Creating Your Prayer

Sun Myung Moon
July 17, 2009

Edited excerpts of Father's message during Hoon Dok Hae on July 17 at the Cheon Jeong Peace Palace

You have to understand how difficult it is to live in attendance of God. A person is to God as a grain of hulled millet is to a person, which is why it is very difficult for someone to become one with God. Even when you make a piece of rice cake, you have to mix the ingredients together in the right way.

Don't think that words by themselves are enough to witness to someone. Witnessing entails re-creating the person you are witnessing to. The way to re-create someone is to give birth to that person. We are living in a world in which children leave their parents after having being cared for by their parents for ten or twenty years. They leave their parents even after being nourished and raised by them. Therefore, when you witness, you have to give more love and truth to the people you are witnessing to than they have received from their parents. If you don't, they won't stay.

Unification Church members did good work when they went out as pioneers, but they don't realize how valuable their pioneer work was. Why can't they realize how valuable it was? It's because they don't realize the value of the message: the word is incredibly valuable. You should feel that you are alive because of the word and that you are living in order to fulfill the word. If you live without any connection to the word, you cannot live. You should teach people to live according to the word.

Edifying people is about more than just teaching what is in each chapter of the Divine Principle. You have to show the model of a life lived according to the Principle. You could go to farms and become friends with farmers, helping them when they need help and receiving their help when you need it. You have to interact with people. If you don't interact with people and just hold your Divine Principle book, saying that you have precious things to teach others and asking them to come hear what you have to say, do you think they will come? You should make it so they can come to hear the Divine Principle. Isn't that true?

When small birds go out to get food, they know how to protect themselves and how to prepare. In order for you to bring people to follow the way of the Principle, you should make friends with them, develop close relationships with them and sincerely win their trust to the point that they invite you into their house to live with them.

I know that many of you have had difficulties and have been chased out of your communities in the past as a result of following me. Do you think I haven't been chased out of places? I have been; I have also been sent to prison. Many things happened in the past, but since everything I did was beneficial to my spirit, God helped me. There's no one else in the world living life in the manner I am.

We are a special force for God. You should be especially clear about where you are staying, why you are going, where you are going, and why you are doing what you are doing. You should be showing your friends that you are living your life according to the word. You should be able to influence others.

Some people are the type that do not like following others. In order to go the way of the Divine Principle, they have to follow other people, in stages, one by one. They cannot go straight up to God. They have to go to the side like this [Father points with his finger and moves it from side to side.] Then eventually, they will go up. Sometimes, though, people just follow others and lose their central focus, which should be God. In that case, they end up in the wrong place as an result. It's like going up a ladder.

It's the same with prayer. You have to create your prayer. From the viewpoint of someone who is following you, you can become a better example and guide for them if you are working to fulfill what you prayed for rather than simply asking for your prayers to be fulfilled. So you should work harder than others to fulfill promises you've made to God in prayer.