The Words of the Beutl Family
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The Words of the Beutl Family |
My dear brothers and sisters,
At the end of yesterday’s letter I referred to Young Jin Nim having passed on to the spirit world “as a holy offering” -- according to our True Father’s words. Rev. Kwak spoke at the World Seung Hwa Ceremony for Young Jin Nim about his having gone “as a righteous offering representing the True Family to save all humanity in the spiritual and physical worlds who are unable to converge with this Providence directed by True Parents and are unable to stand in a providential relationship with the True Parents through their absolute faith and accomplishments.”
Yes, we have fallen short in fulfilling our responsibility to protect the True Children while their Parents sacrificed themselves and their family for us. I wrote “their families” at the end of my last reflection which may not be correct from the standpoint of grammar but from the viewpoint of heart not only their own immediate family became an offering but also the families of their children, who had to go a course of great suffering.
Father told us on May 8, 1994: “Since Christianity did not fulfill its mission and lost their foundation, Father had to re-indemnify this. During this course even Father's children must go through incredible suffering which we are unable to observe from the outside.”
On another occasion he said: ”All the children in the True Family who stood in the second position have been sacrificed so that the Providence of Salvation could be fulfilled. The time has come for these True Children in the spiritual world to do their work here on earth. They established the condition for the liberation of True Parents and the entire world.”
Hyung Jin Nim and In Jin Nim experience the support from True Children whose life has been cut short as they had to leave this earth as an offering. That they would like to help all of us is well known to many members, especially through the book The Victory of Love in which Heung Jin Nim speaks of his desire to be with each brother and sister who strives to find a deeper relationship to God and our True Parents.
True Children in the spiritual world would like to do their work here on earth but they also need our open hearts to allow them to do so through us. They are longing to help us to resolve our family problems, a task which is supported e.g. through the Chung Pyung providence, with Heung Jin Nim as the center according to Father’s clear statement.
Do we have family problems? Yes, we all have them on different levels like in the relationship between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the relationship to our relatives and ancestors who are part of our bigger family clan. The list is long and ends in our not yet having achieved a good standard in our movement as one harmonious worldwide family under God.
How to solve family problems? About this theme many books have been written and one can find experts in this field who give good counseling on this important topic. Above all we have our True Parents who tried so hard to educate us to resolve problems on the level of the family, introducing e.g. the concept of exchange marriage with young men and women with very different backgrounds coming together to create a God-centered family while building bridges of love between races, cultures and religions.
Because our lineage goes back to fallen parents we need to be reborn and become truly alive by growing up in the warm embrace of family bonds, where we learn to perfect our ability to love as true sons and daughters of God. Based on our having joined the Unification Movement we have this understanding in common, but when it comes to its practical application our opinions may differ a lot concerning what it means to build loving families.
In our concepts and convictions concerning what is necessary to get there we are not united, agreeing on all points. This is not necessarily bad because we are each unique children of God, representing special aspects and qualities. We are called to complement, support and protect each other in order to make sure that all of us reach the goal. We agree on the ultimate ideal which we are destined to reach but differ on what needs to be done to get there. This reality can be used positively for the purpose of the whole if we are ready to accept the challenge of our differences to learn from one another and use the opportunities to enrich each others lives.
Most of the long time members of the Unification Church gave their best in order to live up to the task of worldwide restoration while being ready to go even to far off places to invest themselves there for the sake of moving people to fulfill the purpose for which mankind was originally created. We elder brothers and sisters worked together in teams or centers where we may have felt at times like being in a melting pot but we also benefited a lot from these experiences. We received our training from which we came out more or less victorious.
With thousands of Unificationists getting blessed and starting their own families our movement advanced into another stage which is expressed on an external level in the change of the name to Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. A lot can be said about the course of our movement during the past decades but in these lines I want to emphasize the practical aspect of our living together and learning naturally from one another. True Father spoke about this on many occasions. E.g. when he shared with national messiahs during one of the 40 day workshops in the Pantanal he showed us a folder with plans he has drawn of condominiums which he would like to be built to enable families to live together, enjoying the advantages of such a “small community” life.
In a few cases such external conditions has been put into practice like in the example of several families living together at one place which they built in Slovakia. One can find many reasons as to why it is so difficult to realize this ideal situation but there is also the possibility to live together for shorter periods of time, what we do e.g. during workshops or during holidays as it was mentioned in one CIG Family Service when the brother responsible for our resort area in Korea spoke about condominiums having been built there.
It is not too much of a challenge to live together with others at a holiday resort place where we are not burdened by the problems of daily life we are faced with in our own homes. Therefore most people find it to be a good experience to live together with others for a short time period where everybody tries to show only the better side of their personality.
I am convinced that so many of our internal problems could be solved in a relatively short period if we are ready to build stronger bonds of heart among us. We meet regularly at the Sunday Service or on other occasions but the question of how closely we connect in heart with one another remains a serious issue because only if we unite on deeper levels can inner issues be cleared up and restored.
As Unificationists we are dedicated to helping resolve the manifold problems of the world which are ultimately all connected with family relationships. Therefore it is essential for the success of our efforts that we invest enough into overcoming barriers in relating with one another. We may speak for countless hours about existing problems and how we would like to see them resolved but the real solution lies of course in our removing the obstacles that hinder us in our efforts to unite in heart with one another as true brothers and sisters based on our common foundation of being members of True Parents extended family.
One practical step lies in our being ready to go beyond our own personal situations and circumstances in order to connect with people wherever we may have been called to go. In this respect most central blessed families of our movement (except for the national messiahs) received not long ago a country where they are asked to invest themselves. True Father even requested that we move there by October 14. This may not have been possible in practical terms for most of us but still it is important that we connect with our respective nations as much as possible on an internal level.
I hope that you can feel that the country your family received is not given by chance but that behind it you can see God’s guidance who is very personally concerned about each one of us. Blessings appear often in disguise which means that only later we find out why a certain “Heavenly Destiny” may be very good for us and our family -- what may not have been visible at all in the beginning. It is a great blessing to receive a country where we have the chance to make a new beginning with new opportunities that will certainly turn out to bring us ultimately great happiness if we are ready to live up to the given task wholeheartedly.
What I would like to suggest for the sake of our own personal development and consequently for the purpose of resolving family problems is to use the possibility to live together with others as much as possible. As fallen people we are naturally inclined not to be too much open to others as we may be easily misunderstood and hurt which leads to the reality that we rather keep a certain distance and our own privacy on the family level. This aspect needs to be overcome by our leading a public life as a family, an area in which the True Family has been standing on the forefront all those years.
Why not make more use of the fact that there are blessed families at many places and take up the challenge of coming closer to one another by going ahead to live together for certain time periods? Of course there are the external hindrances which make it hard for us to do so because of various external responsibilities which we have to fulfill. But in the end what counts most in life is surely how much we connected with God’s will and His providence as the ones who are blessed to live at the same time as the True Parents of Mankind. They open up new experiences for us on the level of heart -- enabling us to expand our ability to connect with others internally and to love them unconditionally.
It is natural to want to stick to the surroundings we are used to live in. The fact that our True Parents ask us to build our eternal tribe in another country than our own nation of origin shows us that they want us to move out of our past into new worlds which open up new doors for our inner development. To go to live in an unknown land is surely a big challenge but we can make first smaller steps through our being ready to come closer together with others from whom we can benefit and for whom we can be a blessing.
The 23rd of this month marked the 10th anniversary of the Declaration of the Realm of the 4th Adam and the Liberation of the Blessing of the Whole Cosmos. Father told us: “The Kingdom of Heaven starts from conditions established by the Fourth Adam. The time has come for blessed families to assume the burden that has been weighing on True Parents' shoulders until now.”
Let us come together to shoulder the burden which our True Parents have been carrying all throughout the years in such a selfless way for us. Let us show to them that all the sacrifices of their family has not been in vain but that they have now in us children whom they can fully trust - that we will never give up on the tough road of bringing this world back to God, a huge task which requires our total commitment and complete investment of our heart and soul, of all our personality without anything holding back.
To bring an end to the suffering of mankind the problems of the individual and the families must be resolved first. May we all be an example in this essential task of leaving our problematic personal history fully behind while helping each other to reach the goal.
Sincerely,
Your brother Nikolaus