and regardless of what our True Parents were going through, because they stuck to True Parents all those years and they never left True Parents, our True Parents are still with us today!" And we realize, what we thought were losers, were actually incredible men and women, heroes of history.

26. And so, when we look at, from God's perspective, we realize what an incredible time we are living in. Absolutely incredible! And so, when we are young looking towards the future and thinking about our careers, sometimes we find ourselves in different settings where we feel stuck. We feel bogged down. But when the Bible in Luke 21:28 asks us to lift up our heads because redemption draws near, what the Bible is asking us to do is to look to God. And in looking to God, asking us not to get bogged down, not to get stuck. In a way, it's up to us not to get stuck. We are only stuck if we allow ourselves to be stuck. We are only bogged down if we allow ourselves to be bogged down.

27. There is this fantastic book that Dr. Seuss wrote. This is one of my favorite readings. When my life gets really complicated and really convoluted, of course I love reading different novels and theological works and philosophical works, but there is something really simple, simply elegant about Dr. Seuss' series. There is this tiny little book that he wrote called, "Oh the Places You Will Go." It's a fantastic book of encouragement and empowerment. He's basically saying, think about all the things you're going to do. Think about all the places you'll go. Think about the different planets, different dreams, places of dreams that you thought about, everything that you wanted to create for yourself in your life. It's really a book about tapping in to the inner child in all of us, and reminding us, that we are that divine being, divine sons and daughters of God, and all we need to do is to decide that were going to go – "Oh the places you will go."

28. But when you read the book, you realize, he talks about different scenarios of life, there will be moments when you're alone, but you need to keep on going and be inspired and be empowered. Sometimes you'll get stuck but you need to just keep on going because you need to keep fixated and focus – and, all the places you will go.

29. And he says, there is this one really sad place. And the sad place in the book is called a waiting place. A waiting place in the book is where everybody sits and waits, everybody sits waiting for that dream, waiting for that gift, waiting for that love, waiting for that happiness. And Dr. Seuss says this is a sad, sad place.

30. What God is asking us, when God asks us to look to God, is – don't get stuck, in what Dr. Seuss says is a sad, sad place. Don't get stuck being bogged down by the burdens of the world. Don't sit and just wait for salvation to come. Don't sit for redemption to come. Don't look down. The Bible is saying, lift your head. It's an active verb. We have to do the action of lifting our heads to look to God. Don't get stuck. Don't wait.

31. This reminds me of a very, very good friend of mine who was in a very, very difficult relationship in his marriage. He loves his wife so much, and they have a wonderful family, but they've been through many, many different things over the years. The husband was saying to me, "You know, I love my wife. And my wife, I think, loves me. But she's really going through the hell of being addicted." She is an alcoholic. And he says, "I've been waiting all these years for her to turn around, for her to realize that redemption is near, she needs to look up, she needs to look towards God. And I've been waiting and waiting, but she's not changing"

32. Well, what God is saying to this husband at this time, in Luke 21:28, is not to just sit and suffer in silence as that poor victimized husband, not knowing what to do, just waiting for his wife to change – but what God is asking this person to do is to think about how, perhaps, he can be a catalyst in his wife's life by deciding to change himself. In a way he didn't realize that over the years he had become a helpless codependent, helping her to continue in her addiction to alcohol. He didn't realize that because he didn't firmly decide not to be a victim, and because he didn't decide that he wanted to be a healthy husband, taking the steps today, not tomorrow, not waiting for tomorrow to bring salvation and deliverance, but to decide today the steps that he can take so that he can, perhaps, change the way he behaves, the way he talks, the way he relates to his wife – so in changing himself he can be a natural catalyst to help his wife want to change.

33. He realized that, once he decided that he no longer wanted to be a codependent in this relationship, and decided to put his foot down and not just be guided by his wife right and left and up and down and following her addiction, just because he wanted to show the world he cared. In a way, he didn't understand that caring also comes with tough love. But the minute he decided tough love was the way to go, and if he really loved his wife he needed to change himself and he needed to catapult himself out of that codependency to become a healthy person, by working on his life, by taking measures into his own hands, becoming the master of his own destiny if you will. He realized that, only in doing so did he become the very catalyst that helped his wife realize that she needed help.

34. So, he was sharing with me all those years of waiting, waiting for my wife to change. "I thought God had left me. I thought God didn't care about me. But I didn't realize that God was waiting for me, in a way, God was asking me to be that agent of change, and do something."

35. So this passage really reminds us to look to God, to look at our lives, our circumstances, our situations from God's perspective. And it also reminds us not to get bogged down and stuck, and not to get stuck in this eternal waiting game where we feel like God has forgotten about us, not realizing that God is not forgetting about us – he is just watching to see what we're going to do.

36. That leads us to the third thing that this passage reminds me of. This third thing is that I realize, so many times in my life, our desire is to love and to be loved, but many times we're stuck in the waiting game. Many times we let years, years go by, days and weeks go by, and we are straddling on this horrible relationship or a horrible marriage and we are wondering whether there is any hope for us in the future. Well, this passage in Luke reminds me, to not just take God's perspective, not just don't get stuck in the waiting game, but it also reminds me to act now. In a way carpa diem, seize the moment, have the courage to act.

37. This reminds me of this documentary that I saw a couple of years back. This was a documentary on obesity – different people who are fighting a struggle, the losing battle of obesity. This documentary followed them in real time, how they try to overcome their addiction to obesity. And you realize that the most difficult thing that an obese person has in terms of dealing with their problem on a daily basis is the desire to do something today. That is the biggest hurdle for these people. You realize that every time the moment comes for that crucial decision, "I am not going to bite into a Twinkie anymore." It always leads to, "maybe I will have one bite today, one bite of Twinkie today and I'll start tomorrow." Its one bite of Twinkie today, every day, that has led to the problem of obesity. And you realize that, many times, we in a religious community have really, really good intentions. We know exactly what we need to do. We know exactly what we should not do. We know what we would like to be, and want to be that today. But many times we don't have the courage to act, or have the strength to follow through – to say, "No Twinkie today, starting from today. No smoking today. Stop smoking today, not tomorrow." Because every time we allow for tomorrow, there is always another tomorrow.

38. When somebody, in the context of a family – you know many times we go through many, many different things, and sometimes as siblings we want to encourage our other sibling, "If you have a problem go talk to parents. Please go talk to parents." And just like biting into a Twinkie the person will say, "I will go see my parents. I will go see my parents at the end of the year. I will go see my parents next year." But if we really love our True Parents, then we are going to go see our True Parents today. And if they are not here physically we are going to go see them in our prayers. In a way, so much of life is, well and good intentions. But unless we seize upon our good intentions and substantiate it, starting from today, nothing will be accomplished.

39. And this reminds me of something that I thought was interesting. From time to time, we, coming from the Eastern tradition, we tend to be very superstitious people. We come from a shamanistic culture – it's part of a Korean culture that when somebody gets married, when somebody's about to go into the next phase of life, maybe graduating, going abroad to study in a different country – usually the parents like to do a little astrological reading on that person's destiny or that persons, what I call, blueprint.

Hoon Sook (Julia) (Pak) Moon (wife of Heung Jin Moon)

40. Hoon Sook and I from time to time like to visit this astrologer. He did a reading for me and he did a reading for Hoon Sook. And I thought one of the things he said was very interesting. I said, can I ask you a question? He's been reading astrology for a great many people, including presidents, anybody who is anybody in Korea has gone to this man. And I said, "What do you think about destiny? What is your understanding of a person's destiny? Is somebody born to be a certain thing, and just because a person is born with a certain blueprint, is that the person they're going to be?" And what he said to me, that I thought was very interesting, he said, "Many people don't realize that there is a God up there, there is a supreme being up there, and yes we are born with incredible destinies. But so many people come to me to have their charts read, because they are saying, "I am stuck. Nothing is working out for me. Why is my destiny so horrible? Why did God give me a bad one? Why does everybody have great destinies, but I have a bad one?" And he said something that I thought was very interesting. He said, "Most people are born with incredible good destinies. But the problem is, the destiny is there, but the people are not responsible." Of course he does not use the Divine Principle wording, "they are not exercising their 5% responsibility." That's not what he said, but that was basically what he was saying. He said the destiny is there, but people are afraid to act. They don't have the courage to love, they don't have the courage to take the first step, they don't have the courage to decide, today, how they are going to make their destinies come true. 41. And so he said, "When I study the chart of winners versus losers in society, the only real difference is in the fact that the winners have acted. They have decided. They have exercised their 5% responsibility." And that's something that I realized about True Father and our True Mother for many, many years of my life. These are not just people who are consumed by their own perspective. They take God's perspective. These are not the kind of people that are stuck in the quagmire or stuck in the swamp of our existence. They don't play the waiting game. They don't wait for us. They are going to run with or without us. They are going to move the Providence whether we are there or not.

42. I always like to say to young people who come up to me and say, "How do you know they are the Messiah!" And I say, "I know they are the Messiah because they are here. And guess what, I believe that I am living at a blessed time. And I have studied enough, I've spent enough time in the library and in research to know that there is something quite groundbreaking about the breaking news that our True Parents bring, the gift of the Blessing. It is groundbreaking because they bring the gift of the Blessing. But not only do they bring the gift to the blessing, they bring themselves as incredible role models that we can aspire to, that we can look to. And one thing about Father and Mother, they don't wait for tomorrow. Once something goes into their head, that's when they act. They act today. I am sure they want to bite into a Twinkie just like any of us. Every now and then I look at that Twinkie wrapping and I'm salivating. But I'm also thinking, I would like to be healthy. I'd like to make sure that I take care of myself. And so you don't.

43. Likewise, our True Parents, once they decide they're going to do something – I have never heard our True Father say, "I am going to be the Messiah tomorrow! I am going to be the Messiah at the end of the year! I am going to be the True Parents next year." No, our True Parents, they seize the day, they seize the moment. They are here to substantiate what they came to do. They are the Messiah now, today, and every day. And they have been for the last 40, 50 years!

44. So, you young people with a glorious future – when I went into the Lovin' Life Camp meeting room – such handsome young men and women, such beautiful faces. Some of them happy to be there. Some of them still trying to figure out, "why I'm here?" Some of them happy to make their parents happy – that they came. But one thing they all had in common was hormones raging. In that room I could cut the hormones raging with a knife. It's a young people, the young people environment, and whenever you group the young people together – I feel it. You know we are all divine spiritual beings. When you walk into a room, when you walk into a place, there is an immediate feeling and you feel – and I felt hormones!

45. I said to the young people, "you guys are so awesome, you have so much to look forward to, and I'm sure some of you are wondering – "who is going to be my eternal partner?"" And you're there to learn about your community to learn about your tradition, to learn about the Divine principle, which I'm sure you did, because I know David Hunter and I'm sure he did a fabulous job. And he has had a lot of young couples there, a lot of young men and women helping out as a team – and I'm sure you must be thinking, you must be wondering. It's like, what's that movie? It's either, Wayne's World or Bill and Ted's Great Adventure. You know what I'm talking about, right? It's this movie that plays out a stereotype, typical life of a teenager. These guys are kind of geeky. They don't really fit into society. They are kind of weird. Kind of like the way we all feel when we are adolescents.

46. There is this guy, one of the weirdos, the geeky guys, is madly in love with this incredibly looking blonde woman. And every time this blonde woman comes into view the lights go out, the spotlight comes on, and he goes foxy. And he starts singing, "foxy." And he's looking at this beautiful blonde with wind blowing in her hair. And all he's thinking is, "foxy." Because he wants to be seen. He feels like an invisible tree. But he wants to catch her attention. That's what it's like many times, when the hormones are raging – it's like, in Wayne's World, every time you look at a beautiful woman its shwing! You see a beautiful woman, shwing! You see a really handsome guy, shwing! Everything is shwing! And you're wondering, when am I going to get focus in my life? When am I going to have enough solid foundation so that I can concentrate on what I need to concentrate?

47. The reason why Lovin' Life Camp is important, and the reason why Divine Principle is important, is that there are a lot of people who live their whole life shwinging. And at the end of their life, realize that all they have ever accomplished was a whole lot of shwing. And nothing else.

48. What True Parents, as a great role model, is here to tell us, is that our life is not about shwing here and then a shwing there, and then after we've lived a life, a life of shwinging. Our true parents are here to remind us that we really do have an opportunity to work on ourselves. Many times when we are young we are looking to the other to complete us. But, as somebody who has counseled many, many blessed couples, if you want a healthy marriage, if you want a great blessed life – the hard work of working on ourselves needs to be done before the Blessing.

49. In that way, by working on ourselves, is how we prepare to have a good foundation, or develop a kind of latitude, a great kind of depth so that we can invite another person into our lives and build something really beautiful.

50. Working on ourselves is something that we young people might not be too inspired to do every now and then. But if you really want to be a great father and a great mother, if you want a great family, then the huge bulk of character building, of setting goals and accomplishing them, being a committed person, being a person with a purpose, being a person with a goal in life – all of this must start way before the Blessing. Then, when the ultimate gift of the Blessing comes, then we can work on something that is even more great and even more important – and that is rubbing up against each other to create an ideal family.

51. And so, I see, many times in our movement, young couples well-meaning. And I've had many, many personal experiences, and I have also seen my friends and I've seen a lot of first generation – you know we all went to the Blessing not being properly prepared. Because nobody knew what to do with all of us. Nobody gave us a manual or a handbook on how to prepare for the Blessing. We were rushed into the Blessing, all unprepared. And then over the years we have had to work on our character, work on our issues, work on all the problems that naturally should have been taken care of before we brought another person into our lives. But because we didn't, many of us suffered a great deal. Many of the bad habits that were never resolved in a person's life came into the Blessing. Many bad habits.

52. And one of the bad habits that, really, I would like to address to the congregation – especially we have a lot of young people here – is that we are fighting this big problem, this big addiction with pornography. It's a huge problem. Not just in our community, but in all the different churches around the world. People are being addicted through this kind of a medium. The reason why we have stood firm against this fight, against pornography – when you are constantly engaged in a visual relationship, with someone other than your future wife, or your future husband, or your current wife, or your current husband – what it is doing is it's really blurring the lines between what is proper and what is not.

53. If I'm already having sex with the Internet, what's the difference with having sex with a real person that I found on the Internet? It blurs the line. And for young people, people who have problems – and this is not just for boys, this is also for girls. A lot of girls have this problem too. If you get addicted to something like this, this does not prepare you for a good married life, in that you are accustomed to using another person, visually, for your own sexual pleasure. You're not looking, you're not teaching yourself visually, the way we hope to do through ballroom dancing to look upon the other sex with respect, with honor, to take God's perspective. This is not just my sexual toy that I can play around with for the moment, but this is a child of God. This is a daughter of God. This is the son of God that is going to be a mother or a father someday. How can I do that? This is the kind of question we need to ask.

54. So many times, because the individual did not have a chance to resolve the problem of pornography, before they got married – guess what? It enters a Blessed life. And now you have another person you have to take care of, all the while trying to overcome your addiction to pornography. And, it can make the marriage absolutely hellish. And it can destroy marriages for many people.

55. And so the difficult work of confronting this issue, not just pornography, but addictions of all sorts, need to be addressed prior to the Blessing. And that's why in the Blessed Family Dept. I have been stressing the need for proper education before we send our children to the Blessing.

56. And we have to talk about the difficult things. We have to talk about pornography. We have to address it. We have to have the children here, like in GPA, listen to lectures given by John Williams on the subjects that many people find to be taboo. We need to talk about it. We need to educate ourselves. We need to give our children the tools, the ways through which they can overcome their addiction and look towards a healthy, emotional, and a spiritual, and the physical life. That's really the only way we're going to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.

57. So, brothers and sisters, when this passage Luke 21:28 reminds us to take God's perspective, not to get stuck just waiting around, and really encourages us to act. If we are in a lousy relationship let's think about what we can do today that might make it better.

58. I have heard of situations where some couples are having a really tough time, because the husband is taking care of the children while the wives go off to Chung Pyung to pray for 40 or 120 days. Well, going off to Chung Pyung to pray for 40 days, 120 days, is great – but how does that better your relationship with your husband. If you're not working on your relationship with your husband in the same room, how the bleep is the relationship going to get better? How does the relationship get better by running away? It's like, giving God our problems. And what about our husband? Poor husband, going without sex for 40 days?! Come on sisters, let's think about this. Or for 120 days?! And then we expect our husbands to be good.

59. Being in a Blessed life, in a Blessed marriage, it should not be a prison. Blessing is forever, and so we think we don't have to take care of our husband, we can just go off and do whatever we want as long as it's in the realm of the spiritual. But guess what? Substantiation of the kingdom of heaven on earth means it's got to be substantiated. Meaning, we've got to take our heads out of the clouds and start thinking about how we are going to build ideal families!

60. We need to work on problems together. We need to act. So, if you're going to go off for 40 days and leave your husband high and dry with the kids, you better come back with something. Make sure your man is taking care of. And people might be thinking, why am I hearing such things from the Senior Pastor? Because I receive a lot of e-mails from husbands who are at wits end, from wives who are at wits end. And so we need to talk about these things. And we need to laugh about it. And not just laugh about it, but address it, and act now.

61. Maybe it might be a good idea for some wives to go shopping today, later in the afternoon. Maybe visit Victoria's Secret. We are supposed to be a movement of ideal families and people loving life. Can you imagine if we are known as one of the best clients of Victoria's Secret, because we love our spouses, and we want to take care of our families? I think that would be kind of cool actually.

62. When people look at our True Parents and they say miracle. When our True Parents survived the helicopter accident Which took Place July 19, 2008 – it's been three years since that accident. People said it's a miracle. True Parents survived in a Sikorsky helicopter. 16 survived, having crashed into a hill in Chung Pyung. In the history of Sikorsky, in the history of helicopter aviation, they've never seen anything like it. Nobody could believe that all 16 people survived.

63. And the interesting thing about the helicopter accident – yes indeed it was a miracle. There was this man named Kim Young Ho. He was a three-time chairman of the Korean film producers Association. So, he together with the top movie producers of Korea, get together and like to go fishing near Chung Pyung Lake every year. And that particular day that the accident happened he happened to be there with a bunch of his buddies, different movie producers, the best in Korea. And usually he says, "I fish across the river from where the accident happened." But one of his friends said, "Why don't we all come over to my house and we can share some (Korean liquor) and we can talk about the new script that we are thinking about and we can decide who the actor and actress that we want, in this film to be." So he, along with a couple of other producers went over to his friend's house across the river. And it was there that they had lunch, then settled down, they put their fishing poles in the river, and he was waiting to catch some fine fish. And he heard the helicopter. And so he looked up, and he said, "It was absolutely incredible. I looked up and I saw a helicopter, but the weird thing is, the helicopter was surrounded by the ring of a rainbow. And the helicopter looked like it was buttressed or held up by this huge lotus flower floating in the sky." And around the helicopter he said he saw 50 or 60 angels flapping their wings. And so he said, "oh my goodness! What is this!?" And the next day he heard on the news that my father and my mother were in a helicopter accident and miraculously a true miracle, miraculously all 16 survived.

64. And so this guy who is the chairman of the film producers Association – he has been a Christian for over 21 years before he had this vision. But he realized, "oh my God, the rainbow, God and the angels and the lotus flower is what saved Chairman (he calls my father Chairman) chairman Moon. He is an outside person having nothing to do with the church, but he felt so overpowered by the Holy Spirit that, the next day, when they were having an international film Festival and he was the honored guest – he got up when he was being introduced, he got up to the podium, and everyone was expecting to hear – what movies will be coming out, what actors and actresses can we hope to see, or his comments on some of the international movies that are floating around for the year. But he got up at the podium, totally consumed and overpowered by the Holy Spirit, and he said – "did you know who saved Rev. Moon?" He said, "God, the angels, and the rainbow saved Rev. Moon!" And everyone at the festival was totally shocked. "This is our chairman? What has gotten into our chairman?" And different people at the film festival said, "sit down, sit down, you're drunk." "I'm not drunk. I saw what I saw. Rev. Moon was saved at the angels, by the rainbow, by the lotus flower!"

65. And then they literally had to escort him out because this was not what his prepared speech was supposed to be. But this man said, "I don't know what came over me. The spirit just moved me. Something from the belly of my stomach just came out, and before I knew it I was saying these things." Then he said, "When I got off the podium my friend was saying, "what is wrong with you, you're the chairman? You're the Korean film producer. We are under the Ministry of culture, sports, and tourism. You are a big man on campus, what are you doing?" But he said, "I don't know what I was saying. I just had to say it."

66. And on the way back, they were all riding the bus back together to Seoul and he got consumed by the spirit again. The belly came forth, the Holy Spirit had to come out, and on the bus he started talking about his vision. He said, "Rev. Moon survived because of God, the angels, the rainbow, and the lotus flower." There was no stopping this man! And somebody on the bus happened to be a member and so he heard about it.

67. I heard one of the leaders in Korea contacted him and said, "you know you need to share your story." And he goes, "I don't know what happened to me. I was consumed by the spirit. I said what I felt I needed to say. But I'm a public person, I can't meet with you now." And so he didn't meet with a representative of our faith for over three months.

68. But then he said, "The weird thing is the producer's most busy day of the week is Sunday." And he said, "even though I've been an ardent Christian I have not really been to church that much." But he said, "Three weekends in a row somehow opened up for me, and again I was consumed with a feeling that I had to find a Unification Church." "Back then I was looking for Unification Church, I called 114" (the equivalent of our 411), but he said, "I couldn't find Unification Church listed anywhere. Because, he realized later that it was Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. But somehow he got in touch with somebody who knew the church and so he went to the church and he sat for three consecutive Sundays, before he shared with our minister. Later Father came to hear about it.

69. Because he felt so pushed to share this news, to share this vision that he had experienced – he was accused of embezzlement and voted out and another person was elected chairman. And he said, "They accused me of embezzlement, but they checked all my back statements and realized there was nothing that warranted such an accusation." But in a way the whole experience left him feeling like, "I may have lost my temporary position, but I have found an eternal position as the son of God and as the son of True Parents."

70. And so this guy, he came to visit our True Father at one of the Hoon Dok Haes. And he came to True Father and he greeted True Father and Father just looked at him. He said, "Father looked at me with those piercing eyes. He looked right through me." He said to him, "You lonely guy. You lonely, but you've been good to your ancestors," and then he just broke down and cried, because he usually doesn't talk about his personal past, the fact that he lost both of his parents to the Korean War. (Sorry, I missed this – but he was an orphan – and he lived a very lonely life – but Father comforted him by saying that because he had honored his ancestors in his life, that his children would have good fortune)

71. He was saying, "it's a miracle." In English he is saying miracle, right? But when Koreans say it, it sounds – "Mira –cool." In my ears when it's set to Korean pronunciation it sounds like two words. Mira -- which in Spanish means to look. Look, mira. A miracle is something we want to see. It's something that's really not supposed to happen, something that contradicts scientific law as we know it. And we see it as an act of God and we want to see it. It's like, saying look, look, mira. And cool sounds like cool.

72. So the helicopter accident was a "mira-cool." That was a vision showing this Kim Young Ho the Messiah is here! Our True Parents are here! The breaking news is here! And there's is a message to all the young and old and happy and sad and thin and big people in the audience – our life is a miracle. We only need to lift our heads. We only need to mira, look, to realize – coooool! This community is cool. Our kids are cool. And our future is cool.

73. And so, we are always waiting for the miracle, but we only need to lift our heads to realize the miracle is all of us here. And if we realize that, we realize that we have the greatest miracle in our lives each and every day. The great role models that are going to guide us, that are going to inspire us, that have inspired us, and that continue to empower us to be that incredible, awesome, cool, eternal sons and daughters of God – brothers and sisters.

74. So be grateful, be happy, and always know that you are loved, because True Parents truly love you and are Heavenly Parent up in heaven truly loves you – for giving us such a wonderful role model as our True Parents in our lives.

75. God bless and have a great week!

Notes:

Luke, chapter 21

1: He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury;

2: and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins.

3: And he said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them;

4: for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had."

5: And as some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said,

6: "As for these things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."

7: And they asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign when this is about to take place?"

8: And he said, "Take heed that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name, saying, `I am he!' and, `The time is at hand!' Do not go after them.

9: And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place, but the end will not be at once."

10: Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom;

11: there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.

12: But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake.

13: This will be a time for you to bear testimony.

14: Settle it therefore in your minds, not to meditate beforehand how to answer;

15: for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.

16: You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death;

17: you will be hated by all for my name's sake.

18: But not a hair of your head will perish.

19: By your endurance you will gain your lives.

20: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.

21: Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it;

22: for these are days of vengeance, to fulfil all that is written.

23: Alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! For great distress shall be upon the earth and wrath upon this people;

24: they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

25: "And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves,

26: men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

27: And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

28: Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

29: And he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree, and all the trees;

30: as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.

31: So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.

32: Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all has taken place.

33: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

34: "But take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare;

35: for it will come upon all who dwell upon the face of the whole earth.

36: But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of man."

37: And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet.

38: And early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him.  

Lift Your Head High: Substantiating the Kingdom of Heaven through Action

In Jin Moon
July 22, 2012

Good morning. Wow! You certainly know how to blow away your senior pastor this morning! Thank you. It’s really good to be back. We just came back from Korea a couple of days ago, and I had the great privilege of spending Friday afternoon with the Lovin’ Life camp. I want to thank them for allowing me to feel like an 18 -- year -- old for about an hour. They were so gracious and cute.

It’s always an interesting experience for me to see the young kids because even though I’m in a body that belongs to a 40 -- some -- years -- old woman, I still feel young at heart; I feel as if I’m 15 or 16. I realize that they are looking at me as a senior pastor, even as I feel quite junior in my spirit. It’s such a wonderful thing to see all these beautiful children— all different colors and shapes, and so much promise of things to come.

When I look at them, I see the future not just of our movement but of the world. And I feel that if we keep on this course of doing outstanding work in building great families and communities then truly the next millennium is going to be— and it’s not lip service— a world of peace, love, and harmony.

I got to spend a little time with lovely children on Friday, but we also know what happened in Colorado. This young man, 24 -- year -- old James Holmes, decided to take it upon himself to play the Joker on the opening night of the new Batman movie, and he took away the lives of 12 people and wounded 58 others.

When I hear things like this on the news, I cannot help but wonder what kind of a role model a person like James Holmes had in life. I if only he could have had a wonderful role model like the ones we have in True Parents, I wonder how different his life would have been. M any psychologists and sociologists over the years have studied human behavior, human character, and the way character develops, and they’ve pretty much concluded that the most important type of learning is observational learning. It’s not what we’re told; it’s not what is said to us. It’s what we perceive or what we observe in the course of our lives that gives us the model for the kind of people we want to be.

I think that is the reason why our Heavenly Parent wanted to send us a wonderful role model in the form of our True Parents. We’ve had wonderful men and women throughout history providing a good role model for many of us, but very few times in history have we had a couple, a beautiful man and a beautiful woman as beautiful partners, showing us what a loving couple or a loving parent is all about, giving us a glimpse into what our Heavenly Parent is like.

I ask myself, “What is it about True Parents that makes them so loving, so encouraging, so empowering, and inspiring? What is it about their relationship?” We observe them as the children of God, yearning to inherit the true love of God and to be like God through the example of our True Parents. Then we realize that we’ve been given an incredible gift in our lifetime, the gift of a supreme role model that we can look at, aspire to, follow, be guided by, and be inspired by.

The Desire to Be Remembered

Every time something like this takes place – like the Columbine school shootings or shootings on different college campuses – I see misguided youths wanting to let the world know they exist by demonstrating their answer to the question, “I n this sea of human beings, how do you stand out as somebody to be remembered?” For this young man in particular— he was in the process of leaving his Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Colorado University— something must have happened in his course of study that made him realize that perhaps his dream of getting a Ph.D., then getting a fine job at a university and becoming a renowned academic or a scholar, was coming to a close.

I’m sure he was fighting with himself, trying to see, “How can I leave my mark? How can I leave my legacy? How can I be remembered?” Sometimes when we’re going through the zest of life or through desperate measures, we don’t always opt toward the most positive way to go out with a bang. Sometimes young people want to go out with a bang by destroying other people. “If I cannot have it myself,” they seem to think, “then I might as well make it so that the other person cannot have it as well.” When we are miserable, we may decide to make sure we inflict misery on others.

This is the reason why our True Parents’ teaching of living for the sake of others is a marvelous philosophy that we need to keep in mind whenever something like this takes place. If we happen to find ourselves in such a difficult or miserable or suffering state that we are tempted, just like James Holmes, to say, “You know what? I’m miserable, I’m not going to be successful in life, I’m not going to have the love of my life, I’m not going to have and become that big powerful person at this moment, so I might as well go out with a bang and take everybody with me.”

Instead of thinking like that, however, if we follow our True Parents’ encouragement and challenge, we will think about the other— we will learn how to be happy for others, even though we may be in a difficult situation. We may be going through a period of misery, but that’s when we need especially to focus on, “How can I learn how to be happy for others? How can I learn how to wish well on others? How can I learn how to love others despite my own suffering?”

This is what the philosophy of living for the sake of others teaches us how to do. Through the guidance and example of our True Parents, we realize that our life here on earth is an opportunity to leave something beautiful behind. We realize that our end goal is not just to settle down with a fine wife or a fine husband— even though that would be a lovely thing to do. We realize that the goal in life is to become a parent, to experience God’s parental heart, to understand what God must have been feeling when he and she created Adam and Eve, and finally to experience what God must have been feeling when he and she first gazed into the face of their beautiful son and daughter. We are intended to experience what God must have been feeling as a parent when he and she looked upon their children and wanted the world for them. This is what we are meant to experience in our lifetime, and we are given a certain allotted time— our one life.

Looking to God

When we are young we think life lasts forever. But when we really think about it, our one life is quite brief. It’s not that long, you know. One of the foremost ministers, Billy Graham, used to say that one of the first things that hit him whenever he found himself at a pulpit looking into the audience of men and women who had gathered to hear him speak is the brevity of life. He realized that he could be standing at the pulpit one morning, at one moment, and he could be gone the next. Such a realization reinforces the desire to make this time count and to make our life count, by being the kind of a family that can raise beautiful children so the children we leave behind are much more beautiful and better positioned to do well in life than the children we found ourselves to be when we first came into this world.

As we go forward in our movement and we are thinking about how to practice the life of living for the sake of others, one of the things that the Bible teaches us comes to mind. The Bible says in Luke 21:28 “Lift your head up high. Lift your head up high because the redemption draws near.” “Lift your head up high because the redemption draws near.”

What this passage is saying to all of us, all of God’s children, is, “Look to God, children.” Whenever we are in a sea of difficulty and problems, in a sea of our circumstantial situations, instead of looking at ourselves or looking just down at our problems, we are to lift our head up high and look to God.

God is asking us as the children of our Heavenly Parent, number one, to look at ourselves and our situation from God’s perspective. If James Holmes had taken the time out to look at his situation not just from his own perspective but from perhaps a bird’s -- eye perspective, or even better yet, from God’s perspective, he could not have done what he did. He was wrapped up in his own situational pain; he wanted to be remembered in this endless sea of mindless faces; he felt lost, unappreciated, and unheard; and he wanted to be seen.

The Joker from Batman the Dark Knight

He thought perhaps that the way he can finally be heard and seen is to go out with a bang the way he did— to take other lives with him by playing God, by playing the Joker, if you will. I think that in his intellectual understanding of his own life, he was thinking that somehow he was the character of Joker in the Batman series.

But anybody who has read Shakespeare is well aware that sometimes the character of the fool or the joker is the only one who knows or understands the truth. By acting silly, crazy, or insane, the fool hopes to provoke a man or a woman to think about the important matters at hand. The fool’s job is to provoke people’s way of thinking in the king’s court. So some of the things that perhaps the king is not aware of, the fool usually knows, but he parades the truth in such a playful, zany, or crazy way that he’s not going to get his head chopped off by the king even as he makes people think.

I imagine that James Holmes in his own delusional mind was thinking, “I want to play the Joker, I want to play the fool. I want to teach the truth of life— that life is tough, it’s miserable, and I want to provoke a response in the people to think about their lives, to think about what life is all about.” Perhaps he thought he was a messianic figure of some sort.

If he, instead of being engulfed in his own perspective of himself vis-à-vis the world, were in a situation, an opportune setting, in which he could take himself out of himself and see himself from God’s perspective, he would have known that he is God’s eternal son. He would have known that God has given him the gift of dignity, that God wants for this son an empowered and an inspired life, and that God wants this son to do his best, finding his passion, utilizing his talents, and giving back to his community so that he will be remembered for something that he created in his lifetime— hopefully a beautiful family that he has left behind. Had he thought about his moment of difficulty from God’s perspective, then the end result would have been very different than the one we heard about on CNN.

Seeing from God’s Perspective

The Bible in Luke 21:28 is reminding us of just that. Regardless of what circumstances or what difficulty we all find ourselves in from time to time, we need to learn how to look to God. We need to look to God and realize that God’s perspective might be slightly different from our own. We might be looking at the glass thinking that it’s half empty, but God might be looking at the glass and seeing that it’s half full.

When we look at the different avenues of New York City from the perspective of an art student wanting to make a painting showing perspective, we realize that we, from our vision, have a certain perspective on how we’re going to draw those buildings. But if we look from a different perspective— for instance, if we were on a plane or if we’re arriving on a helicopter and we were looking at the city from top down, we realize that our perspective on the same location is going to look very different.

Likewise, when we learn to look from God’s perspective and not be defined by our own perspective all the time, we realize that God has a purpose for all of us. There’s a reason why we are here; no matter how difficult life may be, we have a reason why we need to treat our life with gratitude, respect, and care, so we can create something beautiful and leave something beautiful behind.

When I spent time at UTS with the Lovin’ Life camp, I realized, “Gee, these kids are so different because not only are they the handiwork of God, but also they understand— or they’re coming to understand— that they are eternal sons and daughters of God and there is a purpose for why they are here. They have a reason to exist, and they understand the meaning behind all the things that have taken place in terms of their parents having gone through all those sacrificial years in the wilderness.

So even though the Lovin’ Life campers, like so many of us, may at different moments of our lives have looked at our parents as, “Wow, what a bunch of losers.” (To an audience member) Why are you laughing? You are laughing because you’ve thought it, and I am laughing because I’ve thought it, too. I’ve thought, “What losers my parents are. All they care about is the providence. All they care about is mission. What about money, power, and knowledge? What about all these things?”

Superheroes for God

Why does my father wear the same 1970s polyester shirt day in and day out, decade after decade? In terms of fashion, he’s a fashion victim. In terms of fashion, he’s a fashion loser. But looking at it from God’s perspective, I realized, “Oh my goodness, I thought he was a fashion victim caught in a 1970s polyester shirt, but he’s the messiah, or the Lord of the Second Advent that we’ve been waiting for. Oh my goodness!”

Some of us have thought, “My parents are losers because they can’t make ends meet. How many times have we stood in line for food stamps? How many times have we suffered because we couldn’t pay for gas for the car?” And more of us may have thought, “How many times did I wish I could have been born to a different family? “ But looking at it from God’s perspective, we realize, “Oh my goodness, my loser parents are actually awesome heroes of history. They have done what the 12 disciples of Jesus could not do. The 12 disciples of Jesus did not stand by the Son of God when he was crucified on the cross, but my parents have stood steadfastly by the messiah.”

“Maybe our parents are not that beautiful or not that handsome. Maybe they don’t have bodies like Mr. Universe or Miss Universe. Maybe they look kind of plain. Maybe they look old; maybe they look tired.

But oh my God, looking from God’s perspective, they are like Batman and Superman and the Japanese Anpanman. And they are here fighting the Monster Vikings. They did what the disciples of Jesus could not do.

“They stood by our True Parents through the time of the wilderness for 40 or 50 years. They stuck to our True Parents the way a leech sticks to your leg. They just wouldn’t let go and they never gave up. And regardless of what our True Parents are going through, because they stuck to True Parents all those years and they never left True Parents, our True Parents are still with us today. We realize what we thought were losers were actually amazing men and women heroes of history.”

When we look at our parents from God’s perspective we realize what an incredible time we’re living in, absolutely incredible. When we’re young and we’re looking toward the future, thinking about our careers, we find ourselves in different settings where we feel stuck and bogged down. But when Luke 21:28 asks us to lift up our heads because redemption draws near, it is asking us to look to God— and in looking to God, it is asking us not to get bogged down, not to get stuck. It’s up to us not to get stuck. We’re only stuck if we allow ourselves to be stuck. We are only bogged down if we allow ourselves to be bogged down.

“The Most Useless Place Is the Waiting Place”

There’s a fantastic book by Dr. Seuss that is one of my favorite readings at times when my life gets really complicated and convoluted. Of course I love reading different novels, different theological works, and philosophical works, but there’s something that’s simply elegant about Dr. Seuss’s series. His book called Oh, the Places You’ll Go is a fantastic book of encouragement and empowerment.

He’s basically saying, “Think about all the things that you’re going to do. Think about all the places you’ll go. Think about the different planets, different dreams, different places in dreams that you’ve thought about. Think about everything that you’ve wanted to create for yourself in your life.” It’s a book about tapping into the inner child of all of us and reminding us, “Yes, we are divine beings, divine sons and daughters of God, and all we need to do is to decide that we’re going to go. ‘Oh, the places we’ll go.’”

When you read the book you realize that he is talking about different scenarios of life. There will be moments you’re alone, when you just need to keep on going and be inspired and empowered. Sometimes you’ll get stuck, but you just need to keep on going, you need to get in focus, and “Oh, the places you’ll go.”

He says there’s one really sad place, and the sad place in the book is called a waiting place. A waiting place in the book is where everybody sits and waits. Everybody sits waiting for that dream, waiting for that gift, waiting for that love, waiting for that happiness. And Dr. Seuss says this is a sad, sad place.

What God is asking us when God asks us to look to God, is, “Don’t get stuck in what Dr. Seuss says is a sad, sad place. Don’t get stuck being bogged down by the burdens of the world. Don’t sit and just wait for salvation to come. Don’t sit waiting for redemption to come. Don’t look down.” The Bible is saying, “Lift your head.” It’s an active verb. We have to do the active action of lifting our heads to look to God. Don’t get stuck. Don’t wait.

This reminds me of a very good friend of mine who was in a very difficult relationship in his marriage. He loves his wife so much, and they have a wonderful family, but they’ve been through many different things over the years. The husband was basically saying to me, “I love my wife and my wife, I think, loves me. But she’s going through the hell of being addicted. She’s an alcoholic.”

He says, “I’ve been waiting all these years for her to turn around, for her to realize that redemption is near. She needs to look up; she needs to look toward God. And I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, but she’s not changing.”

Being a Catalyst for Change

God is saying to this husband at this time in Luke 21:28 “Don’t just sit and suffer in silence as the poor, victimized husband, not knowing what to do, just waiting for your wife to change.” God is asking this person to think about how perhaps he can be a catalyst in his wife’s life by deciding to change himself.

He didn’t realize that over the years he had become a helpless codependent, helping her continue in her addiction to alcohol because he chose to continue being a victim instead of choosing to take steps to become be a healthy husband. He didn’t realize that he needed to stop waiting for tomorrow to bring salvation and deliverance. He didn’t realize that instead he needed to decide today the steps that he can take to change the way he behaves, the way he talks, the way he relates to his wife. He didn’t realize that in changing himself he can be a natural catalyst to help his wife want to change.

He needed to decide that he no longer wanted to be a codependent in this relationship. He needed to decide that he was going to put his foot down and not just be guided by his wife right, left, up, and down, and following her addiction just because he wanted to show the world he cared. He eventually realized that caring also comes with tough love, and if he loved his wife he needed to change himself, to catapult himself out of that codependency and into becoming a healthy person working on his life, by taking measures into his own hands. Only by becoming the master of his own destiny, if you will, could he become the very catalyst that would help his wife realize that she needed help.

He was sharing with me, “Though all those years of waiting and waiting for my wife to change, I thought God had left me. I thought God didn’t care about me. But I didn’t realize that God was waiting for me; God was asking me to be the agent of change and do something about our lives.”

So this passage reminds us to look to God, to look at our lives, our circumstances, and our situations from God’s perspective. This passage also reminds us not to get bogged down and stuck in this eternal waiting game in which we feel like God has forgotten about us. At those times, God is not forgetting about us; God is just watching to see what we are going to do.

Act Now

And that leads us to the third thing that this passage reminds me of. This is something I have realized so many times in my life— our desire to love and to be loved. But many times we’re stuck in the waiting game. We let years and years go by, or weeks go by, we’re just struggling in a horrible relationship or a horrible marriage, and we’re wondering whether there’s any hope for us in the future.

This passage in Luke reminds me not just to take God’s perspective, but also to act now instead of getting stuck in the waiting game: Carpe diem— seize the moment. Have the courage to act. And this reminds me of a documentary on obesity that I saw a couple of years back. It was about different people who were fighting a losing battle with obesity. This documentary follows them in real time as they try to overcome their addiction to fattening foods. As you are watching, you realize that the most difficult thing that obese people have in terms of dealing with their problem on a daily basis is the desire to do something today. That is the biggest hurdle for these people.

Every time the moment comes for that crucial decision— “I am not going to bite into a Twinkie any more” – it always leads to, “Maybe I’ll have one bite today, one bite of a Twinkie today, and I’ll start tomorrow.” It’s that one bite of a Twinkie today, every day, that has led to the problem with obesity. Reflecting this to our community, we realize that many times we in a religious community have really good intentions. We know exactly what we need to do. We know exactly what we should not do. We know what we would like to be, and we want to be that today.

But many times we don’t have the courage to act, or have the strength to follow through, to say, “No Twinkie today, starting from today.” “No smoking today. Stop smoking today— not tomorrow— because every time we allow for tomorrow, there’s always another tomorrow.”

In the context of a family we often go through many different things, and sometimes as siblings we want to encourage another sibling, “I if you have a problem, go talk to your parents. Please go talk to your parents.” And just like biting into a Twinkie, the person will say, “I will go see my parents tomorrow. I will go see my parents at the end of the year. I will go see my parents next year.”

But if we really love our True Parents, then we’re going to go see our True Parents today. And if they’re not here physically, we’re going to go see them in our prayers. So much of life is good intentions, but unless we seize upon our good intentions and substantiate them starting from today, nothing will be accomplished.

Exercising Responsibility

This reminds me of something that I think is interesting.

We, coming from the Eastern tradition, tend to be very superstitious people. We come from a shamanistic culture, and it’s a part of our traditional heritage. It’s part of Korean culture that when somebody gets married, when somebody’s about to go into the next phase of life— maybe graduating and going abroad to study at a different country – then usually the parents like to do a little astrological reading on that person’s destiny, or what I call their blueprint.

Julia' Hoon Sook (Pak) Moon

So Hoon Sook and I from time to time like to go visit an astrologer. He did a reading for me and a reading for Hoon Sook, and I thought one of the things he said was very interesting. I said, “Could I ask you a question?” He’s been reading astrology for a great many people in Korea, including presidents. Anybody who’s anybody in Korea has gone to this man. I said, “What do you think about destiny? What is your understanding of a person’s destiny? Is somebody born to be a certain thing? And just because a person is born with a certain blueprint, is that the person they’re going to be?”

His response to me was, I thought, very interesting. He said, “Many people don’t realize that there’s a God up there, there’s a supreme being up there. And yes, we are born with incredible destiny, but so many people come to me to have their charts read because they are saying, ‘I am stuck. Nothing is working out for me. Why is my destiny so horrible? Why did God give me a bad one? Why does everybody have such great destinies but I have a bad one?’”

Then he said something that was, I thought, especially interesting. He said, “Most people are born with marvelously good destinies. But the problem is that the destiny is there, but the people are not responsible.” Of course, he doesn’t use the Divine Principle wording like, “They’re not exercising their five -- percent responsibility in acting.” That’s not what he said. But that’s basically what he was saying. “The destiny is there, but people are afraid to act. They don’t have the courage to love; they don’t have the courage to take the first step. They don’t have the courage to decide today how they’re going to make their destinies come true. So,” he said, “when I study the charts of winners versus losers in society, the only real difference is in the fact that the winners have acted. They have decided.” They have exercised their five -- percent responsibility.

That’s something I’ve realized about True Father and True Mother for many years. These are not just people who are consumed by their own perspective. They take God’s perspective. These are not the kind of people who are stuck in a quagmire or a swamp of existence. They don’t play the waiting game. They don’t wait for us. They’re going to run, with or without us. They’re going to move the providence whether we are there or not.

Sometimes when young people come up to me and say, “How do you know they’re the messiah? “ I like to say, “I know they’re the messiah because they’re here, and guess what? I believe that I am living in a blessed time, and I’ve studied enough, I’ve spent enough time in the library and in research to know that there is something quite ground breaking about the breaking news that our True Parents bring. The gift of the Blessing— it is ground breaking because they bring the gift of the Blessing. But not only do they bring the gift of the Blessing, they bring themselves as that supreme role model that we can aspire to, that we can look to.”

For sure, one thing about Father and Mother is that they don’t wait for tomorrow. Once something comes into their head, that’s when they act. They act today. I’m sure they want to bite into a Twinkie just like any of us. Every now and then I look at that Twinkie wrapping and I’m salivating, but I’m also thinking, “I’d like to be healthy. I’d like to make sure that I take care of myself.” And that helps to control the impulse.

Likewise, once our True Parents decide that they’re going to do something, they do it. I’ve never heard our True Father say, “I’m going to be the messiah tomorrow. I am going to be the messiah at the end of the year. I am going to be the True Parents next year.” No. Our True Parents seize the day. They seize the moment; they are here to substantiate what they came to do. They are the messiah now, today, and every day, and they have been for more than 50 years.

The Opportunity for Improvement

You young people have a glorious future. When I went into the Lovin’ Life camp meeting room, I saw such handsome young men and women and such beautiful faces. Some of them were happy to be there; some of them were still trying to figure out why they’re there; and some of them were happy that they had made their parents happy by coming. But one thing that they all had in common was that their hormones were raging. I n that room I could cut the raging hormones with a knife.

Whenever we group young people together, I feel it. We’re all divine spiritual beings. When you walk into a room, there’s an immediate feeling that you feel, and I felt hormones. I said to the young people, “You guys are so awesome. You have so much to look forward to, and I’m sure some of you are wondering, who’s going to be my eternal partner. You are here to learn about your community, to learn about your tradition, and to learn about the Divine Principle— which I’m sure you did because I know Dave Hunter and I’m sure he’s done a fabulous job with all the young couples and young men and women helping out together as a team. But I’m sure you must be thinking, you must be wondering.”

That situation at the Lovin’ Life camp reminds me of a movie that my kids like to see: It’s either Wayne’s World or Bill and Ted’s Great Adventure. You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s a movie that plays out a stereotypical life of a teenager. These guys are kind of geeky. They don’t really fit into society. They’re kind of weird, kind of like the way we all feel when we’re an adolescent.

One of the weirdoes or one of the geeky guys is madly in love with an incredible -- looking blonde woman, and every time this blonde woman comes into view, the lights go out, the spotlight comes on, and he goes, “Foxy.” He starts saying, “Foxy.” He’s looking at this beautiful blonde with the wind blowing in her hair, and all he’s thinking is “Foxy,” because he wants to be seen— because he feels like an invisible tree. He feels like an invisible tree, but he wants to catch her attention.

That’s what it’s like when the hormones are raging. It’s like it is in Wayne’s World. Every time you look at the beautiful woman, it’s like schwing. You see a beautiful woman, schwing. You see a really handsome guy, schwing. Everything is schwing, and you’re wondering, when am I going to get focus in my life? When am I going to have enough solid foundation so that I can concentrate on what I need to concentrate on?

The reason why Lovin’ Life camp is important and the reason why Divine Principle is important is that there are a lot of people who live their whole life schwing -- ing. T hen at the end of their life, they realize that all they’ve ever accomplished was a whole lot of schwing and nothing else.

What True Parents as a great role model are here to tell us is that our life is not about schwing here and then a schwing there, and then after we’ve lived our life, our legacy is a life of schwing -- ing. Our True Parents are here to remind us that we really do have an opportunity to work on ourselves. When we are young, we’re often looking toward the other to complete us. But as somebody who has counseled many blessed couples, I know that if you want a healthy marriage, if you want a great blessed life, it’s best to do the hard work of working on yourself before the Blessing. In that way, by working on ourselves, we prepare to have a good foundation with great latitude and great depth so we can invite another person into our lives and build something beautiful.

Working on ourselves is something that we young people might not be too inspired to do every now and then. If we want to be a great father or a great mother and we want to have a great family, however, then the huge bulk of character building by setting goals and accomplishing them as a committed person with a purpose and a goal in life, must start way before the Blessing. Then when the ultimate gift of the Blessing comes, we can work on something that’s even more great and important— rubbing up against each other to create an ideal family.

I’ve had many personal experiences, but also I have seen my friends, and a lot of First Generation, who, all of us, went to the Blessing not being properly prepared because nobody knew what to do with all of us. Nobody gave us a manual or a handbook on how to prepare for the interpersonal relations of the Blessing.

We were rushed into the Blessing all unprepared, and then over the years we’ve had to work on our character, work on our issues, and work on all the problems that naturally should have been taken care of before we brought another person into our lives. But because we didn’t, many of us suffered a great deal. Many of the bad habits that were never resolved in a person’s life came into the Blessing and remained as bad habits in the blessed family.

Confronting Addiction before the Blessing

One of the bad habits that I would like to address to the congregation, especially because we have a lot of young people here, is this big problem of addiction to pornography that we are fighting. It’s a huge problem not just in our community, but in all the different churches around the world. People are being addicted to this kind of a medium.

The reason why we have stood firm in this fight against pornography is that when you are constantly engaged in a visual relationship with someone other than your future wife or your future husband, or your current wife or your current husband, it’s blurring the lines of what’s proper and what’s not. If I’m already having sex with the Internet, what’s the difference with having sex with a real person that I found on the Internet? It blurs the line— and this is not just for boys. This is also for girls. A lot of girls have this problem, too.

If you get addicted to something like this, it does not prepare you for a good married life in that you are accustomed to using another person visually for your own sexual pleasure. You’re not teaching yourself visually in the way we hope to do through ballroom dancing, to look upon the other sex with respect and honor, taking God’s perspective. This other person is not just my sexual toy that I can play around with for the moment. This is a child of God. This is a daughter of God; this is a son of God who is going to be a mother or a father someday. How can I do that?

This is the kind of question we need to ask. So many times because the individual did not have a chance to resolve the problem of pornography before he or she got married, guess what? It enters a blessed life, and now you have another person that you have to take care of, all the while trying to overcome your addiction to pornography. It can make the marriage absolutely hellish, and it can destroy marriages for many people.

So the difficult work of confronting this issue— not just pornography but addictions of all sorts— needs to be addressed prior to the Blessing. That’s why in the Blessed Family Department I’ve been stressing the need for proper education before we send our children to the Blessing. We have to talk. We have to talk about the difficult things. We have to talk about pornography, and we have to address it. We have to have the children, here like at GPA, listen to lectures given by John Williams on the subject that many people find taboo. We need to talk about it. We need to educate ourselves. We need to give our children the tools, the ways through which they can overcome their addiction and look toward a healthy spiritual and physical life. That’s the only way we’re going to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

Substantiating the Kingdom of Heaven

This passage, Luke 21:28, reminds us to take God’s perspective, not to get stuck just waiting around, and it encourages us to act. So if we’re in a lousy relationship, let’s think about what we can do today that might make it better. I’ve heard of situations in which some couples are having a really tough time because the husband is taking care of the children while the wife go off to Chung Pyung to pray for 40 or 120 days. Going off to Chung Pyung and praying for 40 days or 120 days is great, but how does that better our relationship with our husband? If we’re not working on our relationship with our husband in the same room, how the bleep is the relationship going to get better? How does the relationship get better by running away? It’s like giving God our problem.

And what about the poor husband, going without sex for 40 days? Come on, sisters, let’s think about this. Or for 120 days? Then we expect our husbands to be good? Being in a blessed life, in a blessed marriage, should not be a prison. The Blessing is forever, and so we may think we don’t have to take care of our husband, we can just go off and do whatever we want, as long as it’s in the realm of the spiritual.

But guess what? Substantiation of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth means it’s got to be substantiated, meaning we’ve got to take our heads out of the clouds and start thinking about how we’re going to build ideal families. So we need to work on problems together. We need to act. So if you’re going to go off for 40 days and leave your husband high and dry with the kids, you’d better come back with something. Make sure your man is taken care of.

People might be thinking, “Why am I hearing such things from the senior pastor?” It’s because I receive a lot of e -- mails from husbands who are at their wit’s end and from wives who are at their wit’s end. We need to talk about these things, and we need to laugh about it. And not just laugh about it, but address it and act now.

Victoria’s Secret lingerie shop

It might be a good idea for some wives to go shopping today later in the afternoon, maybe visit Victoria’s Secret. We’re supposed to be a movement of ideal families, of people loving life. Can you imagine if we would be known as one of the best clients of Victoria’s Secret because we love our spouses and we want to take care of our families? I think that would be kind of cool, actually.

The Angels, the Lotus Flower and the Rainbow

People look at our True Parents and they say, “Miracle.” That’s what they said when our True Parents survived the helicopter accident that took place on July 19, 2008. It’s been three years since that accident. True Parents survived in a Sikorsky helicopter. Sixteen survived, having crashed into a hill in Chung Pyung. In the history of Sikorsky, in the history of helicopter aviation, they’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody could believe that all 16 people survived.

And the interesting thing about that helicopter accident is, “Yes, indeed it was a miracle.” That miracle was witnessed by Mr. Kim Young Ho, a three -- time chairman of the Korean Film Producers Association. He, together with the top movie producers of Korea, get together and like to go fishing near Chung Pyung Lake every year.

On that particular day when the accident occurred, he happened to be there with a bunch of his buddies— movie producers, the best in Korea. “Usually,” he says, “I fish across the river from where the accident happened.” But one of his friends said, “Why don’t we all come over to my house and we can share some soju,” which is Korean sake. “ Then we can talk about the new script we’re thinking about and we can decide the actor and the actress we want to have in this film.”

So Mr. Kim, along with a couple of other producers, went over to his friend’s house across the river. It was there that they had lunch, settled down, and put their fishing poles out into the river. Mr. Kim was waiting to catch some fine fish when he heard the helicopter.

So he looked up, and he said it was absolutely astounding. “I looked up, and I saw a helicopter, but the weird thing is, the helicopter was surrounded by the ring of a rainbow, and it looked like the helicopter was buttressed or held up by a huge lotus flower floating in the sky.” Around the helicopter he said he saw 50 or 60 angels flapping their wings. So he said, “Oh my goodness, what is this?”

Then the next day he heard on the news that my father and my mother were in a helicopter accident, and, miraculously, a true miracle, all 16 survived. So this man, who’s the chairman of the Film Producers Association and had been a Christian for 21 years before he had this vision, realized that, “Oh my God! The rainbow, God and the angels and the lotus flower is what saved Chairman— he calls my father “chairman”— Chairman Moon.”

He’s an outside person having nothing to do with the church, but he was overpowered by the Holy Spirit on the next day when he was the honored guest at the Puchon International Film Festival. When he was being introduced, he came up to the podium and everyone was expecting to hear about the movies he would be coming out with, what actors and actresses he would be using, or his comments on some of the international movies that were floating around for the year.

But he came up to the podium totally consumed and overpowered by the Holy Spirit, and he said, “Do you know who saved Reverend Moon? God, the angels, and the rainbow saved Reverend Moon.” Everybody at the festival was totally shocked to think, “This is our chairman? What has gotten into our chairman?” And different people at the film festival said, “Sit down, sit down, you’re drunk.” But he persisted. “I am not drunk. I saw what I saw. Reverend Moon was saved by the angels, the rainbow, and the lotus flower.”

Then they literally had to escort him out because that is not what his prepared speech was supposed to be. But this man said, “I don’t know what came over me. The spirit just moved me, like something from the belly of my stomach just came out, and before I knew it, I was saying these things.” Then he said, “When I got off the podium, my friends said, ‘What is wrong with you, Young Ho? You’re the chairman of the Korean Film Producers Association. We are under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. You are a big man on campus. What are you doing?’”

He said, “I don’t know what I was saying. I just had to say it.” So his friends said, “Okay.” Then on the way back, they were all riding together in the bus back to Seoul and the spirit consumed him again. The belly came forth, the Holy Spirit had to come out, and then on the bus he started talking about his vision. He said, “Reverend Moon survived because of God, the angels, the rainbow, and the lotus flower.” There was no stopping this man.

Somebody on the bus happened to be a member, so we heard about it. I heard that one of the leaders in Korea contacted him and said, “You need to share your story.” He said, “I don’t know what happened to me. I was just consumed by the spirit. I said what I felt I needed to say, but I’m a public person. I can’t meet with you now.”

So he didn’t meet with another representative of our faith for over three months. “But then,” he said, “the weird thing is that the producer’s busiest day of the week is Sunday, so even though I’ve been an ardent Christian, I have not been at church that much. But then three weekends in a row somehow opened up for me, and again I was consumed with this feeling that I have to find Unification Church.”

“ Back then,” he said, “I was looking for the Unification Church. I called 114 “— I guess that is the equivalent of our 411— “ but I couldn’t find Unification Church listed anywhere.” Later he realized that it was Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. But somehow he got in touch with somebody who knew the church, and he went to one of the churches and sat for three consecutive Sundays before he shared his story with the minister. Then later Father came to hear about it.

Because this man felt so pushed to share this news, this vision that he had experienced, he was accused of embezzlement, voted out of his position, and another person was re-elected chairman. He said, “They accused me of embezzlement, but they checked all my bank statements and realized that there is really nothing that warranted such an accusation.”

True Parents Are the Greatest Miracle

The whole experience left him feeling like, “I may have lost my temporary position but I have found an eternal position as the son of God and as the son of True Parents.” So this man came to visit our True Father at one of the Hoon Dok Hae sessions. He came to True Father and greeted him, and Father just looked at him. Mr. Kim later said, “Father looked at me with those piercing eyes. He looked right through me. And Father said, ‘You lonely guy. You’re lonely, but you’ve been good to your ancestors so all your children will do well in life.’”

Mr. Kim just broke down and cried because he usually doesn’t talk about his personal past. He usually doesn’t talk about the fact that he lost both his parents to the Korean War, so he grew up alone. He grew up very lonely. But he felt that Father was peering into him and understanding the kind of a life that he’s led but also reassuring him at the same time, because “you’ve led a good life and you’ve always honored your ancestors, your children are going to do well.” He felt wonderfully comforted.

So Mr. Kim was saying, “It’s a miracle.” In English, you say miracle, right? But when Koreans say miracle it sounds like mir -- a -- kul, a big mir -- a -- kul. That’s what it sounds like, like mira -- cool, right? But in my ears the word miracle, when it’s set to a Korean pronunciation, sounds like two words. It sounds like mira, like in Spanish, “to look.” Look, mira. A miracle is something we want to see. It’s something that’s not supposed to happen. It’s something that contradicts scientific law as we know it. We see it as an act of God and we want to see it. It’s like mira cool. Saying, look, look, mira. And kul sounds like coooool.

So the helicopter accident was a mira cool. That was a vision showing Mr. Kim Young Ho that the messiah is here, our True Parents are here. The breaking news is here. And this is a message to all the young and old and happy and sad and thin and big people in the audience: Our life is a miracle. We only need to lift our heads. We only need to mira— look— to realize, cool. This community is cool. Our kids are cool. And our future is cool.

We’re always waiting for the miracle but we— all of us here— only need to lift our heads to realize the miracle is right here. And if we realize that, we realize that we have the greatest miracle in our life every day. We have the great role models who are going to guide and inspire us, who have inspired us, and who continue to empower us to be incredible, awesome, and cool eternal sons and daughters of God.

So be grateful, be happy, and always know that you are loved because True Parents truly love you, and our Heavenly Parent has truly shown great love for you by giving us all such a wonderful role model as True Parents in our lives. God bless, and have a great week.

Notes:

Luke, chapter 21

1: He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury;

2: and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins.

3: And he said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them;

4: for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had."

5: And as some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said,

6: "As for these things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."

7: And they asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign when this is about to take place?"

8: And he said, "Take heed that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name, saying, `I am he!' and, `The time is at hand!' Do not go after them.

9: And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place, but the end will not be at once."

10: Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom;

11: there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.

12: But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake.

13: This will be a time for you to bear testimony.

14: Settle it therefore in your minds, not to meditate beforehand how to answer;

15: for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.

16: You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death;

17: you will be hated by all for my name's sake.

18: But not a hair of your head will perish.

19: By your endurance you will gain your lives.

20: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.

21: Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it;

22: for these are days of vengeance, to fulfil all that is written.

23: Alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! For great distress shall be upon the earth and wrath upon this people;

24: they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

25: "And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves,

26: men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

27: And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

28: Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

29: And he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree, and all the trees;

30: as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.

31: So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.

32: Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all has taken place.

33: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

34: "But take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare;

35: for it will come upon all who dwell upon the face of the whole earth.

36: But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of man."

37: And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet.

38: And early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him. 

USA Independence Day with Rev. In Jin Moon

USA Independence Day with Rev. In Jin Moon