The Words of the Lee Family
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The Words of the Lee Family |
Rev.
and Mrs. Lee (seated at left) visit Mozambique's National Assembly
President Veronica Macamo at her office; also present are other
assembly members and members of the press.
On May 1, 2009, after retiring as a pastor in Korea, I visited Mozambique, my mission country where I am now the boonbongwang, and organized a council of ambassadors for peace.
In 2010, we made 120 photocopies of the Portuguese edition of True Father's autobiography and distributed them to the ministers of other churches with whom we had formed connections. We also gave them out to ambassadors for peace and other prominent members of society who seemed truly delighted to receive the books.
I visited Chimoio, a city about 1,300 kilometers from the capital city where I heard that the father of a blessed member had read the autobiography and testified to his friends that Rev. Sun Myung Moon was indeed the Messiah. This incident made me think that we needed to have the autobiography as proper books, rather than photocopies.
While back in Korea in October 2010, at a time when I was offering conditions, Mrs. Masayo Suzuki, a missionary who had first come to Mozambique ten years earlier, was attending an ancestor liberation workshop in Chung Pyung. While praying, she saw Rev. Laurentino Mulungo, a Mozambican Christian minister that had passed away some time earlier. He came and sat next to her. Mrs. Suzuki later visited my wife to tell her about Rev. Mulungo and to ask my wife's views on why he might have come to Chung Pyung and sat beside her.
Four years ago, around the time he died, Rev. Mulungo had appeared in a dream my wife had a day before she was to depart for Mozambique. She said, "I wonder if he is going to the spirit world." The day she arrived in Mozambique was the day of his funeral. On his way home from a church revival meeting, he had been in a car accident, tragically caused by his driver's drowsiness.
Rev. Mulungo had been a pioneering minister of the Baptist Church and had risen to become a senior minister in charge of 530 churches across Mozambique. He was so well known that he was sometimes invited to hold revival meetings in neighboring countries.
When he was told that True Father had endured being imprisoned six times, Rev. Mulungo said that he had also been imprisoned for six years at the time that Mozambique became a communist country, and he kissed a photograph of True Parents. He said that he yearned to meet True Parents once in his lifetime, which he did when Father spoke in South Africa during a global speaking tour. He and his wife took part in the 3.6-Million-Couple Blessing Ceremony in 1997. Moreover, he visited many churches with my wife and I, and he worked hard to bless others.
The fact that Rev. Mulungo had come to Chung Pyung, in Korea, seemed to suggest that he had come to cooperate with the missionaries. I had been offering prayers in an effort to distribute True Father's autobiography, and I expressed the thought that perhaps he had come to ask that we give out copies to the five hundred or so pastors in his denomination.
When she heard this answer, Mrs. Suzuki felt that it would be difficult, because she was heavily in debt. My wife told her that she was just passing on my thoughts and that it was up to her to decide whether she could support this or not. The next day, however, Mrs. Suzuki contacted us and said that she would make 430 copies even if it meant going deeper into debt. With Mrs. Akiko Akiyama, their leader in Japan, eighteen of the Japanese missionaries pooled enough funds for more than four hundred copies. Moreover, the Abel-nation national messiahs, Yves and Eiko Champollion in France, donated funds for a further 430 copies, and each of our children also contributed. We asked even our nephews and other relatives to please give enough for one box. In the end, we were able to buy two thousand copies.
After many hardships and complications, we were able to send off the books, together with some relief supplies, in a twenty-foot container at the beginning of March. We went to our mission country in late March, but it was only with the help of our Cain boonbongwang, Mr. Raul Domingos, chairman of UPF-Mozambique, that we were able to claim the container in late April. We had had a lot of trouble shipping it, and the process of claiming the container on the other side proved equally difficult, so I wonder if we can do that again.
Rev.
and Mrs. Hwa Beom Lee present a copy of A Peace-Loving Global Citizen
to Veronica Macamo, president of Mozambique's National Assembly.
My wife and I visited around twenty churches and orphanages, and based on relationships we had forged with ministers of other churches, we presented them with relief supplies and copies of the autobiography. Whenever we had something to be delighted or pleased about, we thought about the members who had helped us and we offered prayers returning gratitude and glory to True Parents.
Before the container arrived in Maputo, the capital city I was invited to visit the Assembly of the Republic of Mozambique by Mr. Roberto Chitsonzo, who is an assemblyman in the governing party and also an ambassador for peace. The Assembly held a session on April 13. I met a few of the other assembly members as well as the prime minister. As
I greeted them one by one, I thought to myself that I should present them, too, with copies of True Father's autobiography.
I then invited Mr. Chitsonzo and another ambassador for peace, Mr. Manuel Pereira, an opposition party assemblyman, to the church center. I asked them if there was a way that I could present the Mozambique assembly members with copies of As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen. They said that all I needed to do was to get permission from the president of the Assembly, so I asked them if they could set up a meeting with her.
Missionaries and members offered special prayers. It would be a miracle if we could give the books to assembly members.
Fortunately thanks to our earnest prayers, a few days later, on May 13, Assembly President Veronica Macamo invited me to a meeting. I told her that I had first visited Mozambique as a missionary in October 1996 and that I had taught middle school, high school and college students about preventing AIDS using slides as a part of Rev. Moon's true family activities to promote inter-religious, interracial and international peace throughout the world. I also spoke to her about relief programs and education programs we had conducted.
I went on to explain that she would be able to find inspiration and vision from reading True Father's autobiography. She received me warmly saying that she had already heard about Father's peace movement and activities from the assemblymen who were ambassadors for peace.
At the meeting, which included about ten people -- assembly members, secretaries and reporters -- Assembly President Macamo said that 98 of Mozambique's 250 assembly members are women. When I heard that, I thought that Mozambique was indeed a politically advanced nation. She thanked us for the 270 copies of the autobiography and presented my wife and me with cashew nuts and woodcarvings, which are specialties of Mozambique.
We had not prepared any special gifts for her, but my wife had a number of acupuncture pens with her, so we presented her with them and demonstrated how to use them. She seemed truly delighted, and said, Obrigada (thank you) and hugged us.
Mrs. Akiko Hozan, one of ten sisters sent as WFWP missionaries to Mozambique in 1995, runs the Sun Middle and High School in Beira. I presented the teachers and students there with 720 copies of the autobiography. As I looked upon the delighted faces of the students, the hopeful future of Mozambique, they waved the books in joy, and I felt that we had every hope of witnessing in and bringing peace to this nation.
By presenting the assembly members plus twelve representative Maputo city council members with the autobiography, I believe we distributed the book as if it had symbolically gone to all the people of Mozambique. I had wanted to give copies to more ministers and organizations, national universities, teacher-training colleges, high schools and NGOs, and I was sorry that we were unable to do so because we didn't have enough books. Rather than focusing on the difficulties we had had to face while bringing the books to this country, we found pleasure in propagating True Parents' teachings. We set new conditions, with newfound hope and courage, to print and distribute more books.
Back in 1996, I participated in the national messiahs' workshop. That October, I visited Mozambique, which was then a bare land with no foundation of mission work. I began by pioneering Maputo, the capital city, keeping in mind what True Father had told us: "The bones of three generations of your family should be buried in your mission countries."
In 1998, during her global speaking tour, True Mother visited Zimbabwe. Having heard that Mozambique didn't have a church center at that time, she gave us $10,000 as seed money.
After a decade or so, helped by donations from missionaries and the Abel-nation national messiah family, we had enough money to buy a sizable apartment in central Maputo as a church center. Through True Mother's loving care, we were able to lay a foundation for mission work in Mozambique.
In 2000, the national messiahs were called back to Korea to work for the Korean providence, where we served again as church leaders and leaders of providential organizations. While I was working in Korea, my wife continued working in our mission country.
We now have about forty members, about thirty of whom are college students that have attended a Divine Principle workshop. Fifteen students have done a seven-day fast. Of these, five were blessed in the October 14, 2010 Blessing Ceremony and are now witnessing with more passion and motivation. Five more are now preparing to receive the blessing.
People hear the name "Africa" and think it will be difficult there, but even under difficult circumstances, we have hardworking members. Our current center is a bit small, so we are offering prayers to build a church in the suburbs. We expect to receive a donation of a piece of land from the government, on which we can build a church. Some young people who have come to the capital city from the nine states as scholarship students at the integrated national university have now joined our church. They say that when they graduate and return to their hometowns, they will pioneer the way for our church in those locations.
All the work we have been able to do so far in Mozambique was made possible thanks to the preparations made in the background by God and True Parents and the mobilization of those in the spirit world, for it was through them that we were able to lay down the foundation for mission work.
Rev. and Mrs. Lee are from the 777-couple blessing group.