Cham Bumo Gyeong: Episode 398

Cham Bumo Gyeong
Book 13: The Completion of Restoration and the Settlement of Cheon Il Guk
Chapter 4: The Faith and Environment of the Early Days
Section 3: The Life of Cheon Il Guk Citizens, Gratitude
Section 3: The Life of Cheon Il Guk Citizens, Paragraph 09

Section 3. The Life of Cheon Il Guk Citizens

Gratitude

Cheon Il Guk is a world where, based on true love, heaven and earth unite, the body and mind unite, and one lives in harmony with nature. Citizens of Cheon Il Guk should live according to the original ideal of creation. They should be able to feel that God is always with them, even while Cheon Il Guk is being built, and that He shares the pleasures and pains of life with them. To sustain this, they should live with joy, prayer and gratitude for everything at all times. A life of gratitude is always accompanied by heavenly blessings and heavenly fortune. True Mother teaches that this life of gratitude starts when we completely empty our minds.

1  My motto in life is “How can I live today with more gratitude than yesterday?” I have tried to live a life in which I am more grateful today than I was yesterday, and in which I will be even more grateful tomorrow than I am today. It has been my life's goal to have gratitude in my heart every day. Right before True Father left for Danbury, he said, “Please never complain. You should be grateful for the position you have been placed in, for when you become completely one through your gratitude, great miracles can take place.”

2  We all need to empty our hearts and repent. Those who are in high positions should become all the more humble in heart and grateful to God for being alive each day. And when they look back on their lives, they should express their gratitude for having been allowed to make a new beginning. When you ask for help to make this a day on which you fulfill the providential work that you have not yet been able to accomplish, and on which you live your life with gratitude, your surroundings will look beautiful to you. Then you will be happy, and because you cannot keep this happiness to yourself, you naturally will witness to others.

3  Your mind and body unite when you are truly 100 percent grateful. When this happens, those around you become happier. If you live your life with a heart of gratitude for the blessings heaven has given you, I think you will be able to create even more joy among those around you, and you will be able to spread these blessings to your family, society, nation and world. You are truly happy people to be able to work with the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind. True Parents exist only once in history.

4  When you fail to fulfill your responsibility, you have to pay indemnity. It is inevitable. This is why I have told you not to be arrogant, but to live with a grateful heart. When you find it in your heart to be truly grateful in front of heaven and your brothers and sisters, you find peace. You become free. You break free of your chains.

5  We should always be grateful. First, we should be grateful to God, then to our husband or wife, then to our neighbors. The more gratitude you have, the deeper the love that flows into you. The more you share it, the more of God's love you will receive. You receive it in proportion to the gratitude you share. This is why when the time comes for me to pass on, I will leave behind words of gratitude to this world and return to the Father with only love. And when I return to Him, He and I will live forevermore in love. When that time comes, the only thing that will matter to me is how much I can revere God and live in gratitude. This is my dream.

In order to receive love and blessings, we need to live a life of gratitude. When we encounter misfortunes, God knows about it. When we find ourselves in the most wretched of situations in the world, He cannot help but be aware of it. And when we are in such a position and we are still able to deal with it and digest it with gratitude, God will count us as trustworthy. When we are able to overcome even such situations, we will receive blessings that cannot be found anywhere else. This principle is at work in the world.

6  When we think about the fact that God has labored for us until this day, and that He is fulfilling 95 percent of the mission of paving the world-level pioneer course that we need to follow, we cannot but be grateful to Him. In fact, the very essence of a life of faith is to be grateful to God. When you have such a heart, it can be the basis on which you can form a relationship with Him. Should we be grateful only when we find ourselves in good situations? Of course not. God has not labored for us until this day only when things were going well for Him. The more difficult the situation, the harder and more resolutely He has worked. This is why in order for us to attend God as our Father, we should be grateful to Him for having worked and fought His way through on our behalf. We should not do so only when we are well off, but all the more when we are in difficult situations.

Forgiveness and love

True Parents have forgiven the unforgivable for the sake of God and have loved their enemies for the sake of humankind. Forgiveness and love have great power. Forgiveness opens the hearts of people and love moves people. Miracles have been accomplished through True Parents' forgiveness and love. They have said that, when you forgive and love, fighting can turn to reconciliation, conflict can turn to harmony, and war can turn to peace.

7  I make it a point to never remember the name of an enemy. After a day, I forget it just like that. I have forgotten them all. This is why I do not have any enemies. When I learned that the sons and daughters of my enemies were starving, I took them rice I had bought for myself, and if they could not afford to go to school, I paid their school tuition. Because I have lived my life in such a manner, I have not perished. This is why when Satan so much as sees my name, he turns the other way. This is the reason the Unification Church is growing and developing. If you were to ask how the Unification Church could develop as it has despite all the opposition it has endured, the answer is that it stayed true to its principles of righteousness, forgiveness and love, so God protected it. In short, Satan was not able to destroy us, and we continue to grow and develop, because God protected us.

8 When Korea was under Japanese rule, True Father was caught working for the Korean independence movement and was tortured nearly to death. Yet he still prayed for Japan more than anyone else did and loved the Japanese people. This is why there are now many Japanese members in our church. Moreover, our Japanese members are spread out in many nations across the world pursuing NGO activities. After Korea's liberation, True Father went to communist-ruled Pyongyang to propagate the Word, and while doing so he was unjustly imprisoned twice. It did not deter him, and he earned the nickname “saint of the prison” at the Hungnam death camp, which they called a fertilizer factory. October 14, 1950, was the day on which the North Korean army had decided to execute True Father before retreating, but miraculously he was able to escape just before his scheduled execution.

Forty years later, in 1991 my husband and I passed the Hungnam Prison site on our way to meet President Kim Il-sung at his presidential residence in Hamheung. Our hearts were filled with all kinds of mixed feelings. At that moment we laid a new cornerstone for the unification of North and South Korea. We were reminded once again that our Heavenly Parent works miracles in the places where we forgive and love.

True Father had to suffer unjustly in a South Korean prison, nonetheless, True Parents taught the world the spirit and culture of loving heaven, loving humankind and loving one's country, as well as the Korean language itself. I know that many times in the 1970s and 1980s, when True Father heard western members in such countries as the United States and the United Kingdom singing the Korean national anthem in Korean, he was moved to tears.

Even though the United States sent True Father to prison unjustly, in a spirit of forgiveness at Danbury he still made every effort to move the United States and save the world. As a result, American leaders and Christian pastors took the lead in bringing an end to the Cold War, and since then they have pooled their energies with us to advance our interreligious peace movement. In a word, True Father lived a life of forgiveness and love.

9  Through the indignities True Father had to suffer in Danbury for 13 months, he set an example of forgiving the world and embracing it with the loving heart of a parent. In the same way, Heavenly Father deals with human beings with love and always employs the strategy of being struck first and then taking back what is His. In all of history who else has been like True Father, becoming the embodiment of love and acting from love throughout his life?

We have seen with our own eyes that heaven cannot help but be moved, and that even the most evil people cannot help but melt in front of love. True Father has educated the leaders of Korean society nationwide, from the officials of the IFVOC, to neighborhood branch leaders, and even renowned professors. True Parents' God-centered teaching of true love is echoing across the nation of Korea.

True Father said that the hope of humanity lies in this true love and nothing else. He emphasized that the only way for us to survive is to unite our mind and body based on true love, to unite husband and wife in a family based on true love, and going further, to unite all tribes, nations and the world based on true love.