The beauty of my experience in the CIS was to understand the heart of the people and to understand how conscious Heavenly Father has been of them all these years. In America we are conscious of our own suffering, our own difficulties. When we can go to a country that has suffered a hundred times more, we realize that God is so conscious of the suffering that True Parents, after Washington Monument, spoke so much about going to Moscow. Then we had no concept of why, after having this victory here, we would talk about going there. This experience, however, showed me that wherever there has been suffering, God is determined to bring His blessing in a mighty way.

Right now He is giving everything to this land, to the people who have been through so much suffering with so little opportunity to know God and to experience God. Many of them had to hide their Bibles; maybe through their grandmothers they learned something about prayer.

The staff was divided into lecturer, coordinator, mother figure and team leaders; we got our team assignments one day before the students came. We set a strong condition for three days of two people praying all night long, and even though people were bleary-eyed trying to keep up with the schedule and the lectures, somehow that condition brought the staff together. They were doing that in all the workshops.

Unity had to come very quickly, and all the things that can happen in a group of people happened within the first couple of days. There was no time, so we just solved it. Everybody made that kind of effort, everybody. They really slugged it out and prayed it out and made unity within our big teams. That was the key so that God could have a free reign on every group.

We waited a few days before we prayed together with the beginner group, and I think the first public prayer was about how much they had suffered. When I tried to walk down by a group to go back to my seat, some of the people just tried to hug me and said, "Thank you for your sympathy to our country, thank you." During the second week someone gave a very good talk on prayer, and at night after the evening’s activities they would go group by group down by the ocean and start praying. This was amazing. One boy came up to the coordinator and said, "Would you pray with me? I’ve never prayed before."

At the end of the workshop, we got everyone up on stage. They were intoxicated with singing holy songs. We had a really good guitar player, and they would have stayed all night singing. Finally we closed with prayer. Then we formed a little line so everybody could come through and say goodbye. Some said, "Thank you so much," and others said, "I feel so full, this experience had given me so much," and some just burst into tears and hugged us all as they came through. It was just that kind of experience where you could feel Heavenly Father wanted to embrace each person completely.

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