Cham Bumo Gyeong: Episode 105

Cham Bumo Gyeong
Book 5: Expansion of the Providential Foundation and the Annual Mottoes
Chapter 1: Registration of the Holy Spirit Association and Expansion of the Internal Foundation
Section 6: The Cheongpyeong Holy Ground, Paragraph 11 - 18

11  I named the lake in front of Cheongpyeong training center Cheonshim Lake (天心湖, Heaven’s Heart Lake). And I called the mountain in the front, Seonin Peak (仙人峰, Hermit Peak). Next, the mountain that is on the right side of Mt. Cheonseong, with the character seong (成) meaning “to accomplish,” was named Mt. Cheonseon (天善山, Heaven’s Good Mountain). I went up to the summit of the mountain that is directly in front of the training center and gave it the name Mt. Seonin. And the place that goes up and spreads in a line to Mt. Cheonseong, with the character seong (聖) meaning “to be holy,” to the right side of the training center here, I called Cheonin Dae (天引臺, Heaven’s Guide Tower). That is where we will build our main training center.

That place will be off-limits to everyone except those who have reached a certain level in offering devotions and those special people who have come from abroad. We will make a sanctuary zone and build something like a palace. There is a place at the base of that mountain where we can level up to 12 acres of land. I named it Cheonin Dae, which means heaven is guiding, because we are going to pave a road from there. As you can see, the interpretation of all these names brings forth the concept of an ideal garden.

12  There needs to be a meeting place for the people of the world. Cheongpyeong is that place. We will build an international training center at Cheongpyeong. What are we going to do here? We will prepare a block for each country where we have our mission branches: a Japanese block for Japan, an American block for America, and so on. After buying a vast parcel of land, if a piece of it is designated to become the American block, we will entrust that area to Americans. They will create a village that suits the taste of Americans, so that they can come and attend workshops.

We are preparing a cosmopolitan village, a city where the surroundings will bring together the cultures of each country. And in the middle of it we will build our training center. Accordingly, people who worked in other countries will come to this headquarters to attend seminars, and they should feel that it is a glorious thing for them to come to this place, to participate in the workshops, and then return to their own country. To accomplish this, we need a place with beautiful scenery. And we need to make it so impressive that visitors who come to tour Korea will remember it.

Training center construction

On July 12, 1971 True Parents established the Cheongpyeong training center in Gyeonggi Province, at mountain lot 75-1, Songsan-ri, Seorak-myeon, Gapyeong-gun, as the completion stage holy ground, on the foundation of the Cheongpa-dong church in Seoul and Sutaek-ri Training Center in Gyeonggi Province (now Sutaek-dong, Guri). The training center had a floor space of 300 square meters and the lecture room was 230 square meters. The building itself was constructed of wooden slats and was large enough to lodge more than 200 people. True Parents visited the construction site every day, even in bad weather during the rainy season, to supervise each step. The first meeting held at the training center was the Korean Pastors Summer Workshop, held for five days beginning on July 12, and attended by 28 Protestant pastors.

13  When we were building the training center at Cheongpyeong, we completed within eight days what should have taken as long as two months. I told them on the first day of July to level the ground, and on the second day we started the construction work. In this way, we completed the construction in one week. The Cheongpyeong training center is 530 square meters. The training center lecture hall in itself is 230 square meters, so about 200 people can sleep there. We completed that building in one week. If you include today, it is 10 days.

Today is July 11, 1971. We originally planned to finish by yesterday. Accordingly, it should not go beyond today. Counting this way, we finished everything in eight days, and now we will paint it. We will paint and decorate it for three or four days. However, we are not supposed to decorate it well. If you ask why, it is because this building is in the position of a bride who is getting married while fleeing for her life during wartime. Even if she does not adorn herself well when she gets married, if she lives well after marrying the bridegroom, that is enough.

14  Now we are building a training center at Cheongpyeong, and things would have gone as planned if the weather had not been so bad. The rainy season has started, and it is a problem. By my calculations, the construction work should be finished today or tomorrow, but even if it is not finished tomorrow, after all is said and done, Protestant ministers are scheduled to assemble there.

Yesterday, even though the rain poured down, we had to purchase the materials and continue working. And it’s not as if we have a phone there to order things, so someone had to go out and buy the materials in person. Having no other choice, I left by boat to get that done, in a heavy downpour. Since the rain was pouring down so much, I looked like a person who was trying to flee by boat. It looked as if I were running away to evade machine-gun fire. There were truly many incidents like that.

15  At first, we set up a tent where we were going to bring ministers to attend our workshop. But the weather was rainy and gloomy, and they would have had to go in and out of the tent frequently, which would really be too bad for them. Being in such a dilemma, I drew up our overall plan and directed that the training center should be built by July 8, 1971. Somehow we had to gather people who would be willing to work in this kind of situation. At this time I also made personnel changes, sending 30 district staff members to local missions, so the position of department manager under each district leader was eliminated. I told the people who used to work in those positions to come up here immediately. In the midst of the special Cheongpyeong tent workshops, I told those former managers whom I had called to start digging.

16  The people who are working at Cheongpyeong have been digging in the ground for many days. And yet they get only four or five hours of sleep. That being the case, they are on the verge of death. Yesterday, when I asked people who had been injured to come forward, eight out of the 26 people stepped forward. In short, a third of these workers were injured. So I examined their injuries and saw that they were not serious. That site is a place for paying indemnity. This time, I reorganized the districts under a new system, and I intentionally assigned the digging work to the people who had performed administrative jobs in the districts.

17  I am not a carpenter, but even someone who has built houses for decades sometimes needs me to coach them to get the job done right. This shows that there is not actually anything special that sets experts apart. A person can detect in an instant whether something is suitable or not, if he carefully compares it to a definite standard of value. I even had to coach the worker laying down the underfloor heating system (ondol), saying, “You have to place the ondol like this.”

On one occasion, well-diggers came and asked where they should dig the well. They had seen that the carpenters had to tear their work down and do it again after I reprimanded them because they had made a serious mistake. So the well-diggers were worried that if they made a mistake too, I would scold them, so they came to ask my advice beforehand. Accordingly, I told them that if there is a border area between soft land and hard land, and the border line goes straight and then changes direction, you will hit water if you dig in that very place. Then they asked me, “When did you learn to dig a well?” Do you think I took lessons to learn such things? What I said was based on natural law.

As the leader of the Unification Church over the years, I have resolved problems in certain ways, and these have become formulas. I take a glance and know in an instant what must be done. I can sense what the result will look like, even when it is going to be completely different from what the situation looks like now. And when I look at things, I do not look in only one place, but I see the whole. Even in leveling the ground for a house, I take the whole house into consideration. For me, it is like that with everything.

18  When we were completing the roof of the Cheongpyeong training center, we had made a contract three days beforehand for the delivery of tiles. However, the contractor went somewhere and the tiles had not arrived even on the final day of construction. This was a big problem. Ministers were arriving soon to attend a nationwide summer conference at the lakeside, and if we could not finish by the day of their arrival, everything would collapse. Therefore, I had to rush around and was told they would not deliver the tiles if I did not have the money. So I pleaded until they gave me the slate, and I also hired a motorboat to carry it.

I finally brought it to the training center at 11:30 p.m. By the time we had finished unloading the boat, it was already 2:30 a.m. The motorboat had to go back, but it was past the curfew hour, so the owner of the boat spent the night here. When he woke up in the morning, he saw that during the night, not only had the tiles been laid but also the roof had been ridged and capped. At first he thought that, since it was raining, it must be a temporary fix, for he could not see a single person still working. He was wrong. During the night, within a few hours we put all the tiles in place and finished the roof. So he nicknamed it “the ghost house.” If you look closely at how we painted it, the name fits. And if you stare at it, it looks as if something is lying on its stomach meditating. This is why I think that, in the future, this region’s name will become world-famous.