The Words of In Jin Moon from 2012
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The Words of In Jin Moon from 2012 |
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"