Had a long but good community leaders meeting today. Gave a little power point on time management too, which felt good. But By 5pm I was really wiped out. Cancelled one evening meeting, but still had our regular Wednesday prayer evening at 7.30pm. Watched some TV to unwind, since we have a big screen now in our reception area. It never really works for me, TV, when I need to de stress.

Went up to our main hall to prepare the chairs etc at around 6.50pm and light the prayer candle.

some times we need others to shed light on our state of mind

Still feeling a bit fried. wondering if anyone was going to come, feeling a bit shaky, I knew there were some people in the building, but hey maybe they’re not up for it tonight…you can guess where my mind and heart were going. Was doing a reasonable job of coming to terms with what I had decided was a solitary evening. (God’s telling me: “leave that for me to decide”, not that I was listening.)

Especially by 7.30pm on my watch, I am thinking ‘yep I’m on my own’. I am half German – everything should start as the second hand strikes 12.

Decided to go down and see if everyone had opted to watch the football instead and thought I might invite people up. But as I was going down, people were on their way up – the guys who were in LG to practice for Live Lounge, Masa from our HQ congregation, and Aska from Bromley who had been helping in the UPF office.

That prayer evening tonight was seriously the best part of my day. I felt that we could not know how precious it was for God that we came together to pray. We sang a few songs, I asked everyone for their thoughts on some notes I took from Hyung Jin Moon’s talk. And then I asked Aska to pray – she shared the most exquisite prayer that just gave me the chance to wash my face clean. Then we prayed altogether for a while.

giving thanks

I was so grateful to those young people for just being there and giving me the chance to pray with them. I had been pretty wound up and strung out from an intense day, and had got into my ‘no one wants to pray thought-train’, but they just came because they wanted to and through that example lifted me up and out of my fear. Thanks guys.

In HQ we have been planning and experimenting together with our community pastors over the last two weeks to develop a national outreach campaign. Our international president, Hyung Jin Moon, has been making himself visible out on the streets of Seoul witnessing, and also encouraging our world-wide membership to share the good news of True Parents and all that they bring to this world as the returning Christ.

figuring out the message

We are doing our best to plan a national campaign to allow for as many of us as possible to get involved. I want to share with you the skeleton timeline that we have come up with:
22nd March – 11th April:
• Printing and mailing leaflets
• Promoting and presenting campaign vision to congregation
• 21 days of spiritual devotion

12th – 25th April:
• 2 weeks of focused outreach with 360 leaflets per member

25th April – 16th May:
• 3 week message series with a theme for new guests in each local church
(Prepare in advance hospitality team in each church to welcome and involve guests in fellowship. Prepare people to teach.)
4th – 6th June
• Weekend Divine Principle workshop (30 new guests/30 new members)

Goal and focus:
• Join together in spirit with True Parents and Hyung Jin Nim as they make a new start with the new Cheon Il Guk calendar and the new temple.
• Bring spiritual revival to our congregation.
• Bring a new culture of celebrating and sharing our faith in True Parents and the spiritual power of the Divine Principle.
• Welcome new members to our local church communities.

as Matt Damon says in Green Zone: "get your game face on - we're going in..."

I have started going out again over the last month to witness in the street and reach out to friends inside our church community and also beyond. What has struck me is how much this work is like a living prayer. As I share what I believe everything comes into focus, and I am guided to understand more deeply what my faith is about. We all need that. It’s similar to my experience of starting to take on our Lancaster Gate HQ church. When our vision and ideas are related to something tangible they come into focus; we can evaluate and start to see more clearly. (Principle of Creation 3.2)
For me what it means to be a member of our Unification Movement is to worship God (every day and with others), tithe, teach the Principle, and bring people to True Parents so that they may experience rebirth. We need to get ourselves some tangible steps in these different areas so that being a church member becomes clearer for our life. As long as it remains vague I am wasting not only God’s time, but my own.
The other experience I had is that I need to be a witness as well as do outreach. (It’s a divine principle to be and to do.) I need to be a witness to my wife, to my children, members of our community, my wider circle of friends, and to new people I meet. But especially within my family and community it needs to happen everyday. And this is when it gets personal: we are learning how to share God’s love and True Parents’ love that we have experienced. To be a witness I have to cultivate something to share.
This is why we want to start with 3 weeks of spiritual revival. We are preparing in HQ tonight by having a reading of all 28 chapters of the Book of Acts from the New Testament. We hope to read that between 9pm – midnight. Now if you are already outreaching and feeling like a witness or want to get started straight away then go for it! I know many of you are already doing a lot to reach out, and spiritual revival of course does not exclude outreach. We just felt we need to make conditions together in our community to bring the Holy Spirit into our relationships and personal lives.
There is a lot more to say, and probably lots more questions to answer, but maybe this is enough for now.

Just to conclude: let’s make this a successful campaign where we learn from our experience, grow through our mistakes, and celebrate with each other when we bare fruit. I believe we will come out the other side in better spiritual shape, like a body with fresh blood being pumped through it.

Shoveling the sidewalk and driveway today. It was snowing like a busted pillow and I went out to shovel, thinking I could keep up with it. I finished one pass and turned around to see the pavement was quickly being covered again. “Hey!” I shouted to heaven, “I just finished this and you’re covering it up again.”

The only sound was “the sweep of easy wind and downy flake,” as Robert Frost wrote. That’s okay, I wasn’t looking for an answer. I think sometimes God just enjoys keeping company.

It‘s good to spend time meditating. There are countless ways to do it and all of them work. You sit in silence in a church. In a zendo, wearing comfortable, loose-fitting clothing. Outside in the garden with the sun on your back and insect sounds. On a treadmill in a gym. Chopping wood. Lolling in a hammock. Washing dishes. God transmits on all those frequencies and, if it has been important to you, you have put some work into tuning your soul’s instrument to receive that voice clearly on your unique frequency. Maybe you’re like Kyle Toffey who prays while driving. I like to have a notebook when God shows up, but that’s me. I have never gotten anything done in unison prayer, with everyone screaming and lifting the roof off. Others have meaningful experiences with it.

Orwell said, at age 50 every man has the face he deserves. This is somewhat true in that you have become a vessel made up of your laugh lines and your tears. Both your deadly lies and your secret integrities unknown to others are in there as well. All your deeds, nuances and brutalities, gross motor and fine motor. Your money and how you came by it. These become your face and the frequency that connects you to heaven’s inspirations.

A violin held just right in the wind, will hum. You resonate perfectly, so that when you hear God’s voice, it is unmistakable to your heart, and only you can hear it. The gal next to you hears God’s voice on a different frequency, based on the unique molecules of her existence. You gradually develop a way to hear the unmistakable signature of God’s voiceprint on the particular frequency that you have arrived at in life.

All these years I have been talking to God in my prayers. But I should have done more listening instead. A lot more.

Ironically, receiving inspiration is unrelated to happiness or comfort. Some of the most gifted and accomplished artists and the most authentic saints endured lives of constant physical pain and unspeakable heartbreak. Worse is that it’s not even about being righteous because some who have done everything right are miserably poor, and there are others in big houses who have children with straight teeth, but who’s hearts are blacker than the inside of a goat. This part I’ve never figured out.

The only thing that can save me is perspective. Perspective is everything. You can either feel you are sitting in a dark room passively watching a television preacher preach and feeling detached, dissatisfied, even angry, or you can be inspired to the mountaintops  and find realworld revelations you can use in your life. You can either feel you are bowing to heaven before an offering table laden with your material wealth, or you can feel you are bowing to fruit. It’s your call.

Prayer-slash-meditation can result in instructing you to build an ark or go there and do that. But the best prayer changes your perspective A change in perspective alters your paradigm, puts more colors on your palette, enlarges your catcher’s mitt, so then you can feel confident to take your own initiative to build an ark or go there and do that.

I want to be a violin in the wind. Each person who is one in heart and mind with heaven, is also one in heart and mind with every other person in the world who is one in heart and mind with heaven. And heaven is meant to be here and now.

Here is an article from BBC news about people in New York shredding documents, letters and photos in a public ceremony to mark “Good Riddance Day” and leave the bad memories of 2009 behind them.  It made me think about the Jewish New Year (a series of high holidays including Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) during which there is a time for public  confessions of guilt and petitions for forgiveness.  Forgiveness is sought especially for wrongs done against God (which relates to one’s foundation of faith) and wrongs done against other human beings (relating to one’s foundation of substance).

I once received an email from a close Jewish friend around the time of the Jewish New Year in which he apologised for his short-comings during that year and sought forgiveness.  If I’m honest, I didn’t think he had anything to apologise for; nevertheless, I was moved by the gesture and it made me think about his heart of renewal at an important time for him and his faith community.

A quick search on wikipedia reveals that there are two Jewish verbs for repentance, שוב shuv (to return) and נחם nicham (to feel sorrow).  It’s hard to repent if you don’t actually feel sorrow – a sorrowless apology is shallow and meaningless, so the first step of repentance ought to involve an admission of guilt and feeling of remorse.  It is then that one determines to return to the pure state before the sin was committed (be it a sin of commission or a sin of omission).

The Greek word for repentance, μετάνοια (metanoia) literally means “after one’s mind”; if forgiveness is granted, the sin is forgotten in both the minds of the transgressor and the transgressed.  After reconciliation, you could say, “it’s behind me”.

I have often felt that our Unificationist community has been lacking in the area of forgiveness and reconciliation.  Perhaps because we set an absolute standard, any deviation from that standard is quickly rebuked and people feel the need to be squeaky clean all the time.  But making mistakes is all part of the process of growing up, picking yourself up when you fall over and learning from the experience.

Simba learns a valuable lesson from Rafiki

Remember that moment in The Lion King (a film my children recently watch) where Rafiki the baboon hits the grown-up Simba on the head with a stick? Rafiki teaches Simba that although the pain remains, the act is in the past, and he can choose to run from it or to learn from it.  When Rafiki swings his stick again, Simba moves to avoid the stick.  This lesson inspired Simba to return to his pride and fulfil his regal responsibilities.

Grace and mercy are themes strong within the Christian community, and since our community has developed upon a Christian foundation, surely we should have inherited that spirit.  Perhaps because many of our leaders have come from Korea and Japan, where the Christian foundation is either young or absent, the culture created was missing these aspects.

As a Catholic, I went to confession on several occasions.  I must confess (excuse the pun) that I never really took confession seriously:

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned; it’s been a couple of months [more like 2 years] since my last confession… I hit my brother… I watch too much television… [quick, think of something else to say!] … erm, I didn’t go to mass last Sunday…”

But for many genuine Christians, the experience of being forgiven can be one of the pivotal moments in their life of faith, even the start of their journey of faith.  Upon reflection, my own life of faith is built upon one defining moment of reconciliation with myself and with God.  After that moment, I felt liberated to grow, prepared to err but not to rebuke myself for erring.  Learning to forgive myself has been the first step in learning how to forgive others, which is a lesson still being learnt.

There are some members of our worldwide Unificationist community who, after a request from Ye Jin Nim, are participating in a 21-day prayer condition of repentance.  Our national leader Mr Simon Cooper has suggested that we all do a 90-minute prayer some time before that start of 2010, and I hope it can be a liberating and cleansing experience for all of us.  I hope we can discover the humility to repent and the power to forgive.  If we are to perfect the realm of liberation and complete freedom in the Kingdom of God on Earth and in Heaven, I think these are traditions we need to strengthen.

I am sitting at a long dining table with 14 other people. They are all talking about good things, things that are meaningful; it’s not exactly a free for all, so people are taking their turn to share or express something about their experience towards the head of the table, this takes a long time, but as far as I can see there is nothing to fault their sincerity. But I am just not interested and cannot connect to what is of obvious value to them. In fact so much so I feel bored and frustrated and am thinking if I could just leave the table. (Probably how my kids feel when grandma tells them to not get down from the table until they finish their greens.) And now I feel uncomfortable, because if I am bored then I have to ask myself what is my relationship to these people, people that I work ‘with’.

Suddenly I go beyond my boredom. I realise in a moment that if I take these people to be my family, I don’t need to be interested in what they are saying to be at peace, to just be grateful that I can sit with them, to realise that in one way or another I love them.

And then everything seems to have changed. I have to try hard not to cry. (It is a relatively formal setting for goodness sake.) And then someone who I like to listen to but doesn’t normally like to talk in large groups starts talking, and what he shares is candid and personal and I am still able to be in the moment and I can sense the quality of the others around me even more. I catch the atmosphere in the room that I had over looked, that I had been blind to. And I am just grateful to be in the moment and be with these 14 people.

Then someone else starts talking, and speaking in vague spiritual generalisations about the ‘time we live in’, and I let go of the moment and am back in my narrowness. But it was worth it, and there is a residue of that peace swirling around me.

We all get up from the table.

I go and talk to a friend who is a bit down, and try to help them and cautiously offer them some encouragement, we say a prayer together.
Then I meet a doctor on the stair case, one of our German church leaders, I ask him about my bad leg problem, and he measures my legs against each other, sticks some needles in my hand, and looks at me in a way that makes me feel better already.

Meetings: they are what you make of them, and I am learning…..to not take them at face value.

changing my health almost in a moment

One of the great strengths of the Divine Principle is that it explains so well the dynamic relationship between God and His children: that as human beings we need to both listen to God and at the same time determine our own personal destiny.

do you know your intrinsic qualities that are unique to you?

Just been doing my morning study: On page 1487 of the Cheon Song Gyong, Father (Reverend Moon) talks about this:

“Hence you need to look deep inside your mind and consider the intrinsic qualities you were born with originally, and by considering them, you should decide the future purpose that you will pursue. Though God may point you in the right direction, itis up to you to followit of your own accord.”

Then in the middle of page 1489 he explains why it is so important for us to pray and meditate, in order to keep our mind sharp and focused comparing it to how one would whet a knife constantly to keep it fit for purpose.

prayer and meditation are powerful tools to sharpen and focus the mind

Meditation candle helps focus the mind

Every week our meditation & prayer group, of about 10 or 12 people, strives for that inner silence while gentle music plays in the background and the sweet smell of incence fills the room.  The guided meditation, which lasts for about 21 minutes enables the patricipants to share in a time of quiet and inner reflection while following the quiet voice of the group leader.  We close our eyes and are guided to – or some other place of the guide’s choosing – the sea where, facing out into the ocean, we feel ourselves carried on the sound of the surf gently lapping the golden sand.  Sea birds sing joyfully flying to and fro and while the wind is still we drift higher and higher into the realm of peaceful light.  Whoops! Wait a minute!  Did I say, “peaceful light?”  Clearly someone forgot it was supposed to be peaceful for as we all settled into our mystical inner worlds of peace and tranquility a flash of light and clap of thunder – enough to wake the dead, and even the sleeping, brought us all back to the world of reality.  Was it someone’s spirit meeting heavenly forces which reverberated through the group?  No such miracle!  Even as we met at the front door of our host’s house skies were dark and foreboding and the first rains were already starting to fall.  This was not going to be just any meditation night.  And so it turned out to be.  The meditation did, if fact go very well, but first we had to transcend the mundane world of fidgeting bodies, itchy cheeks and thoughts racing along like wild horses in the early stages as overhead a thunder storm did its very best to shake the quiet of our inner spaces.  So, as our meditation quietened the inner storm so the outer storm too was, eventually, quietened by our inner peace.

Our meditation is always followed by some sharing and then some unison prayer as we pour out our hearts for the sake of the world. Although our meditation and prayer were, ultimately, very deep, the sound of the thunder and the flashes of lightning was a stark contrast to our angelic experiences of the week before.

Last week, as we concluded our meditation & prayer evening with a unison prayer, one member of the group happened to look up and saw angels – each about eight feet tall standing next to each person praying.

Deep prayer surrounded by beautiful angels

Each angel was of a specific colour that seemed relevant to the person they were standing next to.  As the angels stood they did so with their right arms outstretched and their hands resting on the head of each person praying – one angel to one person.  Were they carrying our prayers to God?  Were they passing some unseen spiritual energy into our bodies?   We couldn’t say for sure but it was such a nice change to end our prayer, not with the usual someone asking who would like tea or coffee but with someone sharing their vision of angels towering above us filling us with light.  And then we had our teas and coffees.

What had began almost two months ago as an informal prayer gathering has gained its own momentum now, enhanced by the meditation experience and the sharing of our hearts with one another, there is a real sense of brotherhood and fellowship as we each look forward to our next meeting and time of sharing together.

Prayer
Originally uploaded by hyunju21

It’s not secret that hubby and I are hoping for kids in the future and it’s made me more aware of what it means to be a parent. I’ve been feeling a little broody about kids, observing other parents in their parenting styles, avidly watching SuperNanny (she’s changed my whole perspective on parenting methods), and reflecting on what it means to be a parent.

There is one parenting technique that I know that I will NOT adopt into our regime and that’s using prayer as punishment. As a pre-teen, I once observed a parent who forced their child to go pray in front of True Parents’ picture because they were caught stealing. Even from the age of 12 I recognized that this was going to breed problems later. Forcing children to pray when they’re being punished will only reinforce negative associations with prayer and might even plant or nurture seeds of resentment in the child’s heart.

Prayer is such an important part of our faith, a time for us to have alone with God to reach out and try to understand His heart. For 90% of the day, we more or less are unaware of Him so we set aside some time to really try and reach and connect. It’s a precious thing and I hope that Matthew and I will eventually be able to convey the value and heart behind it.

I know that you’re busy, but if you can, take just 1 minute to reach out and touch God’s heart right now.