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#1168 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Tue Jan 5, 2010 2:01 pm
Subject: Dr Sun Jin Moon: The Basic Premises of Positive Psychology 		weeny.kim
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The Basic Premises of Positive Psychology
by Dr. Sun Jin Moon
 
 
In previous articles we have introduced the field of positive psychology as taught by Dr. Tal Ben Shahar, emphasizing the importance of creating an upward spiral or momentum of positive well-being to be happier.  To reiterate, the following are three reasons why positive psychology is a relevant tool for creating happiness.
 
First, positive psychology focuses on what works because what we focus on creates our reality.  The type of questions that we focus on changes the dynamic of the answers.  For instance, in trying to solve the problem of teenage school truancy in underprivileged areas of the United States, rather than asking the simple questions of “How do we keep students in school or prevent school violence? ” we can ask, “How do we cultivate the seed of greatness, virtue, and strength in each student?”  By focusing our questions on everyday problems on the basis of the salutogenic -- or health -- model we can tap into the source of health, success, and well-being, and we can become more active agents as opposed to passive victims.
 
Second, positive psychology contends that happiness does not spontaneously arise if unhappiness is removed.  Using the analogy of dining, if we get rid of indigestion, that does not guarantee that we will enjoy the meal.  So, rather than focusing on weaknesses, by focusing on strengths, we can become active agents in building our competencies and passions.  Positive psychology focuses on pursuing happiness and passion as sources of health and well-being rather than focusing on running away from pain, deficiencies, or unhappiness.
 
Third, by cultivating our spiritual, emotional, and physical capacities through personal growth, self-actualization, and passions, we can deal with our weaknesses, anxieties, and negative emotions, since no life is devoid of pain.  Simply, positive psychology contends that people become ill if they do not pursue health and meaning in their lives.  Cultivating capacity gives us the resources and mind-set to make us more resilient and capable of handling many difficulties of life.  Prevention of illness results from amplifying and cultivating our strengths that build courage, passion, future-mindedness, hope, honesty, capacity for flow, optimism, virtue, love, and insight.  With these, we create a stronger spiritual or emotional “immune system” to transform the way we view the world and deal with inevitable challenges.
 
In order to build a foundation and set the framework or context for later discussions on the details of positive psychology and this field of study, we offer five basic questions to consider.  We will discuss the relevance of each one in more detail in future articles. The five basic questions are as follows:
 
  1. Do we want to see “bridge building” versus division between academia and “Main Street?”
  2. Is change possible, or is change illusive?
  3. Do internal factors such as genetics determine happiness, or is happiness a primary function of the external environment?
  4. Should human nature be obeyed, or should human nature be perfected?
  5. Should happiness be a primary or secondary pursuit?
 
By focusing on these questions based on scientific research, we should be given more knowledge and context to make better decisions for our lives, making them as enriching and meaningful as possible.
 
 
 
previous topics from Dr Sun Jin Moon
 
 
Written by Sun Jin Moon, graduate of Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in Psychology. Sun Jin Moon has written this article with a focus on promoting the topic of Positive Psychology in order for others to learn more about this field and be able to use it in their lives.  (courtesy o familyfed.org)

God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
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WinnyCaymeKim
  
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#1167 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Mon Jan 4, 2010 4:18 pm
Subject: life & lesson: John Gokongwei's life story 		weeny.kim
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John Gokongwei , Jr
Ad Congress Speech

Before I begin, I want to say please bear with me, an 81-year-old man who just flew in from San Francisco 36 hours ago and is still  suffering from jet lag. However, I hope I will be able to say what you want to hear.

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Thank you very much for having me here tonight to open the Ad Congress. I know how important this event is for our marketing and advertising colleagues. My people get very excited and go into a panic, every other year, at this time.

I would like to talk about my life, entrepreneurship, and globalization. I would like to talk about how we can become a great nation.

You may wonder how one is connected to the other, but I promise that, as there is truth in advertising, the connection will come.

Let me begin with a story I have told many times. My own.

I was born to a rich Chinese-Filipino family. I spent my childhood in Cebu where my father owned a chain of movie houses, including the first air-conditioned one outside Manila. I was the eldest of six children and lived in a big house in Cebu's Forbes Park.

A chauffeur drove me to school everyday as I went to San Carlos University, then and still one of the country's top schools. I topped my classes and had many friends. I would bring them to watch movies for free at my father's movie houses.

When I was 13, my father died suddenly of complications due to typhoid. Everything I enjoyed vanished instantly. My father's empire was built on credit. When he died, we lost everything-our big house, our cars, our business-to the banks.

I felt angry at the world for taking away my father, and for taking away all that I enjoyed before. When the free movies disappeared, I also lost half my friends. On the day I had to walk two miles to school for the very first time, I cried to my mother, a widow at 32.  But she said: 'You should feel lucky. Some people have no shoes to walk to school. What can you do? Your father died with 10 centavos in his pocket.'

So, what can I do? I worked.

My mother sent my siblings to China where living standards were lower. She and I stayed in Cebu to work, and we sent them money regularly. My mother sold her jewelry. When that ran out, we sold roasted peanuts in the backyard of our much-smaller home. When that wasn't enough, I opened a small stall in a palengke.  I chose one among several palengkes a few miles outside the city because there were fewer goods available for the people there. I woke up at five o'clock every morning for the long bicycle ride to the palengke with my basket of goods.

There, I set up a table about three feet by two feet in size. I laid out my goods-soap, candles, and thread-and kept selling until everything  was bought. Why these goods? Because these were hard times and this was a poor village, so people wanted and needed the basics-soap to keep them clean, candles to light the night, and thread to sew their clothes.

I was surrounded by other vendors, all of them much older. Many of  them could be my grandparents. And they knew the ways of the palengke far more than a boy of 15, especially one who had never worked before.

But being young had its advantages. I did not tire as easily, and I moved more quickly. I was also more aggressive. After each day, I  would make about 20 pesos in profit! There was enough to feed my siblings  and still enough to pour back into the business. The pesos I made in the palengke were the pesos that went into building the business I have today.

After this experience, I told myself, 'If I can compete with people so much older than me, if I can support my whole family at 15, I can  do anything!'

Looking back, I wonder, what would have happened if my father had not left my family with nothing? Would I have become the man I am?  Who knows?
 
The important thing to know is that life will always deal us a few bad cards. But we have to play those cards the best we can. And WE can  play to win!

This was one lesson I picked up when I was a teenager. It has been my guiding principle ever since. And I have had 66 years to practice self-determination. When I wanted something, the best person to depend on was myself.

And so I continued to work. In 1943, I expanded and began trading  goods between Cebu and Manila . From Cebu , I would transport tires on a  small boat called a batel. After traveling for five days to Lucena, I would load them into a truck for the six- hour trip to Manila . I would  end  up sitting on top of my goods so they would not be stolen! In Manila , I would then purchase other goods from the earnings I made from the  tires, to sell in Cebu .

Then, when WWII ended, I saw the opportunity for trading goods in post-war Philippines . I was 20 years old. With my brother Henry, I  put up Amasia Trading which imported onions, flour, used clothing, old newspapers and magazines, and fruits from the United States . In 1948, my mother and I got my siblings back from China . I also converted a two-story building in Cebu to serve as our home, office, and  warehouse all at the same time. The whole family began helping out with the business.

In 1957, at age 31, I spotted an opportunity in corn-starch manufacturing. But I was going to compete with Ludo and Luym, the richest group in Cebu and the biggest cornstarch manufacturers. I borrowed money to finance the project. The first bank I approached  made me wait for two hours, only to refuse my loan. The second one, China Bank, approved a P500,000-peso clean loan for me. Years later, the banker who extended that loan, Dr. Albino Sycip said that he saw something special in me. Today, I still wonder what that was, but I still thank Dr. Sycip to this day.

Upon launching our first product, Panda corn starch, a price war  ensued. After the smoke cleared, Universal Corn Products was still left standing. It is the foundation upon which JG Summit Holdings now  stands.

Interestingly, the price war also forced the closure of a third cornstarch company, and one of their chemists was Lucio Tan, who  always kids me that I caused him to lose his job. I always reply that if it were not for me, he will not be one of the richest men in the Philippines today.

When my business grew, and it was time for me to bring in more people- my family, the professionals, the consultants, more employees- I knew that I had to be there to teach them what I knew. When dad died at age 34, he did not leave a succession plan. From that, I learned that one must teach people to take over a business at any time. The values of hard work that I learned from my father, I taught to my children. They started doing jobs here and there even when they were still in high school. Six years ago, I announced my retirement and handed the reins to my youngest brother James and only son Lance. But my children tease me because I still go to the office every day and make myself useful. I just hired my first Executive Assistant and moved into a bigger and nicer office.

Building a business to the size of JG Summit was not easy. Many challenges were thrown my way. I could have walked away from them, keeping the business small, but safe. Instead, I chose to fight. But this did not mean I won each time.

By 1976, at age 50, we had built significant businesses in food products anchored by a branded coffee called Blend 45, and agro- industrial products under the Robina Farms brand. That year, I faced one of my biggest challenges, and lost. And my loss was highly publicized, too. But I still believe that this was one of my defining moments.

In that decade, not many business opportunities were available due to the political and economic environment. Many Filipinos were already sending their money out of the country. As a Filipino, I felt that our money must be invested here. I decided to purchase shares in San Miguel, then one of the Philippines' biggest corporations. By 1976, I had acquired enough shares to sit on its board.

The media called me an upstart. 'Who is Gokongwei and why is he doing all those terrible things to San Miguel?' ran one headline of the day. In another article, I was described as a pygmy going up against the powers-that- be. The San Miguel board of directors itself even aid for an ad in all the country's top newspapers telling the public why I should not be on the board. On the day of reckoning, shareholders quickly filled up the auditorium to witness the battle. My brother James and I had prepared for many hours for this debate. We were nervous and excited at the same time.

In the end, I did not get the board seat because of the Supreme Court Ruling. But I was able to prove to others-and to myself-that I was willing to put up a fight. I succeeded because I overcame my fear, and tried. I believe this battle helped define who I am today.  In a twist to this story, I was invited to sit on the board of Anscor and San Miguel Hong Kong 5 years later. Lose some, win some.

Since then, I've become known as a serious player in the business world, but the challenges haven't stopped coming.

Let me tell you about the three most recent challenges. In all three, conventional wisdom bet against us. See, we set up businesses against market Goliaths in very high-capital industries: airline, telecoms, and beverage.

Challenge No. 1: In 1996, we decided to start an airline. At the time, the dominant airline in the country was PAL, and if you wanted to travel cheaply, you did not fly. You went by sea or by land.

However, my son Lance and I had a vision for Cebu Pacific: We wanted every Filipino to fly.

Inspired by the low-cost carrier models in the United States, we believed that an airline based on the no-frills concept would work here. No hot meals. No newspaper. Mono-class seating.  Operating with a single aircraft type. Faster turn around time. It all worked, thus enabling Cebu Pacific to pass on savings to the consumer.

How did we do this? By sticking to our philosophy of 'low cost, great value.'

And we stick to that philosophy to this day. Cebu Pacific offers incentives. Customers can avail themselves of a tiered pricing scheme, with promotional seats for as low a P1. The earlier you book, the cheaper your ticket.

Cebu Pacific also made it convenient for passengers by making online booking available. This year, 1.25 million flights will be booked through our website. This reduced our distribution costs dramatically.

Low cost. Great value.

When we started 11 years ago, Cebu Pacific flew only 360,000  passengers, with 24 daily flights to 3 destinations. This year, we expect to fly more than five million passengers, with over 120 daily flights to 20 local destinations and 12 Asian cities. Today, we are the largest in terms of domestic flights, routes and destinations.

We also have the youngest fleet in the region after acquiring new Airbus 319s and 320s. In January, new ATR planes will arrive. These are smaller planes that can land on smaller air strips like those in Palawan and Caticlan. Now you don't have to take a two-hour ride by mini-bus to get to the beach.

Largely because of Cebu Pacific, the average Filipino can now afford to fly. In 2005, 1 out of 12 Filipinos flew within a year. In 2012, by continuing to offer low fares, we hope to reduce that ratio to 1 out of 6. We want to see more and more Filipinos see their country and the world!

Challenge No. 2: In 2003, we established Digitel Mobile Philippines, Inc. and developed a brand for the mobile phone business called Sun Cellular. Prior to the launch of the brand, we were actually involved  in a transaction to purchase PLDT shares of the majority shareholder.

The question in everyone's mind was how we could measure up to the two telecom giants. They were entrenched and we were late by eight years! PLDT held the landline monopoly for quite a while, and was first in the mobile phone industry. Globe was a younger company, but it launched digital mobile technology here.

But being a late player had its advantages. We could now build our platform from a broader perspective. We worked with more advanced technologies and intelligent systems not available ten years ago. We chose our suppliers based on the most cost-efficient hardware and software. Being a Johnny-come- lately allowed us to create and launch more innovative products, more quickly.

All these provided us with the opportunity to give the consumers a choice that would rock their world. The concept was simple. We would offer Filipinos to call and text as much as they want for a fixed monthly fee. For P250 a month, they could get in touch with anyone within the Sun network at any time. This means great savings of as much as 2/3 of their regular phone bill! Suddenly, we gained attraction.  Within one year of its introduction, Sun hit one million customers.

Once again, the paradigm shifts - this time in the telecom industry.  Sun's 24/7 Call and Text unlimited changed the landscape of mobile- phone usage.

Today, we have over 4 million subscribers and 2000 cell sites around the archipelago. In a country where 97% of the market is pre-paid, we believe we have hit on the right strategy.

Sun Cellular is a Johnny-come- lately, but it's doing all right. It  is a third player, but a significant one, in an industry where Cassandras believed a third player would perish. And as we have done in the realm of air travel, so have we done in the telecom world: We have changed the marketplace.

In the end, it is all about making life better for the consumer by giving them choices.

Challenge No. 3: In 2004, we launched C2, the green tea drink that would change the face of the local beverage industry -- then, a playground of cola companies. Iced tea was just a sugary brown drink served bottomless in restaurants. For many years, hardly was there any significant product innovation in the beverage business.

Admittedly, we had little experience in this area. Universal Robina Corporation is the leader in snack foods but our only background in beverage was instant coffee. Moreover, we would be entering the playground of huge multinationals. We decided to play anyway.

It all began when I was in China in 2003 and noticed the immense popularity of bottled iced tea. I thought that this product would have huge potential here. We knew that the Philippines was not a traditional tea-drinking country since more familiar to consumers were colas in returnable glass bottles. But precisely, this made the market ready for a different kind of beverage. One that refreshes yet gives the health benefits of green tea. We positioned it as a 'spa' in a bottle. A drink that cools and cleans, thus, C2 was born.

C2 immediately caught on with consumers. When we launched C2 in 2004, we sold 100,000 bottles in the first month. Three years later, Filipinos drink around 30 million bottles of C2 per month. Indeed, C2 is in a good place.

With Cebu Pacific, Sun Cellular, and C2, the JG Summit team took control of its destiny. And we did so in industries where old giants had set the rules of the game. It's not that we did not fear the giants. We knew we could have been crushed at the word go. So we just made sure we came prepared with great products and great strategies. We ended up changing the rules of the game instead.

There goes the principle of self-determination, again. I tell you, it works for individuals as it does for companies. And as I firmly believe, it works for nations.

I have always wondered, like many of us, why we Filipinos have not lived up to our potential. We have proven we can. Manny Pacquiao and Efren Bata Reyes in sports. Lea Salonga and the UP Madrigal Singers in performing arts. Monique Lhuillier and Rafe Totenco in fashion.  And these are just the names made famous by the media. There are many more who may not be celebrities but who have gained respect on the world stage.

But to be a truly great nation, we must also excel as entrepreneurs before the world. We must create Filipino brands for the global market place.

If we want to be philosophical, we can say that, with a world-class brand, we create pride for our nation. If we want to be practical, we can say that, with brands that succeed in the world, we create more jobs for our people, right here.

Then, we are able to take part in what's really important-giving our people a big opportunity to raise their standards of living, giving them a real chance to improve their lives.

We can do it. Our neighbors have done it. So can we.  In the last 54 years, Korea worked hard to rebuild itself after a world war and a civil war destroyed it. From an agricultural economy in 1945, it shifted to light industry, consumer products, and heavy industry in the '80s. At the turn of the 21st century, the Korean government focused on making Korea the world's leading IT nation.  It did this by grabbing market share in key sectors like semiconductors, robotics, and biotechnology.

Today, one remarkable Korean brand has made it to the list of Top 100 Global Brands: Samsung. Less then a decade ago, Samsung meant nothing  to consumers. By focusing on quality, design, and innovation, Samsung improved its products and its image. Today, it has surpassed the Japanese brand Sony. Now another Korean brand, LG Collins, is following in the footsteps of Samsung. It has also broken into the Top 100 Global Brands list.

What about China? Who would have thought that only 30 years after opening itself up to a market economy, China would become the world's fourth largest economy? Goods made in China are still thought of as cheap. Yet many brands around the world outsource their manufacturing to this country. China's own brands-like Lenovo, Haier, Chery QQ, and Huawei-are fast gaining ground as well.  I have no doubt they will be the next big electronics, technology and car brands in the world.

Lee Kwan Yu's book 'From Third World to First' captures Singapore's aspiration to join the First World. According to the book, Singapore was a trading post that the British developed as a nodal point in its maritime empire. The racial riots there made its officials determined to build a 'multiracial society that would give equality to all citizens, regardless of race, language or religion.'

When Singapore was asked to leave the Malaysian Federation of States in 1965, Lee Kwan Yew developed strategies that he executed with single-mindedness despite their being unpopular. He and his cabinet started to build a nation by establishing the basics: building infrastructure, establishing an army, WEEDING OUT CORRUPTION,providin g mass housing, building a financial center. Forty short years after, Singapore has been transformed into the richest South East Asian country today, with a per capita income of US$32,000.

These days, Singapore is transforming itself once more. This time it wants to be the creative hub in Asia, maybe even the world. More and more, it is attracting the best minds from all over the world in filmmaking, biotechnology, media, and finance. Meantime, Singaporeans have also created world-class brands: Banyan Tree in the hospitality industry, Singapore Airlines in the Airline industry and Singapore Telecoms in the telco industry.

I often wonder: Why can't the Philippines, or a Filipino, do this?

Fifty years after independence, we have yet to create a truly global brand. We cannot say the Philippines is too small because it has 86 million people. Switzerland, with 9 million people, created Nestle.  Sweden, also with 9 million people, created Ericsson. Finland, even smaller with five million people, created Nokia. All three are major global brands, among others.

Yes, our country is well-known for its labor, as we continue to export people around the world. And after India, we are grabbing a bigger chunk of the pie in the call-center and business-process- outsourcing industries. But by and large, the Philippines has no big industrial base, and Filipinos do not create world-class products.

We should not be afraid to try-even if we are laughed at. Japan, laughed at for its cars, produced Toyota. Korea , for its electronics,  produced Samsung. Meanwhile, the Philippines ' biggest companies 50 years ago-majority of which are multinational corporations such as Coca- Cola, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever Philippines , for example-are still  the biggest companies today.  There are very few big, local challengers.

But already, hats off to Filipino entrepreneurs making strides to globalize their brands.

Goldilocks has had much success in the Unites States and Canada ,  where half of its customers are non-Filipinos. Coffee-chain Figaro may be a small player in  the coffee world today, but it is making the leap to the big time. Two Filipinas, Bea Valdez and Tina Ocampo, are now selling their Philippine-made jewelry and bags all over the world. Their labels are now at Barney's and Bergdorf's in the U.S. and in many other high-end shops in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

When we started our own foray outside the Philippines 30 years ago, it wasn't a walk in the park. We set up a small factory in Hong Kong to manufacture Jack and Jill potato chips there. Today, we are all over Asia. We have the number-one-potato- chips brand in Malaysia and Singapore. We are the leading biscuit manufacturer in Thailand, and a significant player in the candy market in Indonesia. Our Aces cereal brand is a market leader in many parts of China. C2 is now doing very well in Vietnam, selling over 3 million bottles a month there, after only 6 months in the market.  Soon, we will launch C2 in other South East Asian markets.

I am 81 today. But I do not forget the little boy that I was in the palengke in Cebu. I still believe in family. I still want to make good. I still don't mind going up against those older and better than me. I still believe hard work will not fail me. And I still believe in people willing to think the same way.

Through the years, the market place has expanded: between cities, between countries, between continents. I want to urge you all here to think bigger. Why serve 86 million when you can sell to four billion Asians? And that's just to start you off. Because there is still the world beyond Asia. When you go back to your offices, think of ways to sell and market your products and services to the world. Create world-class brands.

You can if you really tried. I did. As a boy, I sold peanuts from my backyard. Today, I sell snacks to the world.

I want to see other Filipinos do the same.

Thank you and good evening once again
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
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#1166 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Jan 3, 2010 1:08 am
Subject: health is wealth (164): 10 foods that causes heart attacks 		weeny.kim
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10 Foods that Cause Heart Attacks

Concerned about high cholesterol or high blood pressure? Avoid
these foods at all costs.
By Seth Czarnecki, Quality Health News
Reviewed by Quality Health's Medical Advisory Board
From: www.QualityHealth. com

You probably already knew junk food is bad for your waistline, but
did you ever stop to think about what it's doing to your heart? In
particular, watch out for foods high in saturated fat, sodium, and
cholesterol- -all of which can raise the risk of heart disease and
heart attack, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
And while desserts can be dangerous, plenty of other common foods
are proven to be detrimental to your heart health. So drop your
fork, and pay attention. Here, a guide to the ten foods that can
cause heart attacks and what you should eat instead.

1. Fried chicken.
Fried food is a known cholesterol and fat powerhouse, but chicken
sounds healthy. Four pieces of KFC's Original Recipe Chicken comes
with 920 calories, 63g of fat, 350mg of cholesterol- -and that's
not including the fat-laden sides.

Eat this: A grilled, skinless chicken breast is one of the most
nutritional meats you can eat. At 120 calories, 1.5g of fat, and
70mg of cholesterol, a grilled chicken breast can make a tasty
substitute for its fried, fat-loaded brethren.

2. Sausages.
A staple at tailgate parties and barbecues, sausages can wreak
havoc on your arteries. The Johnsonville Original Bratwurst or
Italian Sausages contain 22g fat (8g saturated fat), and 810mg
of sodium per grilled link.

Eat this: Try smoked turkey sausages. At only 110 calories,
6g of fat (1.5g saturated fat) turkey sausages--though not an
everyday fare--are a better alternative.

3. Cheesecake.
Let the sweet toothed beware; most cheesecakes will run up your
calorie and fat intake. An especially risky choice is the Cheesecake
Factory's Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake, which packs a whopping
860 calories, 57g of fat, and 80g of carbohydrates per slice. The
allure of this indulgence may be strong, but think twice before
diving in.

Eat this: If you have a hankering for cheesecake, opt for the plain
variety. With 315 calories, 20g of fat, and 25g of carbohydrates,
though it's not a healthy choice, the plain cheesecake is less
detrimental to your heart than its chocolaty cousin.

4. Steak.
Yes, the steak. High amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol make
red meat, particularly in large quantities, an unhealthy heart choice.
A top sirloin cut of beef, raw, can run you 594 calories, 18.5g of fat
(6.8g saturated fat), and 191mg of cholesterol. If you pan-fry it,
you'll add even more calories, cholesterol, and grams of fat.

Eat this:
Choosing the right cut of beef can prevent a lot of wear and tear on
your arteries. The pricey filet mignon will cost you only 6.7g of fat
(2.5g saturated fat), and 67mg of cholesterol. Filet mignon out of
your price range? A T-bone steak is less-expensive healthy choice
for your red meat cravings.

5. Burgers.
Choosing the wrong burger can have big repercussions for your heart.
McDonald's famous Big Mac contains 540 calories, 29g of fat, and
1040mg of sodium. Even if you make your hamburgers at home, a
three-ounce hamburger made with 80 percent-lean beef still has
14.8g of fat (5.6g saturated fat), and 76mg of cholesterol.

Eat this: The best alternative for ground beef is ground turkey breast.
It clocks in at an amazing 120 calories, 1g of fat (0g saturated), and
28g of protein per four-ounce burger. Add ground pepper, a pinch of
cayenne, and a dash of salt to beef up your turkey burger.

6. Pizza.
It's a convenient, Friday-night delivery essential, but pizza is no
friend of your heart. A single plain slice has 9.8g of fat (4.4 saturated
fat), and 551mg of sodium. But who just stops at one?

Eat this: Pizza is an easy, do-it-yourself meal. Start with whole wheat
dough, English muffins, or pitas, then add sauce and reduced fat cheese
to create a flavorful, healthy alternative your whole family can help
make.

7. Pasta.
It's an Italian classic: spaghetti and meatballs. Mom's recipe may
include a secret ingredient, but the dish served at Romano's Macaroni
Grill has some eye-popping extras: 1,430 calories, 81g of fat and
41g of saturated fat, and 4540mg of sodium.

Eat this: If you have pasta on the brain, try the whole wheat variety.
On average, this kind contains only 197 calories, 0.8g fat, and is a
great source of fiber. A little marinara sauce won't put you in a
nutritional bind. If you're in the mood for meatballs, go for ground
turkey.

8. Ice cream.
It may evoke memories of your carefree childhood days, but ice cream is
anything but innocent. Ben and Jerry's best-selling flavor, Cherry Garcia,
packs 14g of fat (10g saturated), and 22g of sugar for every 1/2 cup (approximately two scoops).

Eat this: The obvious alternative to ice cream is frozen yogurt. The
frozen yogurt version of Cherry Garcia contains half the calories and
only 3g of fat (2g saturated).

9. Doughnuts.
It's probably no surprise that these breakfast blunders made the list
of worst heart foods. However, few people know how terrible can be.
Just one Krispy Kreme Creme Filled Chocolate Doughnut is a doozey:
20g of fat (5 saturated), 23g of sugar, and 38g of carbohydrates.
It'll take you an hour to walk off the damage.

Eat this: Reach for instant oatmeal, which has been proven to lower
the bad LDL cholesterol and boost your metabolism. Add some fresh
berries for an excellent start to your day.

10. Chips.
First, consider that the average 1-ounce bag of plain, salted potato
chips contains 155 calories, 10.6g of fat (3.1g saturated fat), and
149mg of sodium. Then multiply those numbers by 112: that's the number
of 1-ounce bags that the average American eats in a year. It's the
equivalent of seven pounds of potato chips annually.

Eat this: A great choice instead of potato chips and the fattening
dips that go along with it are the dynamic duo of pita and hummus.
One pita has under 100 calories and less than one gram of fat.
Hummus is an excellent, low-fat, low-cholesterol choice for a dip.
And it tastes great.


God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
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#1165 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Dec 31, 2009 2:53 pm
Subject: Power & Importance of Imagination 		weeny.kim
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Rev In Jin Moon of Lovin' Life Ministry
Power & Importance of Imagination
Dec 6, 2009 at Manhattan Center New York
 
Good morning, brothers and sisters.  How is everyone this morning? 
 
I am delighted to see you once again.  We just had the Seventh Annual Ambassadors for Peace Awards Ball the other day and were delighted to have such distinguished guests together with us, along with lots of inspired young people.  The crowd enjoyed great ballroom dancing, and I heard that quite a few people that I know very well in the audience really boogied down and had a great time.  I was delighted to hear that our community can come out together like this in celebration of something wonderful, acknowledging the new chairman of the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), Dr. Hyung Jin Moon.  We wish him the best in the years to come, and we know that under his leadership UPF will be taken to a whole new level.  I am sure that the Ambassadors for Peace will continue to grow. 
 
My father has never stopped dreaming about world peace ever since Jesus Christ appeared to him when he was a 16-year-old boy and asked him to fulfill Jesus' mission.  Even though he's well past 90 years of age, not a day goes by, not a minute goes by when my father doesnt think about what the word peace means to him.  In the last years of his life, what he really wants to see is the reunification of the two Koreas. My family, including all my brothers and sisters, is working very hard to see that dream realized, and I know that all of you have been working so hard throughout the years.  As a member of the True Family, I would like to thank you for all your efforts and all your sacrifice. 
 
As I was thinking about what I would like to talk about this morning, coming from this wonderful ball where the theme of Generation Peace and the word peace was very much with us throughout the event, I considered the great men and women of history who have decorated and inspired our lives.  I would have to start with my parents.  When I think about their lives and about what makes them such a great man and woman, there's one theme that runs through their lives, as well as throughout the lives of all the great people I have met.
 
Everybody who becomes a great person and truly expresses his or her luminous divine light unto the world has a common theme. They, like my father and mother, have a spark of imagination.  Webster's dictionary defines imagination as the power or the act of creating mental images that have yet to exist or are yet to be experienced. 
 
The various religious heritages encourage people to meditate and to visualize. For a lot of us who've gone through the flu season or some chronic illness, homeopathic-type doctors have encouraged us to do mental exercises, visualizing our body getting better.  I've thought about this when I was in the hospital recuperating from an illness or when I was being fed chicken soup during a long bout with the flu.  I tried my best to create mental images of wholeness, of a healthy body and wanting to be strong again. 
 
Sometimes I would do little case studies on myself. When I got sick, I would try different methods, but I would always come back to creating mental images in my mind, visualizing where I wanted to be.  In my four decades of life and self-discovery, I've learned that this process of imagination has an incredible efficacy rate in healing oneself from ailments. 
 
I've also noticed that this ability to imagine is usually the spark or the inspiration that causes you to want to be something greater than you are.  When I look at my father's life and when I study his writings and speeches, I see a man who is so inspired because he can imagine the peaceful world that has yet to exist.  He can imagine a world where all races, religions, and people of different cultural heritages come together and live together as one family under God, under the same Heavenly Parent. 
 
My father can imagine a world where goodness is not something to strive for because you want some kind of reward or because you dont want to be a bad person and thus avoid punishment.  He can imagine a world where people are good people, just because: just because they know they are eternal sons and daughters of God. He imagines a world where there are no suicide bombers.  He imagines a world where children are no longer killed as they go to school, wanting only to better their education and their lives.  He can imagine a world where the two Koreas are no longer divided. My father can imagine a world where there is no more killing and no more hatred. He sees, and in seeing he experiences a world that he knows can be a peaceful world, one that we can experience in our lifetime.
 
From the moment my father was inspired by Jesus Christ, he had a dream, and he started to imagine, putting into mental images things that are yet to exist - like his dream of finding an eternal bride, a woman who was not only beautiful on the outside but beautiful on the inside, who could be his eternal partner and stand together with him as the True Parents of humankind.  My father dreamt that dream.  He imagined what is yet to exist, but in imagining and in visualizing he could make that dream—those mental images - into reality.   
 
My mother often told me that her mother married her father because a wise old woman in her village said, If you two come together in matrimony and have a child, you will have the messiah. A messiah will be born in your lineage. That is why my mother's father and mother came to be together.  Because my mother was born in the context of a patriarchal society, where the value of the son was more important than the value of a daughter, when my mother was born, her father was deeply disappointed. He had been promised a messiah and therefore was expecting a son. But God sent him a daughter. My mother grew up never knowing her father because he left my grandmother.   
 
The same wise old woman headed a group of prayer ladies who ran a church that existed because its members believed that the messiah would come in their lifetimes, and it would be their duty to clothe and feed him, to support his ministry. Their whole purpose was to await the messiah and to be there for him as the main foundation for his ministry.  
 
This lady came upon my mother when my grandmother took her to this church. There was something very precious and special about my mother. When this senior lady saw my mother, she felt compelled to pray.  She had never done this before over a young girl she'd never met, but she felt overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit and felt that there was something unique and special in this child. I think she felt or imagined that this was an extraordinary woman in the making. In fact, Im sure she experienced mental images of what my mother was going to be.  So she offered a prayer, blessed her, and anointed her in the Christian tradition as a woman of God, someone who was born to do great things. 
 
Even though my mother was very young and didnt really understand the full significance of this prayer when she received it at eight years old, she kept this feeling, this dream that she was supposed to be a servant of God.  In fact, she imagined her life to be that of someone like Mother Teresa, someone who would live her whole life for Jesus Christ and for the Lord, maybe not even marrying. This is how serious my mother was about her dream, her mental images of what she wanted to be.  She kept this dream alive within her.   
 
Of course, God works in mysterious ways.  Her mother joined the Unification movement, and my father soon came to know her.  My grandmother told me a story about the first time she brought my mother to the church.  Your father was talking to a group of brothers and sisters, but I think he felt something in the air.  He looked up and saw this young girl.  Then he prayed, murmuring, Thank you, Heavenly Father, for sending such a lovely representative as your daughter. 
 
My grandmother loved to tell me this story when I was growing up, that my father recognized something special in my mother.  Of course, she grew up and became my father's partner in marriage, and together they started their ministry as the True Parents of humankind in 1960.  Since then they have worked tirelessly to bring peace.   
 
My father and mother often told their children, How do we create a world of peace?  There are many ways to create peace. If we think about the family as the school of love, probably the most effective way to bring about peace is international marriage, with people from different backgrounds coming together in holy matrimony as eternal partners because they are committed to our Heavenly Parent, they are committed to humanity as brothers and sisters, and they accept that we belong to the same family under God. 
 
Over the years my father has blessed thousands of couples from opposite backgrounds - from enemy countries of Japan and Korea, for instance.  Because I grew up in the beauty of our international community, I never realized how deep is the hatred between Japanese and Koreans until I went to college and then started having kids.  My mother was kind enough to find me a nanny to help take care of the kids while I was finishing my education.  
 
When I encountered my Korean friends on campus and they realized that my children were being cared for by a Japanese nanny, their mouths dropped open.  This was in the mid-1980s.  I had no idea how deep the hatred was between Koreans and Japanese. These friends were from the educated elite of Korea. They came to study abroad at the best American university; they were the future movers and shakers of Korea. They said to me, How can you allow your child to be raised by Japanese hands?  I said, What are you talking about?  They said to me, Japanese people used us as slaves for 40 years when they occupied our country.  They stole and raped our women.  They took our women and put them in brothels for the enjoyment of Japanese soldiers as they went about conquering different countries.  How can you allow a Japanese person to raise your Korean child? 
 
I said to my classmates, First of all, I was raised not to see myself as a Korean.  I was raised to be proud of my Korean heritage, but I was raised to be proud that I am the eternal daughter of God, that I am more than a single nation.  I am not raising my child to be just a Korean boy; I am raising him to be a great son of this world, a great son of our community. 
 
I said, We cannot hold our ancestors forever in all the things that have gone wrong. We are a new generation.  We have to think about forgiving, and we have to think about how we are going to inspire our children to imagine a world of peace without being bogged down by a cultural heritage where deep-seated hatred between different countries exists.  If we really want our children to be raised as one family under God, as people belonging to a worldwide community, as people who see the different nationalities as their brothers and sisters, we must concentrate on the fact that we all come from God.  And despite what has gone on in the past, we must make the world a better place for our kids. 
 
I continued, I am honored that Japanese hands can raise my kids.  If Koreans hate Japanese and Japanese hate Koreans as much as they do, I am honored that that Japanese lady is willing to love my child, and not as a Korean.  She is willing to love my child because she knows that my child is also a child of God, a son of God. 
 
I remember telling one particular friend, If we cannot imagine a peaceful world, if we cannot believe in our own dreams of what our world can be, then we are just going to be mere receptacles from one generation to another, basically inheriting and not digesting the baggage of what came before.   Maybe the baggage was old and tattered and full of hate, jealousy, and murderous thoughts, but we know who our Heavenly Parent is. Because we know who we are as eternal sons and daughters, we can be the agents of change that take this baggage of difficulty and transform it into blossoms of true love that can inspire, that can empower, that can encourage the new generation to want to live as if we belong to one family. When I had that conversation with my classmate - which turned into an ongoing conversation and we became lifelong friends - I realized back then that the ability to imagine is really the spark that gets the engine going. 
 
But then we need to do a little more.  My mother always emphasized to her children, To dream is the first step. The rest is up to you. The great churches of Christianity have singled out three words that I love - conceive, believe, and achieve.  My mother has always emphasized the importance of dreaming, envisioning a concept in your mind of what you want to do with your life. But then she encouraged us children to not only imagine, but through a lifetime of experience to turn our dreams into real images, real experiences.  She said that the gulf between concept and belief is bridged by faith: You must have faith in yourself.  First your faith in God, but the next important thing is to have faith in yourself. 
 
She frequently told me that we can be our own worst enemy; we can be the one always making ourselves fail.  But if we believe in God, then we must believe in ourselves because we are his children.  We are divine, just like he is.  If we believe that we are divine, then we realize we have infinite value, having qualities and characteristics like God's, those of being eternal, unique, absolute, and unchanging.  If we believe in that, then we can, with our sheer effort, dedication, and tenacity, achieve what we've long imagined. We can accomplish what we have dreamed.   
 
Martin Luther King, had a dream, too.  He imagined a world where a white man and a black woman could walk down the street and not be stoned.  Im sure he imagined a world where one day black men and women would sit on the Supreme Court and be senators and congressmen, and maybe one day a black man would sit in the White House.  Martin Luther King had this dream; he imagined this reality.  He could see in his mind the images, that what he imagined could be accomplished.  So he turned the impossibility into a possibility because he believed and because he had faith. 
 
One of the greatest things that I know about my father and mother is that they are eternal dreamers, an incredible man and woman of imagination.  They think out of the box.  How many men from my father's generation of Koreans would put their wife out front?  It simply does not happen.  My father is 90 years old, so take yourselves four generations back to the old provincial villages of Korea.  No one from that generation would ever support a woman, let alone his wife, to be a worldwide leader.  Nobody from his generation would encourage his daughters to go beyond being great wives.  He encouraged us to get the best education, to be the best that we can be. In fact, both my parents challenged the daughters in the family to beat our brothers in everything they did - in academics, in sports.  It was relentless.  But they pushed us because they believed that women had a role to fulfill in society, as well as in their families. 
 
Think about a man who has the ability to imagine, to revolutionize the health industry of America.  My father introduced ginseng to the American people in the 1970s.  He introduced the importance of having more fish, more raw fish. Ninety percent of the best sushi that is served in America is provided by the True World Foods group.  He thought outside the box.  He thought about making Americans healthier when at that time the vogue was Burger King and McDonald's.   
 
At a time when nobody thought that water would be sold as a product, my mother championed the importance of having enough water in our diets.  She gave an interview in the late 1970s to a prestigious women's magazine in Korea. When the interviewer asked her, How is it you are past middle age but you look so young? my mother gave two answers. The best way to keep your youth is to smile, which she does so beautifully, and to drink a lot of water.   
 
I remember back then when the interview first appeared, a lot of women were puzzled.  We dont really drink water in Korea; we drink barley tea or other teas.  But here was this beautiful, elegant woman, a very youthful-looking woman, championing the importance of drinking water. When my father created a pharmaceutical company that produced ginseng extract and tea, it was on the advice of my mother, who said that one day water would be a very precious product, that we started bottling the spring water that we own in Korea, which continues to this day. 
 
Again, she was a person who thought out of the box.  Great men and women always do. They are ahead of everybody. When you grow up with parents like that, you realize it may not be a good idea to follow trends.  In fact, when the trends are being followed, it's already too late.  You need to come up with original ideas. 
 
When I became responsible for the American movement, there was a trend in a certain direction.  But because my father and mother have trained me well, I want to imagine something different; I want to dream something a little different.  Because my parents have taught me well, I want to think outside the box. When we first started Lovin' Life Ministries, many people said it could not be done, not in Midtown Manhattan.  What are you thinking?   Nobody's praying at the services.   
 
When we first started Lovin' Life Ministries, I received many supportive e-mails, but the not-so-happy people who wanted to continue a certain trend that our movement was following said, Where are the prayers?  We need at least three prayers.  I said, I believe that our life is a prayer, and I believe prayer can come in many forms.  It can come in unison prayer, where we're all crying together, shouting out, holding up our hands.  But I also think listening to a beautiful song is a prayer. So we have three prayers.  There are always more than three songs before the sermon.   
 
Then others told me, When we come to church, we need to suffer.  We need to feel the pain, to know how horrible we are, to feel guilty sometimes to get ourselves in shape and do better.  My take on it, having raised five kids, is that when you have that philosophy in your family and tell your kids that our job as eternal sons and daughters is to suffer, feel the pain, burn every day, and be serious and miserable, your children, if they are like my children, are not going to be inspired to imagine and dream.   
 
I feel that the best way to inspire ourselves to want to do good is to realize how beautiful each and every one of us is. We are so beautiful because each and every one of us is a masterpiece of our Heavenly Parent.  We need to celebrate this masterpiece, and we need to appreciate ourselves for being such a great gift to the world.  All of you, all of us, have a wonderful ability to change the world.  We are the masterpieces that God has created for each other. 
 
One of my favorite poets is William Blake, of the Romantic Age, who was also a fabulous illustrator.   Some of the artists who have come to appreciate his illustrations are calling him one of the greatest artists of England. He created collections of poetry that he called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  One poem in particular I like to reread from time to time is the most famous and the most enigmatic poem in the collection Songs of Experience, which was published in 1794.  Its title is The Tyger When I feel the pressure and burdens of the world on me, I like to read this poem because it reminds me of the importance of imagination.  It reminds me that we are all divine beings and that we have within our power this incredible creativity.  In fact, it's this wonderful creativity that allows us to be God-like, that allows us to be immortal.   
 
It starts out, Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night.  Why does an English poet, who knows the word tiger very well, spell tiger not with an I but with a Y?  He goes on to talk about how the tiger is fearful, something that incites awe and wonder.  He cajoles the reader into thinking about who made this tiger.  In fact, the question is repeated throughout the six stanzas.  Blake is provoking us, toying with us by continually asking. 
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night. 
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 
 
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire? 
 
And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 
 
What the hammer?  What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 
 
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 
 
Tyger!  Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 
Looking at the first stanza, you see that the first syllable is ty, and that the last syllable of the word symmetry is seemingly try. But if you look at the word right above it, you realize that the last word of the third line of the first stanza is eye.  But because there's the word eye, it pushes you to read symmetry as symmetr-eye.   
 
The first syllable is ty, and the last syllable of the first stanza is try.  So already you get the feeling that the tiger might not be an actual animal.  In fact, Blake is giving us hints all throughout this poem that it might be a metaphor for something else.  If he wanted it to be a tiger, he really should have spelled it with an I.  The letter I is missing, but the pronounced I is very prominent.  There is something about I, meaning me, in the syllable ty and in the syllable try that is repeated again and again. 
 
Mythologically the fire or furnace has been linked to creativity.  The fire burning bright -  when I read that I thought, if it were some kind of catharsis or purgation that is taking place, then the poet would have alluded to a termination as an end result, but there is no allusion to that.  In fact, burning bright, such a present and active verb, is very powerful.  It starts in the first stanza.  In the sixth stanza it's a fearful symmetry in that the sixth stanza mirrors exactly what the first stanza says, except one word.  In the first stanza you have Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forest of the night.  What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry. 
 
Then in the sixth stanza you have the exact same thing, except that could changes to dare.  What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?  So you realize that something that is a could, something that can be imagined, a supposition, has become something that is actually there, that is actually done, that it may be actually completed.   
 
A lot of scholars who have dissected this poem have said that it's about good and evil. 
 
Some have ventured to say it's a poem that elucidates the Old Testament prophets and their understanding of what the fire meant, namely the burning wrath of God.  The tyger becomes God's judgment unto the world of experience.  Some have alluded to the idea that it might be totally scientific.  They understand the poem to explain the astronomical explanations or questions of the universe.   
 
But when I read the poem and see the fearful symmetry that exists in the beauty of how he constructed these six stanzas, I realize that when Blake is asking us who created the tyger, the answer he is seeking from us is that it’s Blake himself who created the tyger. The tyger is not an animal but something that was formed through the furnace of his creativity, something that came out of the forest of the night.  It’s the burning bright, it's the imagination, the spark of creativity that is burning bright that tied his imagination to his hands and his eyes. With his effort and his trying he created a masterpiece that not only shows how incredible God, our Heavenly Parent, is but also points to the fact that every man and woman is an artist who, just like God, has the power to create something beautiful. 
 
Many scholars have looked at the third and fourth stanzas of this poem and suggested that the poet juxtaposes a lot of drama in the context of each stanza because he's playing around with caesura, which is a pause like a rest within a line.  In Stanza Three, And what shoulder, & what art, he breaks that line very abruptly, but in the next line he tones it down a little bit by saying, Could twist the sinews of thy heart?  In the third and fourth lines he reverses that. 
 
What you get when you look at the third stanza is a pattern like A, A, B, B.  And in the fourth stanza we have C, C, D, D.  But the rhyme is constantly changing.  The third stanza, for example, is a trochaic spondee, but then the second one is iambic.  The third line is iambic, but then it's back to trochaic spondee.  He plays with different rhymes and meters to create a tension of something being formed out of nothing.  In the third stanza, you get the image of an artist as a sculptor with powerful shoulders, using physical exertion to create something beautiful.
 
Then in Stanza Four comes the image of an artist as a blacksmith, where the art is chained to an anvil, being molded and shaped, just the way a blacksmith takes a hot rod of iron and bends and molds it to whatever he would like it to be. Under the white heat of creativity, something beautiful and awesome is being created. 
 
In the fifth stanza Blake brings in an almost-cosmic drama of the stars spewing spheres and the heavens being drenched in glory.  What he wants us to realize is that whenever we take part in creative imagination, we are engaging in something of cosmic proportion. 
 
When I addressed the Ambassadors for Peace and encouraged them that our job is to inspire the young people, the children of the world, to aspire to greatness, it's because I believe very strongly that there is no future without great kids.  If we can ignite our ability to imagine and inspire young people to see themselves as something other than a show me the money generation who live for more than the pursuit of money, power, and their own glory, then we can truly be a phenomenal movement.  We can almost guarantee a future when responsible young men and women, inspired by their own dreams and imagination of what they can be, come together as a family wanting more than anything to build a wonderful world of peace. In that way, I believe, my father's dream can be realized. 
 
William Blake provoked and cajoled us, asking in the fifth stanza, Did he smile, his work to see?  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?  Most academics know that the poem The Tyger is a sister poem of a poem called The Lamb in the collection Songs of Innocence.  But we can also understand the lamb in a theological context.  If the creator of the poem is asking, Did he who made the Lamb make thee? we can understand that to mean that he could be God. Did he who made the Lamb make thee?  Did he who created Jesus Christ make you, The Tyger, the poem, or you, the reader? 
 
But if that is what William Blake was asking, then he would have capitalized the letter h in he.  But he distinctly makes a point of not capitalizing the letter h, while he does capitalize the l in Lamb.  The way I understand it, The Lamb is the title of the poem that William Blake wrote in the Songs of Innocence.  When he is cajoling and provoking the reader by writing Did he who made the Lamb make thee? he's giving the reader a hint: Look, it's me, the artist.  By tapping into my divinity, I am becoming immortal, just like God. 
 
Again, when the first syllable starts out with ty again, there's the letter I implicit in the first syllable.  And also, at the end, the last word is symmetry.  Implicit in the syllable try is the letter I.  These are the hints that Blake gives us, saying, It's me, the artist, who has created the tyger, and the tyger is a metaphorical thing.  It is not the scary creature, but the awesome and the wondrous poem that will allow me to be immortal, just like God, because I have tapped into this creativity that comes only from God. 
 
Just as William Blake through this poem reminds us of our own divinity, I want to encourage the congregation to remind ourselves - and I will remind myself - that we are all divine.  Just as a poem like The Tyger is wondrous and powerful in its symmetry, we can be incredibly powerful in what we do by deciding to become agents of change, by deciding to imagine what most people do not want to imagine; by wanting to believe what most people are not ready to believe; and by wanting to be what maybe a lot of people think we cannot be. 
 
We can imagine and we can believe by having strong faith. We need faith in those times when we are believing because life is wonderful, but also difficult.  The Bible reminds us in II Timothy 2:12, If we endure hardships, we will reign with him.  Meaning, if we can actually go through this difficult process of creativity, this hot, burning furnace where our shoulders are worn weary, where we are exerting incredible effort because we want to create something beautiful, we are like that sculptor and that blacksmith, exerting everything we have in order to create something beautiful. 
 
But if we can have faith and endure, just as the Good Book reminds us, then we will be looking into the face of the beautiful word achieve.  Everything that we dreamed, everything that we imagined can and will be accomplished with our effort, our determination, and our faith. 
 
Brothers and sisters, Im hoping that on this Sunday morning you can think about all your loved ones seated around you and really love each other as divine human beings, as masterpieces of art that have been handed to you from God, to share and delight in.  Here at Lovin' Life Ministries we want to celebrate our life.  We want to celebrate our own divinity.  We want to celebrate everything that we can be, and everything that we will be. 
 
Just as my father dreamed for 90 years that world peace will be accomplished, we here at Lovin' Life already imagine.  We are already dreaming.  We are already believing. This means the world of peace is just around the corner. 
 
God bless you, and have a great week.


God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
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#1164 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Tue Dec 29, 2009 2:17 pm
Subject: Fw: Korea Likely to Permit Dual Citizenship 		weeny.kim
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Korea Likely to Permit Dual Citizenship
By Lee Tae-hoon
Staff Reporter

The government plans to permit dual citizenship to Koreans who have acquired another nationality, as well as foreigners who have married a Korean or lived here for five years, a senior Justice Ministry official said.

Korea has scrapped its original plan to offer dual citizenship only to Korean adoptees and foreigners with outstanding talents, said Cha Gyu-geun, head of the ministry's Nationality and Refugee Division.

The ministry has nearly completed the new bill which would overhaul the Naturalization Law, Cha said.

The proposed legislation will be publicly announced in two weeks and will likely be voted on in February at an extraordinary session of the National Assembly, according to Cha.

Both ruling and opposition parties do not deny on the need of passing the revision as it would not only protect the rights of minorities, but also attract talents and woo new voters.

Currently, Korea does not permit multiple nationalities for either its citizens or foreigners.

Pledging Loyalty to Korea

The bill would allow people who meet a certain criteria to have dual nationality, upon the submission of a document pledging loyalty to Korea and vowing not to exercise rights as a foreign national while staying here.

Foreigners who have a Korean spouse or lived in the country for five consecutive years would need to pass a naturalization test to obtain a Korean passport.

Currently, they have to renounce their original nationality within six months after naturalization, a major stumbling block that deters foreigners from seeking Korean citizenship.

Under the current law, Korean nationals who obtain citizenship of another country before turning 20 years old have to renounce one nationality before they are 22. Those who get dual nationality after 20 must choose one nation within two years.

Anyone who does not make a choice within a certain period of time loses their Korean nationality, in some cases without their knowledge.

Compulsory Volunteer Work?

Cha denied a recent media report that the ministry is considering demanding women complete a two-year volunteer assignment or military service on the condition of granting dual citizenship.

"Given that women are exempted from military duty in Korea, such a decision would provoke a strong backlash," Cha said. "The measure was once briefly discussed a long time ago, but the government is no longer considering it."

As many highly skilled Koreans have opted to remain overseas after finishing their study abroad, Korea has been suffering from a brain drain.

The majority of dual nationals from advanced countries, such as the United States, abandon Korean nationality when they are asked to pick only one.

"The country is rapidly heading to an aging society. If it wants to maintain national competitiveness, Korea can no longer afford to lose talented people, who are reluctant to abandon their foreign citizenship," Cha said.

Of the Koreans who earned doctorate degrees in engineering in the United States, 31.3 percent remained there after graduating between 1996 and 1999, and 46.3 percent stayed between 2000 and 2003, according to the ministry.

Collateral Benefits

Cha notes that one of the main collateral benefits of the new measure is that it prevents foreigners from being stateless people in case their Korean citizenship is annulled.

If the revised bill is passed, foreigners who have married a Korean will also be able to become Korean without having to renounce their original citizenship.

Of 1.15 million foreigners in Korea, at least 200 have become stateless because they abandoned their original citizenship to gain a green card here, and lost the Korean one as well on charges of sham marriages, according to the ministry.

Cha said the measure will encourage 20,000 Chinese living in Korea for several generations to naturalize.

The majority of the Chinese have refused to be naturalized because they strongly insist on keeping their original citizenship to maintain their cultural identity and keep relations with their ancestral homeland.

Foreigners who have maintained an address in Korea for five consecutive years or more will also be eligible for dual citizenship.

They will be required to have assets or skills sufficient enough to make a living here, and pass a test on basic Korean communication skills and knowledge of its customs and culture.

As of early this year, more than 23,000 people were on the waiting list for the test. Some wait for up to two-and-a-half years. In an effort to expedite the immigration process, the ministry has been administering the test to 3,000 aspiring Koreans every month since July.

The number of people who have lost or renounced their nationality has increased to 1.8 million since 2002, far surpassing the current 83,000 naturalized or newly reinstated Korean citizens, according to the ministry.

Exceptionally Talented Foreigners

Foreigners deemed to have exceptional talents and who can contribute to national development would qualify for Korean citizenship right away. They do not have to fulfill domestic residential requirements or pass the naturalization test.

The only requirement for them will be making a pledge that they will fulfill their duties as a Korean and give up the privileges as a foreigner while living here.

Aggressive steps are being taken by developed countries to attract the necessary human resources with open-door policies.

The net brain inflow into OECD countries rose from 1 percent in 1990 to 1.6 percent in 2000, and the highly educated increased from 31.2 to 35.4 percent, according to the ministry.

Nearly 100 countries permit multiple citizenship. Israel has allowed dual nationality to reinforce solidarity among Israelis living abroad and encourage them to return to their motherland since its modern state was founded in 1948.

In the United States, a child born in the country is given American citizenship at birth. It is estimated that several millions possess multiple nationality, including Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He has been a U.S. citizen since 1983, and has retained his Austrian citizenship during his service as governor of California.

Even Germany, which has a very restrictive nationality law, does grant dual citizenship under certain circumstances. The estimated number of holders of dual citizenship is around 2 million in the Western European country.

Solution for Aging Society

Korea's birthrate stands at 1.13, one of the lowest in the world, according to the National Statistical Office. By 2050, the population is projected to decline by 6.41 million and the proportion over 65 will be the highest among OECD countries.

The economically active population, aged between 15 and 64, is also expected to fall at a rate of 4 million every 10 years until 2050.

"The original revision bill, announced in May, did not sufficiently address difficulties weaker members of society are facing and lacked measures to prevent Korea from becoming an aging society," Cha said. "The new bill will seek stronger measures that enhance social integration, protect human rights of minorities and help the country cope with the declining workforce and low birthrate."

A 2008 survey conducted by the ministry finds that more than 71 percent of Koreans approved of dual citizenship to a certain extent.

Toward Multicultural Society

Strict nationality regulation has been a major obstacle in attracting foreign talent and a source of inconvenience for expatriates in Korea's increasingly multicultural society.

As of September this year, the number of foreigners in Korea reached 1.15 million, or 2.3 percent of the entire population, the ministry said.

"The number of foreign residents has increased 2.75 times over the past 10 years," said a ministry official. "If the trend continues, Korea will see a foreigner population of roughly 1.6 million by 2012."

With regard to suffrage, the official said that the ministry is considering banning dual citizens from casting ballots until they meet a minimum year of residency requirement.

Remaining Obstacles

Most migrant workers from developing countries are allowed to work in Korea for only three years, making it very difficult for them to meet the five-year residency requirement for Korean citizenship.

Korea has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on the Employment Permit System (EPS) with countries which send some 70,000 migrant workers to Korea each year.

However, their employment contract period cannot exceed one year and they can renew the contract only within the limit of three years from the entry date to Korea.

leeth@...


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#1163 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sat Dec 26, 2009 12:15 am
Subject: Have you tried using ANION SANITARY NAPKIN 		weeny.kim
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#1162 From: "weeny.kim" <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Tue Dec 22, 2009 6:56 pm
Subject: Competent People are hired, without regard to religious affiliation 		weeny.kim
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forwarded note from Bro Robert Torok, thanks a lot!
"This article was published in the leading South Korean news magazine Sisa Journal on August 5, 2009 -- editor. "

"Competent People are hired, without regard to religious affiliation"
by Reporter Hoi Kwon Kim




The Tongil Group is creating a stir in Korea and around the world. The Peace Cup Football Tournament it recently hosted in Spain included Real Madrid C.F. one of the most prestigious football clubsamong its participating teams, and it is playing a part in building the Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel. It also created a stir in communities around Yeosu by greatly scaling-down the Ocean Resort special zone business. Last March it revealed plans to purchase the Yongsan Citizens' Hall site in Yongsan, Seoul, for the largest Unification Church religious structure in Korea.

The person leading these enterprises is Kook Jin Moon (39), CEO of the Tongil Foundation, who is also the fifth son of Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. After taking over as CEO in 2005, he completely reformed the medium-sized group whose assets total some 1.3 trillion won. The group of companies, which recorded an operating loss of 40 billion won in 2004 with a debt to equity ratio of 767%, was transformed into a group making an operating profit of 40 billion won in 2008 with a debt ratio of 184%. Large donations contributed by church members in Japan played a significant role in removing the cumulative deficit. He graduated as an economics major at Harvard University in the United States and also received an MBA from University of Miami, after which he established KAHR, a weapons-manufacturi ng company, which was a great success. Thus, his business management ability won recognition from Rev. Moon. In contrast to the other medium-sized companies, which are experiencing difficulties due to the worldwide financial crisis, the Tongil Group is operating relatively safely thanks to its young navigator. On June 28th last, we met with CEO Moon at the Tongil Group CEO's office in the Dowon Building, located in Dohwa-Dong of Mapo-Gu, Seoul.

Q: Many companies are experiencing difficulties due to the worldwide financial crisis. How is the Tongil Group doing?
A: We are also affected. To begin with, sales have decreased. The Tongil Group focuses mainly on the leisure industry, and we made quite a profit in the sale of condominiums, but at present we are not faring as well in that, either. However, we carried out management restructuring in 2005, and our balance sheet is more solid than ever. Though we are also experiencing difficulties, we are relatively safer compared with other companies.

Q: Is the leisure industry the growth model of the Tongil Group?
A: Most of the group's assets lie in the leisure industry. Only when we do well in that industry can the entire group operate well. The truth is it is not easy to make money in the leisure industry. The scale of investment is big, and there are many risks. Though we have many guests on the weekends, there aren't many during the week. So we are researching new ways to make use of the facilities during the week in order to create an additional profit.

Q: Do you have a new business model?
A: When I assumed the position of the Chairman of the Board of the Tongil Foundation in 2005, many of the companies in the Tongil Group were incurring losses. In particular, such businesses as Yongpyong Resort were incurring an immense operating loss. From then until now has been a time of normalizing company operations. We are still in the stage of cutting expenses and putting the business organization in order. I believe it will take a few more years. Taking up a new business model will come after that.

Q: You own a large amount of real estate in Korea. Does that have anything to do with business?
A: From a long time ago, the Unification Church has owned large tracts of land, many of which are very good. They are worth more than the companies. If we could develop all the land to raise their value, we could create a large profit. Rather than selling the land when the price of real estate rises to gain a trading profit, we plan to develop them when the economy picks up so that we can gain development profits.

Q: Has the scaling-down of Yeosu Ocean Resort been decided?
A: The Yeosu Resort Project was not begun as a business to make money. It is continuously recording a loss, and there isn't a strong possibility that it will improve. We first began to make an investment with the aim of helping the development of the undeveloped southern region. Until now, many foreign companies have invested in Yeosu, but they are also in difficult situations. We are altering our business plans to have reasonable marketability and to guarantee profitability.

Q: What is the Tongil Group's role in the Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel Project?
A: Rev. Sun Myung Moon has been thinking about the Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel since a very long time ago. He believes that, when nations whose relationships aren't friendly are connected in a network that includes structures such as tunnels, this can bring about peace. However, the government should take charge of the project. The Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel will require a great deal of funds, so it will be impossible to do unless the government steps in. The Tongil Group is only presenting an analysis of the technical adequacy and profitability. We are also playing the role of explaining the financial value of the Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel to the Korean and Japanese governments.

Q: You are also running the Pyonghwa Motors business in North Korea. Are you supporting it in any way?
A: We don't give any support. It is only related to Tongil companies through Sang Gwon Park, the CEO of Pyonghwa Motors, a Unification Church member. There are no business interchanges. There is no one in the world who knows more about North Korea than CEO Park. He has been to North Korea more than 150 times, and he is well acquainted with those in charge in North Korea.

Q: The Tongil Foundation cannot be separated from the Unification Church.
A: Tongil Foundation is a non-profit organization. Its certificate of incorporation clearly states that the foundation supports the Unification Church. Our for-profit investments involve about four industries. We run the businesses and make a profit and give the profit to the Unification Church, and sometimes invest that money in the businesses. It is not that difficult to separate religion and financial management. The Tongil Group aims to make a profit, and the foundation owns the stock of the Tongil Group, so it receives a dividend. The mission of the Tongil Foundation is to support the Unification Church.

Q: What percentage of the staff working at the Tongil Group are church members?
A: When I took over as Chairman, only 10% of the staff at the Tongil Group were church members. Now the percentage has increased. Many of the staff members think well of the Unification Church and have converted. Their number is increasing.

Q: For example, experts on financial management would be needed at such places as Central City and Yongpyong Resort. Aren't there many such experts among church members?
A: No, there aren't, so we hire competent people. Even if they are not Unification Church members, if they are competent, we hire them.

Q: You built a successful company in the United States through your own efforts and were living comfortably. That being the case, didn't you hesitate when you were first asked to assume the position of Chairman of the Foundation?
A: I had to do it because my father had asked me to. I feel responsible, because I can help the community. When I came and got down to it, I found that there were many problems. The work I am doing is something that cannot but be stigmatized by others; it is not one that gives happiness. It is very trying. However, I am doing it because somebody has to do it. I would have been much happier if I had stayed in the United States.

Q: When Rev. Sun Myung Moon steps down, who will take charge of the Tongil Group and the Tongil Foundation?
A: I will stay in the position of the Chairman of the Tongil Foundation. As long as I am in that position, the purpose of the Tongil Foundation will continue to be to support the Unification Church. When the assets of the Tongil Group are managed to make profit, the profit goes into supporting the development of the church. My younger brother Hyung Jin is in charge of the church. He is responsible for the religious aspect, and my older brother Hyun Jin is in charge of overseas NGO activities. Even when my father steps down, we will continue to bear our share of responsibility and manage the Unification Church and the Foundation.
============ ========= =========

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#1161 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Mon Dec 21, 2009 2:30 pm
Subject: Rev Hyung Jin Moon: Everlasting Liberation of God 		weeny.kim
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Everlasting Liberation of God
Rev  Hyung Jin Moon
November 7, 2009, HQ Church, Seoul Korea
courtesy of iunificationist.org
 
This is the type of figure that the Messiah is.
He does not come to give everybody an inspirational message.
He comes to challenge the people,
to bring them to a new level of faith,
to cut them from sin and the life that has entrapped them.
 
Hyung Jin Nim's Welcome remarks:
 
We are going to start with Cheon Seong Gyeong p.322 today. Father speaks: Without love, unity cannot be attained. Words alone are not enough to unite two different people into one. Then, what is needed to unite them? There must be love.
 
When we understand what True Father talks about when he talks about love -  it is not just the feeling, but it is the heart of the parent to care for that person, to even sacrifice for that person. Thats actually a very important part of being in a blessed relationship, to learn to sacrifice for your spouse.
Sermon by Hyung Jin Nim:
 
Brothers and sisters, today I want to talk to you about The Everlasting Liberation of God.
 
Let’s start with our world Scriptures today. We’re going to start with Christianity, II Corinthians, 3:17.  Let’s read this together: “Now the Lord is the spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom!”
 
Lets take a look at Buddhism today, the Sutta Nipata 9:48. Lets read this together: Selfish desire is a chain, shackled to the world, and it is a difficult one to break. But once that is done . . . the stream has been cut off and there are no more chains. Aju!
 
This is from the Bhagavad-Gita 5:24. Lets read this together: That disciplined man with joy and light within becomes one with God and reaches the freedom that is God's. Aju!
 
And True Parents' words today; this is from the 329th volume. Lets read it together. It is a little lengthy but we're going to read it together: What does it feel like to experience the being of God? The interminable struggle between your mind and body, which formally plagued your self-centered life--when you put yourself as number one in everything you did--will completely disappear. Instead, you will live the life that God wants you to live:  living for others and giving yourself for the whole. Then true love will continue for ever, and God's joy will be displayed in the spiritual world. You will experience such satisfaction and happiness as you have never felt before, because it will be connected to the whole. Thus, you will discover yourself in the state of liberation.
 
You know even in my own studies, I could never really understand what Father was talking about here. It was only when I started really working in the ministry, and beyond that, particularly with this human rights' violation issue in Japan (that I could understand).  When we really stand up to fight for the whole, to fight for our faith – then I could understand what Father was talking about here:  that you will experience such a joy and happiness as you never felt before. 
 
In my own life, I have experienced many different types of joys; but really when we can stand up for other brothers and sisters whose rights and freedoms are being stripped away from them, and we can stand up for that incredible cause, then I really can start feeling the truth and the depth of that kind of teaching.
Lets look at the Scripture. That is John 8:12 today, When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
 
See, brothers and sisters, we have to understand that the Messiah does not come as we think. We often tell VIPs when they come to meet Father and  want to hear him speak, we often  tell them beforehand, You probably are not going to be inspired or encouraged; you are going to be challenged! You are going to hear a very long speech probably, and you will be challenged in many different ways.
 
We explain to them that the Messiah does not come to bring us peace, just like Jesus said in Matthew 10:34, I come not to bring peace, but I come to bring a sword. The Messiah brings the sword that cuts us away from fallen lineage and fallen life and fallen love. The Messiah does not come just to just make us feel good. The Messiah comes with an incredible desperation.  He comes as an incredible challenge to the world.  So when we explain this to them, we say, You know, many times you may think that Father is very shocking, that he acts in very radical ways.
 
I was talking to a new church member. He was a former evangelical Korean Christian, he joined through the Chedang (business foundation).  He said he's been in the church for a couple of years now, about four years, and is working with the church, attending church, etc . . . .  And he said, You know all my negative feelings towards Unificationists have disappeared.  I have met the people, I have seen that they are (real) people – that they eat dinner too; and they do all sorts of normal things, but I am a little stuck. I still cant understand why Father does these incredibly big weddings, or why Father does the crowning ceremony of God or why Father comes out and wears king's robes. I cant understand that. That looks very cultish to me. It looks very controversial.  I told him, Look, we have to understand what the Messiah is. He is not here to simply please the world or the society.
 
And I told him, Look at Jesus! You are a Christian. You should look at the Bible, look at Jesus! Look how even cultish Christ acts. In John 8, this is where the quote comes from, Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, and he is preaching.  He is going into the synagogues, even in the midst of the rituals. He is just walking into the synagogues and he is proclaiming before the people, the Pharisees and the different Jewish traditions there.  He's saying, I am the light of the world, anyone who follows me will never be in darkness. This is a very strong type of teaching.  The Pharisees say, You are demon-possessed. They start chastising, condemning. You are crazy, you are possessed by Satan, they say. Your testimony is not valid because you are testifying on your behalf alone.

And Jesus says, It says in your law that you need two; one to testify and one as a witness. I testify on my behalf and God is my witness. They get very upset. They start attacking him, Jesus you are crazy. Here's a 30 year-old man, probably no taller than I am, and he is walking around intruding in the temples and saying such things as, I am the light of the world. 
 
In verse 44, he goes on to say, You are not of your father, the God of Abraham, you are of your father, the devil. He basically says, You are Satan's children. He is totally challenging them.
 
They say, Our father is not the devil; our father is Abraham, that is our father. In verse 56, Jesus said, Did you know that Abraham rejoiced; he rejoiced to see my day. He rejoiced, he saw it and was glad. It's almost like a spiritual message from Abraham. Did you know that he is rejoicing at my day? is what Jesus is saying.
 
And then in verse 58, they get angry at Jesus and say, How can a 30 year old man – you are not even 50 yet - claim to see Abraham? and he said, Before Abraham was born, I am! Now this is quite shocking for people at that time.
 
This is the type of figure that the Messiah is. He does not come to give everybody an inspirational message. He comes to challenge the people, to bring them to a new level of faith, to cut them from sin and the life that has entrapped them.
 
I explained to this Korean former evangelist, When we understand Jesus we can actually understand True Father a lot more. There are reasons why Jesus and True Father had to proclaim themselves as the Messiah.  First, of course, they had to spread the message; but as time went on, why did they have to continue to do such a thing?
 
When we reflect on it, we can see that even at the time of Jesus, the Apostles who followed Christ started lacking in faith. They started saying, Jesus, you are too radical. It's hard to present you to the public!  I dont know if I can show you to my friends. You are quite radical, Jesus. They are getting ashamed, even embarrassed about Jesus; and so they stop declaring him as the Messiah. And so Jesus had to go out; he had to go out and declare himself.
 
When I saw this passage in John 8, it reminded me of what happened to our own church, how we forgot to declare True Father as the Messiah. We explained him as a patriot, and a great person of peace, etc.  But that's comparing him to peace activists and comparing him to patriots of nations that we see, or politicians or people who are always very polite.
 
Father is not comparable to those people. When he gets on stage, he is screaming; screaming and shouting and hollering and saying, You must cut away your fallen lineage, etc. He talks about absolute relationships and all these kinds of things that seem extremely radical.
 
But we have to see why  Father did get into this kind of situation. And many times when I look at even my own life, we forgot as a community for about a decade how to declare True Father as the Messiah; how to explain to the world that the Messiah does not come in the way that we think. He comes to challenge us. He comes to give us a new insight, to make us at times uncomfortable with ourselves so we can come into a new dimension with God.
 
And we have watched him doing such things like declaring himself as the Messiah. We have seen media say negative things about him and we have felt ashamed that he had done such things, and we have even blamed him for it. Father why do you have no politeness or etiquette? Why do you speak for hours on end? Our VIPs cant eat, they cant eat their dinner. Why do you do such things?
 
But you know we must always look at this in context.  In studying the Buddhist tradition, when I lived with a Tibetan Buddhist, I was struck by this one point. The Dalai Lama is the Incarnation in that tradition; he is the living embodiment of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara -- that is the Buddha of Compassion. That is basically a perfected being, almost a God – a deity – a person that can become a full Buddha, which is a perfect being, but one that relinquishes that freedom so that he can save other sentient beings.
 
But never once did I hear the Dalai Lama proclaim himself as the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. Maybe on some occasions he expressed that he has inklings towards such things or he has an appreciation for that Bodhisattva. But I have met countless Tibetan Buddhists, countless Tibetan Buddhists. Whenever they talk about the Dalai Lama, they see him as the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They are declaring that the Dalai Lama is who he says he is or he is whom they believe him to be.
 
And in the same way, it is our responsibility as people of faith, and as the apostles and the disciples of True Parents, to be able to have that kind of faith – the faith that can free Father from declaring himself as the Messiah; and for us to be able to rise up in our faith and be able to declare him to the world in the way that he truly is. Let’s give it up for True Father (applause) . . . . and True Mother (applause)
This is a very important point.
 
Let us look at John 8: 31-32. Lets read this together. Jesus said, If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. We’ve heard this one.
 
When I was on the street witnessing, just a couple of weeks ago, we were at a bus stop terminal, and we met some wonderful people.  We met some Jehovah's witnesses, exchanged some Bible verses with them, we explained to them about our tradition. We gave them the flyers.  On the flyer it declares True Parents as the Messiah. It says Rev. Moon is the Messiah. He is the returning Lord, the returning Christ.
 
I walked up to this group of 4 elderly women. They were probably in their 60s; nice ladies, nice Korean young ladies, and I sat down next to them at the bus terminal. And I said, Anyeong haseyo ladies, hello ladies, how are you doing? Would you like to have this flyer? My father came up with this wonderful autobiography. It's the best-seller in Kyobo. It was the best-seller on that day in Hyun Pung bookstore. It was the #1 best seller that day. And I explained to them about the flyer. They said, We dont want that flyer! We dont want. Thats Rev Moon. We dont want that flyer! I said, Why not? It's a nice flyer! They said, We are Korean Christians. We dont like.  We dont like; we dont want that flyer. And I said, Oh! You are Christian, thats wonderful, because Rev Moon is the Messiah. You've been waiting 2,000 years for him.
 
Ooooh! OOH! They started hollering. They started ruffling around. Oooh, how can you say this person is the Messiah? Thats crazy!! Jesus . . . Jesus is Messiah! How can you say Jesus is not Messiah and Rev Moon is Messiah?  I said, Look, how can I say,this person is the Messiah? Was Jesus not a person? Yes, Jesus was a person.Was Jesus not the Messiah? Yes he was. Wasnt Jesus called a heretic and a false prophet? Yes he was. Same as True Father; that is the same that is happening! And we ended up having this wonderful energetic discussion – incredible – it was very fun. I think it was very good; a fantastic discussion and at the end of it, they told me to go away.  (laughter)  But . . . but . . . but, I thanked them. I said, Ladies, I had a wonderful time! I said, Can I shake your hand? No! No shaking hand! And I said, You ladies have a wonderful day! God bless you today!
 
You know what happened? Of course these people did not convert into our Unification tradition. They are not now running around declaring that True Father is the Messiah.  But what happened? In my own heart I felt totally liberated, totally liberated. Why? Because I felt proud that I could proudly declare my faith. I could declare True Father as the Messiah; that this was my democratic right, that we have freedom of religion, and that we could discuss this with the Christians openly.  This was a new type of experience that these people had.
 
You have to remember that this faith is real. It goes out and declares True Parents as the coming Lord. It is the faith that got the Apostles of Christ persecuted and stoned. This same type of faith is what Unificationists have.
 
Particularly in Japan, we've heard about this issue – we've brought this up many times during service about the incredible human rights violations – the 4,300 confirmed cases of illegal kidnappings and confinements in Japan.  Of course, there are even some cases of rape, and even murder. In this age of liberation, our members – particularly our members in Japan – are still dealing with this issue. We were in Nigata just last week; they are still dealing with this issue. It was a real issue for our brothers and sisters there.
 
But there is an incredible advancement. I have to report this to you, because it is so incredible. We have this incredible case where for 43 years we've been persecuted by Christian ministers and Communist lawyers who have created this organization. I spoke about this many times. They kidnap our Unificationists; they explain to the parents of those families that Unificationists make their children crazy, all these kind of things, and then they illegally kidnap them and confine them.  Many times our members will be put in an apartment.  They will rent an apartment, throw the member in there, tape up the windows and confine them within there. Every day a Christian pastor will come up, slander the Unification Church, tell them why the Unification Church is not the right church, and tell them why they should relinquish their faith.  These are the kinds of faith-breaking activities.
 
These kinds of hate crimes have been perpetuated against us, not just once, not just twice, but 4,300 times. The Japanese members, if you talk to them, they all know about this issue. But it has been such an incredible issue for them because for the last 43 years they have tried to come to justice.  There were times where  actually the police came to the place in which a person was confined, and they were screaming, hollering, Let me out, please, free me, free me! and the police just walked away after they were told that this was the Unification Church, saying, Oh this is a family issue. Im leaving now.
 
So a new thing happened just two weeks ago, for the first time in our history, and I have to report this to you guys. Just two weeks ago, Kook Jin hyeong who is now taking responsibility for Japan,  for our organization there, he organized a professional team of private detectives and lawyers. We located the place of one member who was actually presently confined. She was 29 years old, she was illegally kidnapped and she was confined in Japan.  This is a democratic country, Japan.  The private detectives and the lawyers located her. They did not go to her directly;  they went to the police. They told the police that the police must come to free this person. They escorted the police, and the spiritual mother of that sister who was confined came along with them.
 
They arrived at the location which was very close to this pastor's church, the pastor that actually kidnapped them and was deprogramming them, so to speak. His name is Takayama. And they rang the bell and they said, This is so-and-so-and-so. We know that so-and- so- and- so is in this place and we request that we be able to see her. I am her friend and I am her spiritual mother, etc... They responded, We are not going to do that. No, go away! Then they put the police on the bell (let the police ring the bell). The police said, This is the police, you have to allow that person to speak on her behalf as a democratic citizen.
 
That sister who was confined, she then was asked by the police over the speaker phone, Do you wish to come out and see them? She said, I do.  The sister came out and she saw her spiritual mother who was there; and she ran to her spiritual mother. They started breaking down in tears, and she said, I want to leave this place, in front of the policemen. And for the first time in our Japanese history, one of our sisters who was illegally kidnapped and confined was free. She was totally free, liberated! (Applause)
 
Freedom . . . freedom of religion . . . freedom!  (HJN shouts to lots of applause)
First time in history! She was free! This was the first time this had happened in the history of our Japanese church.  As a church, we organized a professional unit to go out and free these members whose human rights are being violated.
 
But then an incredible thing came out of her testimony when she explained what happened. She's just 29 years old, and she explained the incredible kind of torture she received, the psychological beatings she received, and the confinement. They duck-taped all the windows up, so she could not open them and jump out the window.  Now, this is a democratic state, this is in a democratic country, brothers and sisters; we have to remember this.   She was in confinement for 67 days – of course, that was nothing compared to some of our brothers and sisters who have been confined for 12 years and 5 months, like Goto-san; and one sister confined for over 10 years, a decade of her life gone. But this sister, in particular, was confined for 67 days, and she was having this deprogramming session where the Takayama minister – the Christian minister – was attacking the church and slandering the church, and saying, You must break your faith, you must do this etc. He then got very frustrated after many days and days of trying to educate her.
 
One day he said to her, I am very frustrated with you. Do you know that that fool Kook Jin is trying to put me in prison?  He is sending my picture all over America. He's trying to put me in prison.  When our sister heard that from the kidnapper while she was being confined and illegally abducted, when she heard that, she thought, Ooh! Kook Jin Nim’s trying to put you in prison!  She said she got such an incredible surge of strength and faith. She said she felt almost totally liberated, because somebody was fighting on her behalf and because - while she had no power to escape - somebody on the outside was fighting for her freedom!
 
Lets give it up for Kook Jin hyeong and the brothers and sisters that worked to free her. (Applause) Hallelujah! This is an incredible day, incredible day for our church because we are fighting and we are discovering our freedom once again. This is absolutely incredible!
 
Lets look at John 8: 35-36. Lets read this together. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. Aju!

You see, brothers and sisters, when we understand that we have been set free from Satan's lineage and love and life by the victory of True Parents' full inheritance of God's essence – His true love – and that through the seven deaths and resurrections we also received the resurrection power that even multiple deaths cannot destroy, then we realize that the age of liberation and freedom for our members has come.
 
Those who perpetrated hate crimes against us – they did it with a purpose. They did it to break our faith, to kill our faith, to kill our hope in our future; to try to teach us that we have no future: You guys are going to be over! But they did not know that we have the power of the seven deaths and resurrections, and that even though the Unification Church may seem like it's dying, and even though we die and die again, we still can be resurrected – and resurrected again -- with the power of true love, and true faith and True Parents! Lets give it up for True Parents, brothers and sisters! (Applause)
 
You see, we as Unification Church, and those whom True Parents have set free, we will be free from the death of our movement and our faith.  We will have faith in declaring our beliefs as our democratic right, our right to practice our religion, our democratic right to believe in our faith.

Because of this small, incredible victory, now it's beginning to happen in Japan on the ground -- the liberation's beginning. We know now that our faith will last for ever. Lets give it up for UC!  For all our brothers and sisters around the world! (Applause) Now is a day of freedom for us!

I want to end with a quote from Isaiah 49: 8-10. Lets read this together. It's very beautiful! Let’s read this together: 
 
8 This is what the LORD says: 
       "In the time of my favor I will answer you, 
       and in the day of salvation I will help you; 
       I will keep you and will make you 
       to be a covenant for the people, 
       to restore the land…
9 to say to the captives, 'Come out,' 
       and to those in darkness, 'Be free!'…
10 They will neither hunger nor thirst, 
       nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. 
       He who has compassion on them will guide them 
       and lead them beside springs of water.
 
Brothers and sisters, lets give it up for True Parents who lead us to those everlasting springs of water and for the freedom that is now coming to our brothers and sisters around the world. Lets give it up for our brothers and sisters, and True Parents once more. (Applause)
=======================



God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
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#1160 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Mon Dec 21, 2009 1:17 am
Subject: God's Goal of Peace Discussed in Las Vegas 		weeny.kim
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God's Goal of Peace Discussed in Las Vegas
posted on December 20 at familyfed.org
 
 
There's no place on earth quite like Las Vegas, that temple of glitter and glitz devoted to the pursuit of all forms of human pleasure, but proving for many a gateway instead to unhappiness and even despair. The city that promises much but often delivers little proved a fitting location for Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon's first public sermon in Las Vegas in almost ten years, a wide-ranging discourse in which he once again returned to the theme of renewing the United Nations so that it makes effort to include religious and spiritual resources into its efforts of conflict resolution.
 
In his introductory remarks, Dr. Thomas Walsh, UPF Secretary-General of UPF reported that ever since the UPF Founder's August 2000 call for an interreligious peace council at the UN, there has been a growing recognition of the need for spiritual leadership, with a greater role for the voices of moderate and committed religious leaders.
 
The attention of the media and many of the revelers may well have been focused a few blocks away on the latest gaudy jewel in Las Vegas' eclectic skyline, the brand new, ten-billion dollar City Center casino and resort which opened officially at midnight that very day. Yet the more meaningful show was unfolding before the more than 1200 people crowded into one of Las Vegas' oldest institutions, the Flamingo. The art-deco casino has long been best known not for its exotic pink birds but for its earlier connections with notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel who invested in the property in the late 1940s when the young Sun Myung Moon was just beginning his mission in post-war Korea.
 
Perhaps mindful of the Flamingo's checkered past, Rev. Emanuel Wasson III, Pastor of Las Vegas' Holy Trinity A.M.E. Church, welcomed the large and mostly out-of-town crowd and urged them to leave Las Vegas with a different perspective. Though we come from many different nations, let us celebrate the most important thing we all have in common, he said, And that is, that we are all the children of the one God. I hope you have a fruitful time in our city, but when you go home, remember to testify that the Spirit of God is alive and well in Las Vegas!
 
There are three central institutions in life, said Bishop William Shields of Hopewell Baptist, Georgia, one of Americas top 20 mega churches, the home, the workplace and the place of worship. All of these need to be in healthy balance with each other, but we know well that they are not. This is why our country is in a mess, and that is Father Moons call to America to turn its face back to God is so important.
 
Rev. In Jin Moon, President and CEO of HSA-UWC USA had the happy task of introducing her own father to a packed house. Everyone comes to Las Vegas hoping to win the jackpot, she said, and I think those of us who have come here today to hear these messages are already the winners of a much more important prize. My father has not let his advanced age of 90, nor his six imprisonments, nor any amount of misunderstanding and bigotry sway him from the path of God's Will, she said.
 
As we welcome him today, let us determine that we ourselves will become like him, and be the people God needs to bring change to America and the world. We dont need to wait for political or religious leaders to take action, she said. Let us seize the day!
 
In his keynote address, Dr. Moon addressed the need for change of heart and a change of mind to bring America back in line with the destiny given to it by God. Rather than simply dwell on well-known problems such as promiscuity and corruption commonly associated with Las Vegas, he chose instead to draw the attention of a crowd of over 1200 to the missed opportunity for goodness. If even a portion of the colossal energy and expenditure invested in Las Vegas every day in the personal pursuit of pleasure could be diverted into a heavenly purpose, the pursuit of true happiness, how quickly the world could be changed, he said.
 
I have watched many, many people waste their time and their money here, he said, but I still want to help them, and to help America. I can never forget the fact that it was American soldiers who freed me from a communist prison camp and prevented my homeland being lost to tyranny, and I will always love America deeply. Yet I can see that in many ways the moral climate in this nation is getting worse.
 
I have prayed long and hard through the night, even during the darkest nights when I was in prison, to find out how to help the American people realize that God is our living heavenly parent, and the spiritual world is real, he said. Without God, there is no way that we can rescue America from a self-centered and individualistic culture that is far from the truth.
 
Father Moon then went on to observe that our daily habits and the mental and emotional environment that these habits and choices create surround us with energies that have a profound but often unnoticed effect on our spiritual well-being. There are a lot of evil things going on in Las Vegas, he said, but even this town can become a heavenly community filled with the children of God, the heavenly King.

It Wouldnt Be Vegas without a Show
At this point, Dr. Moon paused in his speech and, in the best tradition of a Las Vegas show, asked for audience volunteers to come up to the stage to participate in an exhibition of the power of ki, the spiritual energy that flows through all people and even all things.
 
Leading the display was Dr. Dow-soon Im, who discovered a simple demonstration of the way in which a person's spiritual energy - ki - can be increased or radically diminished by the objects in his or her immediate surroundings. The volunteers gripped thumb and index finger together, and then Dr. Im or another volunteer would try to break the grip. Logically, it seems that strong men would have always more powerful grips than small women - but it doesnt seem to work out that way. It all seems to depend on what the person making the grip holds in their other hand, and the energy associated with that object.
 
The Sources of Positive Power
In the demonstration  - performed in the plain sight of more than a thousand people – volunteers who held onto objects with positive spiritual energy, such as a picture of Jesus, Father's recently - published autobiography, or even the program of the event, found that their grip was immensely strengthened and could scarcely be broken. But when they held an object with negative energy the situation was reversed! The guide book to other Las Vegas entertainment seemed to be particularly weakening, although judging by the amount of exposed flesh in many of those shows, perhaps that's no real surprise!
 
As the ki demonstration came to a conclusion, Father Moon invited one of his own sons, Kwon Jin, to come forward. Kwon Jin, an accomplished martial artist, inspired the audience with a song, a creative interpretation of Imagine by John Lennon.

A Call to Action
I want you all to make a promise to me today, Father Moon said as he moved to his conclusion. God desperately needs good men and women to build his kingdom now. Yet the nations of the world are wasting their time and effort on armies and weapons, and families are breaking down because people are not honoring the true love, life and lineage that God wants to give to all of us. If you knew the depth of what I am saying, you would stay up all night to read my words and put them into practice.
 
We are living in a time when everything will become clear, he said. Think about it: these days, once you know how to use your computer well, you can use the internet to find out almost anything in just a few minutes, including the things which people would rather remain hidden. How much more so will the truth of the heavenly world be known when we learn how to use our God-given abilities in the right way! We must all live lives of purity and clarity.
 
How then can we create a world of peace? he said. Today we are talking about the settlement of an Abel United Nations. What does that mean? It will be a world where the major nations such as the USA, Russia and China, instead of investing billions in unnecessary weapons and defense technologies, will understand that God is waiting in sorrow for all his children to come to him in peace.
 
This task starts with every family and every couple, he said. The heaven I know is not a place that anyone can go to just by themselves. You and your spouse should become True Parents yourselves, and when you successfully multiply families of peace, this nation and the world will become peaceful too.
 
Written by Dr. Michael Balcomb, communications director of the Universal Peace Federation


God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
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#1159 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Dec 20, 2009 8:50 am
Subject: Deutronomy 31:27 - Rebellion against the LORD 		weeny.kim
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For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you have been rebellious against Me while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel after I die! 

- DEUTRONOMY 31:27




All of us, some more than others, have had or are having times of rebellion against God. For some, the rebellious spirit is obvious by our attitude and actions and in others there may be an outward pretense that covers a rebellious heart.  Jonah best characterizes the spirit and actions of rebellious person. Instead of obeying God's command and go to Nineveh, he “rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord.” (Jonah 1:3a) He went in the opposite direction.


All rebellion is against God.  Whether it’s a son rebelling against his parents authority or a believer turning away from the church, the real issue is one’s refusal to do what one know God or True Father wants us to do. To hide or justify our rebellion we seek to justify it by pointing to our parent’s defects, hypocritical members or leaders of the church, personal slights and sometime our church’s inflexibility. While there may be some justification for those attitudes, there is never any justification for using them as an excuse to rebel against God or True Parents. 

As you read the book of Jonah, you will find 2 major thoughts on rebellion. 

First, the longer you live in rebellion against God, the harder it is to go back.   

Second, when Jonah rebelled against God, there was a ship ready to take him out. He jumped on board and sailed far away. Favorable circumstances or opportunities does not always equal right. As children of God and True Parents, we cannot use right circumstances as the only criteria to justify our choices. In our rebellion, we can always find a way to justify what is wrong. In fact, Satan often encourages our rebellion by lining up circumstances to ease our way down the road to rebellion.

Rebellion may not be a lifestyle. It may be a small area of our life that we refuse to give to God – music, videos, an attitude to a particular person, etc.  God views our rebellion and stubbornness as one.  Samuel said to Saul, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.” (1 Samuel 15:23). The only solution to rebellion is confession, humility and total obedience.


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#1158 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Dec 20, 2009 6:39 am
Subject: faith & life: Member of the Body 		weeny.kim
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A Member Of The Body

1 CORINTHIANS 12:12 NKJ
12 For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body.

Each individual believer IS also part of the Body of the Messiah, which is composed of all believers.

Think how insane it would be for you to allow your hand to attack some other member of your body. It is just as crazy for us, as members of the Body of the Messiah, to attack other members.

ROMANS 12:4-5 NKJ
4 For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function,
5 so we, being many, are one body in the Messiah, and individually members of one another.

Other members have different callings -- different functions. But your job is not to oppose them -- even though you may not understand them, or why they do what they do. Just leave that to the Head of the Body -- and do what He tells YOU to do.

You are not the Head of the Body of Christ -- The Messiah is. He is responsible for, and capable of, coordinating all we do so our actions will accomplish His plan. Members of a body have different functions, but all are necessary for the body to function properly.

When you dont obey the Messiah, the Head of the Body, you are destroying his plan & block his will.

Think what a difficult time you would have accomplishing anything if each member of your body did whatever it felt like -- instead of obeying orders from your brain.



 
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
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#1157 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sat Dec 19, 2009 4:57 am
Subject: faith & life: Fight the Good Fight of Faith 		weeny.kim
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Fight The Good Fight Of Faith

1 TIMOTHY 6:12 NKJ
12 Fight the good fight of faith . . . .

We are supposed to fight internally too!

Our struggle is about our faith. Satan wants our faith in God to wither and die. God wants our faith to grow stronger.

The battlefield is our mind. Satan tries to keep his evidence foremost in our thoughts: negative circumstances and what our senses tell us. God's evidence is contained in His unchanging Word: True Parents' words.
 
We must choose to feed all the truth in Father's words into our thinking to keep our faith strong.

Satan still tells mankind his old lie, Has God said? which we could modernize as, Did God really mean that?

Yes, God meant what He said and said what He meant.

Then why doesnt it seem that way when I look around at my circumstances?

Because we are supposed to fight the good fight of faith and actively receive the promised blessings. God will bring His Word to pass in our life when we actively believe it. God's program is set up to reward those who trust Him.

We should resist and even rebuke thoughts of doubt, knowing they originate with the evil one. God is faithful and His Word is true.

We have authority over what we think. In PHILIPPIANS 4:8., it tells us what to think about:  But you must exercise your authority through words spoken. Otherwise, authority doesnt benefit you.

HEBREWS 11:1 NKJ
1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Faith involves things not seen, or not discerned by your physical senses. If you can see it or feel it you don't need to have faith for it. Faith is your evidence until it manifests to your physical senses.

God & True Parents dont lie. Their written Word is our faith evidence until the blessing is evident even to our physical senses. We shoukd resist the devil by continuing to believe God's Word.
 
courtesy of list@...


God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
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#1156 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Wed Dec 16, 2009 2:28 pm
Subject: Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) 		weeny.kim
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Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS)
Do you often have blurred vision, headaches, or feel a burning sensation in your eyes? If you are one of the millions of people who work at a computer all day, you may be suffering from Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS).
By Lisa Heath

How to Minimise Your Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) Through Eye Exercises?

Bates Method and Other Eye Exercises Minimise the Risk of CVS

Computer VisionSyndrome

How much do you know about Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) and Eye Exercise benefits? If you spend more than two hours every day on your computers, you may probably get affected by CVS. What are the factors which causes CVS?

Click the link below to continue reading:
http://www.associat edcontent. com/article/ 1530481/how_ to_minimise_ your_computer_ vision.html? cat=33
     


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#1155 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:57 pm
Subject: USA "Star" Magazine article about the Blessing 		weeny.kim
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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The following issue of the "Star" magazine is currently on newsstands in stores throughout America. It contains a feature article about Nicole Richie's marriage (daughter of singer Lionel Richie) with a connection to True Parents' October 14th Blessing Ceremony.

It describes the Blessing ceremony in a very positive way and the picture of the couples in Korea is beautiful (page 50) great free advertising in a mainstream publication!

 


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#1154 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:00 am
Subject: News: Signs of Mayon Volcano's eruption in the Philippines 		weeny.kim
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News from Inquirer online:
 
LEGAZPI CITY—Albay officials have begun moving thousands of villagers out of harm’s way near Mayon Volcano after it oozed lava and shot plumes of ash late Monday.
 
Officials said the villagers would probably spend a bleak Christmas in an evacuation center.
Government volcanologists raised the alert level on the cone-shaped, 2,460-meter volcano overnight to two steps below eruption after ash explosions and dark orange lava fragments glowing in the dark trickled down the mountain slope.
 
Nearly 50,000 people live in the “hazard areas” within an eight-kilometer radius around Mayon, and authorities were ordering them to leave in case the volcano erupts, Gov. Joey Salceda said.
 
for the details click this

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Peace be with you
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#1153 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sat Nov 21, 2009 2:04 pm
Subject: health is wealth (163): God's food gifts to humanity 		weeny.kim
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God's Food Gifts

thanks to Housewife @ Work

 

God left us a great clue as to what foods help what part of our body! God's Pharmacy! Amazing! <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... and YES, science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart has four chambers and is red. All of the res earch shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine and are indeed pure heart and blood food. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds on the nut are just like the neo-cortex. We now know walnuts help dev elop more than t hree (3) dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.


<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and many more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don't have enough sodium in your diet, the body pulls it from the bones, thus making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Avocadoes, Eggplant and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look just like these organs. Today's research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? It takes exactly nine (9) months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them). <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the mobility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility.


Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.

<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Oranges, Grapefruits, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Onions look like the body's cells. Today's research shows onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. The y even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes. A working companion, Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals from the body.

God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
Bishop WinnyCayme-Kim
(010-5818-3924  / 070-8197-0212)
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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#1152 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:22 pm
Subject: Rev In Jin Moon: The unique gifts God blesses us with 		weeny.kim
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Rev In Jin Moon of Lovin Life Ministry
The Unique Gifts God Blesses us with
November 8, 2009
courtesy of familyfed.org
 
Good morning, brothers and sisters.  How is everyone?  You guys have to excuse me a little. Im a little bit under the weather.  I spent some time with my lovely daughter, who is a junior up at Harvard University. She had come home to spend some time with me, but she was very, very sick.  Of course, I, being a mother, have always been trying to take care of myself really well so I can better take care of my children.  But when I saw my beautiful daughter walk in and she just flew into my arms, I could not resist but embrace her in a big and long hug.  As satisfying as the hug was, unfortunately I caught the flu. So you’re going to have to bear with me.  My voice is not as clear as I would like it to be this morning.
 
Wasnt the band wonderful? Music is so important for all of us here at Lovin' Life; it's really a universal language.  My father has often talked about the importance of music in the education of children and adults, in helping people learn how to experience the divine, how to experience God.  Many times he has also spoken about love as a universal language as well.
 
Just like music, when we think about love, I think we all start out in life wanting to please our parents, our Heavenly Parent, and our True Parents, and we spend a great deal of time when we are children en route to becoming a great artist trying to please the teachers or trying to even please mommy and daddy.  The first thing that we like to do is make drawings, replicas of masterpieces, to give as gifts to our parents, making them very happy.
 
But as we mature and as we really think about our desire to become artists, to leave something truly worthwhile and beautiful behind, we come to know that the true goal of an artist is not just to be somebody with a paintbrush or a guitar who can play everybody else’s music.  The goal of an artist is to tap the rich reservoir of love that we have within us.  Unlike a child who says, Love me, love me, all the time, as we grow into our years and walk down the road of self-discovery, what we should do, and I encourage all of us to do this, is to tap into this rich reservoir of love that we have within each and every one of us, and to truly realize that we have all the love we need.  We’re carrying all the love we need.
 
Instead of trying to get love from people, start thinking, How do I love others?  How do I leave my imprint on every relationship I have in my lifetime?  Just as an artist has taken classes and experimented with different media, like acrylic, oils, or graphic arts, what that artist really wants to do is tap into the rich reservoir that is uniquely his or hers.  No great artists are the same. Picasso and, Rembrandt were very different types of artists, but each tapped into his unique talents and design.  Therefore, they were able to leave the world huge gifts in terms of their masterpieces, the artwork that showcases who they were as human beings and as fine artists.
 
How should we go about our daily lives in becoming well versed in the language of love? How do we go about practicing it in our daily life? How do we go about applying it in different relationships that we have with one another?
 
Three things come to mind. The Bible tells us in Amos 3:3 that two people cannot walk together without a clear direction, meaning that in order to practice love within a family, between a husband and wife, between siblings, between parent and child, there has to be a clear direction, a clear purpose.
 
Just as when you look at two eyelids on a face, if your right eyelid wants to do one thing but your left eyelid wants to do another, you’re not going to have a very beautiful expression on your face if each eyelid is doing its own thing.
 
If you want to go to the supermarket, maybe the right leg that represents an older brother wants to go to H-Mart, and maybe the left leg representing the younger brother wants to go to Stop 'n Shop. You're going to have a very difficult time getting to where you want to go. You will be neither going to H-Mart nor Stop ‘n Shop. You will probably be fumbling around somewhere; maybe you'll even fall down because you cannot have a clear consensus on the direction you would like to go.
 
Likewise, when we are thinking about how to practice this language of love in our daily life, we have to always start from the beginning.  We have to always think about where we are going and what our goal is. That direction or purpose in our lives must always be centered on God. God has to be that direction.  So despite the differences of what the right eyelid or the left eyelid might want to do, we have a clear purpose. We have a clear direction. We need to keep our eyelids clean from dust and impurities in the environment so that we allow this wonderful human being to see so we can find our way to the goal that we would like to reach, so that there is a common direction in our life.
 
Even between a husband and wife, when we base our relationship and our direction smack on God and centered on God, then everything falls into place. When you start your day with God, then you immediately understand that you have a certain amount of responsibility and that the day thats given to you is really an opportunity to exercise this wonderful thing called love in your daily life with your spouse. So our individual pride, our individual arrogance, or maybe our individual desires of wanting our way all the time become secondary and dont take priority.  So the difficulties or obstacles that might stand in the way of a couple uniting together actually go away when we concentrate on the common ground, the common understanding that God is the center in every relationship.
 
I've often thought that another thing to keep in mind is the passage from I Thessalonians 5:11.  The Bible tells us that when we're thinking about speaking the language of love, we need to be constantly encouraging others and building each other up, just as we are doing. So again, this emphasizes very much having good will to others. I understand this passage to be a reminder for practicing compassion in our lives. It's a call for us to be kind in words, but, even better, to be kind in our actions.
 
Sometimes when I've talked about kindness to my children, I've noticed that they're not very keen on the word compassion or kindness. When Truston and Paxton are not happy with each other because they both want to do what they want to do, as a mother Im encouraging them to unite together and work together because they are brothers.  They think that being kind just means always giving in.  But I always remind them that kindness can also be in the form of an incredible strength.
 
For instance, if you happen to have a friend who is an alcoholic or suffering with drugs, how can you be kind to this person?  How do you encourage this person?  How do you build this person up, still practicing love?  Some people might think, Just be kind. Buy them more alcohol, maybe buy more drugs. Why not go out and get the drugs for them so they dont have to move and still get high?  Isnt that what a friend would do?  Isnt that kindness?
 
Another way of looking at it is, being kind to somebody with severe problems means taking a stand. Instead of allowing yourself to be a codependent and therefore helping them to continue in their not-such-a-good-way, in order to be kind, you have to be strong. When you see a friend keeling over, lying in a pool of vomit, sometimes the kind thing to do is to leave him there.  Sometimes the kind thing to do is to let him wake up and realize what a mess of life he has made.  Sometimes the kind thing to do is not to take off his shirt and wash it for him, not to drag him into bed and clean him up, so that he wakes up as if nothing happened.  Sometimes the kind thing to do is to allow that person to suffer the consequences of his actions.
 
Many times when you really care about somebody and when you love somebody like your best friend but you know they're in trouble, the best thing that you can do as a friend is to be firm, to be constant, and allow them to help themselves.  Lets say in a family setting the two brothers, like Paxton and Truston, are not getting along.  Say Truston is the elder, and the family has an incredible garden that we planted together in time for the fall harvest. Truston maybe one day decided, Our family worked on the garden, but today I've decided the garden belongs to me.  Imagine Truston said to Paxton, This is my garden. Trespassers will be thrown out.
 
What should Paxton do as a younger brother, as somebody who truly loves his older brother?  Understanding that the garden belongs to Heavenly Parent, it belongs to our True Parents, and it belongs to their parents, what should the younger brother do?  Some people in town who happen to be friends of the older brother might look at Paxton and say, You just need to love the older brother more.  If you're the Abel, love Cain more.  Let him have everything.  Just unite.  Maybe he took the garden away from the family because you were such a lousy younger brother.  Or maybe Paxton's friends might look at the situation and say, Go and fight. Knock the eye sockets out of Truston.  Go claim the garden back.
 
What should Paxton do in this situation?  What should the younger brother do?  The younger brother should continue to love the older brother with all his heart and with all his might.  But he needs to do the right thing also; he needs to confront the older brother with love and say, Brother, what you've stolen from our family does not belong to you.  It belongs to God, and it belongs to our family.  What you are doing is wrong.  Please, remember the common direction.  Remember the common ground.  Remember the common center, which is our True Parents, which is our parents. You have to be willing to lose everything in order to gain everything.
 
If the older brother, Truston, took the garden by force, but the father and mother are saying, No, no, give the garden back, then if the older son Truston was mature enough, understanding that taking the garden away from the family and from God is not a good thing, he would return the garden to the parents and to God, and say, Father, Mother, I made a mistake.  Please forgive me.  Please take back everything that I took from you, and you decide what I deserve.  If the older son did that, and if the younger son was standing there together with him, encouraging him to do the right thing for the family and for our Heavenly Father, then the younger brother would not only have not left his position, but he would have been the catalyst in uniting the family and actually inspiring the older brother to give back to the family what does not belong to him.
 
This is a simple example of what could go on, but of course when we're trying to encourage and build up each other and empower each other, we all know that there's a process involved.  Sometimes the older brother might realize, Whoops, I made a mistake, maybe within a day.  But maybe some older brothers will not realize that they made a mistake and decide, You know what?  I took over my garden. Now the neighbor's garden looks pretty good, too. Let me go after that one.  Maybe the older brother will be on a feeding frenzy like this and will not realize for a long time, maybe months, maybe years, that he made a mistake.
 
If this older brother had a bunch of friends who really loved him with all their might and all their heart, and these friends could see the situation realistically, and if they were really this brother's friends, what should they do?  The kindest things the friends could do is to tell him, Older brother, I love you to death.  You're my best friend.  But what you're doing to your family and to your neighbors is just not right.  I want to walk with you.  I want to play with you.  I want to be with you all the time, but because I love you I am going to walk away from you.  I am going to leave you so that you can experience the consequences of your actions. 
 
Because if you were to take the fruits of my garden from me, I would not be a good friend, to pretend that nothing happened.  I would be very upset, and I need you to know I am upset.  And you need to know that your parents are upset.  If I am your friend, I am going to give you the opportunity to work it out with your parents, to work it out with your younger brother, and Im going to walk away from you because I truly love you. That's what a true friend would do.
 
Maybe it's not even a friend. Maybe Truston had a group of farmers working together with him in this garden.  If you are a true worker, you must not only think about where you get your salary, but you also need to think, How am I helping my farm?  How am I helping my team?  How am I helping my organization?  If I continue to support a leader who steals from his family, who steals from God, and Im only thinking about my salary, I am not being a true friend, nor a true object for this older brother Truston.  If I truly love this older brother, I would have the courage and I would exercise my power to walk away and say, Please work it out with your family.  Please work it out with the higher powers.  That’s love, brothers and sisters.
 
In Proverbs 3:27–28, the Bible talks about not withholding any good from somebody that deserves it, meaning if you are in a position of helping somebody today, dont wait until tomorrow.   When I read this passage, I understand it to be speaking about tearing down all the conditions that we put upon each other.  Many times we raise barriers or walls, and many times we say, I'd love to help you, but Im too busy.
 
Many times, now that I've come to this position as head of the American movement, I catch myself saying to my children, Im a little too busy.  But every time I say that and hang up the phone, I really have to reflect about it because one of the most precious things in our lives is our children and the ability that we have to spend time with them in a particular moment.  Once that moment is gone, that moment will never come again.
 
I was having lunch the other day with a friend who's an executive in the entertainment industry.  He was telling me about how he has a two-year-old son, and he is so busy traveling around the world that he barely has time to see his child in the course of the week. The only time he really has for his family is sometimes a Saturday but usually a Sunday. Thats when he really wants to unwind because he travels so much and suffers from jet lag and stress. So when he comes home, he just wants to disappear under the bedcovers and put a Do Not Disturb sign on his bedroom door. He doesnt want his wife disturbing him; certainly he does not want his child disturbing him.
 
He said one day he came home and his son was basically taking a basketball and throwing it against the bedroom, saying, Papa, boom, Papa.  Obviously the child so much wanted to spend time with the father.  But the father was so tired because he had been so busy and he wanted to sleep.  But the child wanted his attention, wanted playtime.  Usually, he said, he would just ignore it and go to bed, but on that particular day he decided to open the door, let his son in, and play ball with him a little bit.
 
Even though the child was so young, having been accustomed to daddy never opening the door, he was so amazed that the door finally opened.  My friend said, I physically saw the expression on his face change from total hopelessness to incredible hope.  He had not realized until that moment what he had been teaching his child.  His child had been learning, as his son, that when he banged on the master bedroom door, wanting attention and love, that he's not going to get any response back.  But this day was special because he got a response back.  The father realized what kind of a transformation that allowed this child to have on his face, and he realized at that moment how incredibly important each moment of a child's life is for him to experience it together as much as he possibly could.
 
For many of us, our children have grown up and gone on, walked down the aisle.  My eldest son just got blessed recently to a wonderful bride. Now they're on their merry way in trying to build this thing called an ideal family.  When I look back on Preston's life, I realize I had only a set amount of years when I could directly and profoundly touch his life.  I will always be there for him as a mother, but those crucial years are so, so important.
 
Many times we as parents look at it as a natural thing.  When two people come together, you're bound to have a little one.  But not much thought has gone into how we turn this little one into a fine human being.  I believe that instead of a parent waiting for tomorrow, if we can find that moment to capture and to seize upon so that we can show our children how much we love them, then they will be so secure in their own skin, knowing that they are truly loved, and they will gladly go out into the world as confident sons and daughters of God.
 
I've noticed many times the way my friend was suffering, hurting, stressed out about his job - so much traveling, so many deadlines, so many late nights.  But he realized that sometimes when you are hurting the most, the best thing to solve your hurt or pain is by helping others.  He realized that by seizing upon that moment and spending time with his child. Even though he didnt have much energy to go on, he became so inspired that he didnt feel like he needed three or four hours of extra sleep.  In fact, he left his home feeling better because he had done something wonderful for his child.
 
I have another friend who is a very famous actress.  When you're working in Hollywood with various producers and casting directors, and there are many demands on you, demands to be thin and beautiful all the time, it's very difficult.  You're trying to land the right roles, and it's a very laborious process.  She was getting to a point where she could not take the pressure any more, regardless of how successful she was.  The more successful she got, the more depressed she got.
 
She fell into an incredibly depressed state, and she needed medical assistance to get better.  But she realized that she was getting so depressed because she was so consumed with herself.  So then she decided, Let me try something different. Let me try thinking about other people.
 
She started volunteering at children's projects, helping them with artwork, making a T-shirt, building a teddy bear, and she started doing this volunteer work on weekends.  She started thinking about the children for once, and not just herself.  She realized that out of thinking and living for the sake of others, she felt so satisfied and fulfilled as a human being that she could be a better actress.  She could be a happier person, and she could be a more grateful person in that she realized that because she was blessed with so much, she was able to open up her purse and share with the needy children.  She realized what a fairy godmother she could be.  She realized the goodness because she tapped into the rich reservoir that was already there.
 
It doesnt matter who we are or where we come from.  Many times in life we're searching and looking and hoping to be loved. But when you meet people who are confident and very comfortable in their skin, you realize something.  You realize that they love themselves.  You realize that they're grateful for what God has given them.  You realize that these people, instead of looking outward to receive, most of these successful, confident, and healthy individuals tap within themselves this rich reservoir.  They discover within themselves an endless and eternal pool of divinity that’s flowing through their veins.  They realize that this divinity is unchanging, absolute, and eternal.
 
It's so special because it's unique to you, unique to me, unique to that person, unique to my children. We need to discover that we are beings of love, and all we need to do is reach out and instead of being a taker, start generating the true love action by being a giver, by serving others, by taking care of others, exercising compassion, exercising kindness with strength, exercising understanding and exercising this wonderful thing called an embrace, this wonderful thing called a hug.
 
I dont know how many times my older brother said to me, I wish my father would hug me.  He always hugs you. Why doesnt he hug me? I wish he would hug me. Human beings are tactile creatures in that we need to feel this universal language. In order for us to speak this universal language effectively, we have to allow others to feel.  It's not just in the spoken word but in our actions as well.
 
As parents, how wonderful if we can hug our sons as we do our daughters!  How wonderful if we can exercise the power of a very simple three-word sentence: I love you.  The power of saying, I love you, has the power to melt the biggest iceberg around.  I think we as a community dont say it enough.  We look at ourselves as a community of love; we look at ourselves as people who practice true love, but many times we dont hug enough.  Many times we dont tell each other enough that we love each other.
 
If we can start with just these very basic, simple things within a family setting, realizing that we want to walk together with a clear and common purpose, which is God, living our lives for the sake of others because we are true sons and daughters of God, then these little things, before we know it, will become huge mountains and deep valleys.  They will become the most beautiful oceans and the most majestic skies.  They will become the most awesome trees, the most beautiful creatures.
 
When the band sang today, they touched upon a lot of different themes, but when we listen to their singing, it's a wonderful opportunity to remember that everybody here is a divine human being and that everybody is so beautiful in God's eyes.  When God looks upon you, you wake up more beautiful each and every day.  That's how he sees us; that's how she sees us.
 
As our eternal parent, what God would like to see in his children is for us, who start out as crawling caterpillars maybe in a preparation phase, to enter and become the chrysalis.  Maybe this is the time when we focus and harness our gifts and our strength to work on our weaknesses.  Then we can enter another phase in our life when we can finally act, can finally fly like the beautiful butterfly that we all are.
 
I know that our Heavenly Father, when he gazes upon each and every one of us, is waiting for us to turn into a beautiful butterfly.  Because I have five children of my own, I pretty much know the Disney catalog by heart, and the Pixar catalog.  One of my favorites is A Bug's Life, and one of its cutest characters is a German caterpillar whose name is Heimlich.  He's this fat, gorgeous little thing thats crawling around, speaking with a German accent, who goes around saying, I vant to be a beautiful butterfly.  Thats what he wants to be for his whole life. Of course, we love him because he's so touchy and he's so cute and has this adorable German accent.  And at the end of the movie he turns into a graceful, beautiful butterfly, and he flies all over the place.
 
I think, brothers and sisters, what God is waiting for - and maybe there are some Heimlichs in the audience here, too is for us to take flight, to have lived a life well, preparing and really focusing on what our unique gifts are so that when we finally fly, we can give something beautiful back to the world, just the way the great artists like Picasso gave back to the world something that was of his own making, something eternally beautiful, but with his unique imprint.
 
Each and every one of us is not put on earth to suffer and just crawl along.  We were meant to fly, beautifully, and we were meant to leave something behind beautifully—maybe through our artistic efforts, or through the unique gifts and talents that God blessed us with.
 
I hope that as you think about this next week and as you gaze upon your children and gaze upon your own body, and your own face, that you can think about having a clear direction.  Whenever you have more than one person in the family, there has to be some kind of consensus, some kind of understanding of where you are going.
 
In our daily living, lets allow ourselves the opportunity to practice compassion and kindness in many different settings, sometimes by being strong, sometimes by giving in, and at the same time be those wonderful human beings who do not withhold out of fear. Be that person who has the courage to love, who has the courage to help, who has the courage to say, I might be suffering, but I am going to rise above my suffering and decide to help somebody today.
 
If we keep doing little things like this each and every day, we're going to slowly become masters of this thing called true love. Before we know it, our families will be healthier, our families will be more loving, our families will be closer, and our families will be talking to each other, which is a wonderful and a vital thing in a family.
 
Please have a wonderful Sunday and a great week, and God bless.
=============

God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
Bishop WinnyCayme-Kim
(010-5818-3924  / 070-8197-0212)
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
join CKTA family for more educational/valuable materials
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#1151 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:51 am
Subject: Preventive measure for Swine Flu 		weeny.kim
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forwarded note from Rhia Clemente-Nkulu
 
Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid specialist), having clinical experience of over 20 years.

The following message given by him; I feel it makes a lot of sense and is important for all to know

    The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat.  In a global epidemic of this nature, it's almost impossible not coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions.  Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is.

    While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):

     1.  Frequent hand-washing (well highlighted in all official communications) .
   
    2.  "Hands-off-the- face" approach.  Resist all temptations to touch any part of face (unless you want to eat, bathe or slap).
     
     3.  *Gargle twice a day with warm salt water (use Listerine if you don't trust salt).  *H1N1 takes 2-3 days after initial infection in the throat/nasal cavity to proliferate and show characteristic symptoms.  Simple gargling prevents proliferation.  In a way, gargling with salt water has the same effect on a healthy individual that Tamiflu has on an infected one.  Don't under estimate this simple, inexpensive and powerful preventative method.

    4.  Similar to 3 above, *clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm salt water.  *Not everybody may be good at using a Neti pot, but *blowing the nose hard once a day and swabbing both nostrils with cotton swabs dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bringing down viral population.*

       5.  *Boost your natural immunity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C.  *If you have to supplement with Vitamin C tablets, make sure that it also has Zinc to boost absorption.

    6.  *Drink as much of warm liquids (tea, coffee, etc) as you can.  *Drinking warm liquids has the same effect as gargling, but in the reverse direction.  They wash off proliferating viruses from the throat into the stomach where they cannot survive, proliferate or do any harm.


God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
Bishop WinnyCayme-Kim
(010-5818-3924  / 070-8197-0212)
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
join CKTA family for more educational/valuable materials
Lets learn from one another through educational sharing!


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#1150 From: winny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:00 am
Subject: health is wealth (163) 7 ways to avoid Flu 		weeny.kim
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Dear Families and Friends,

I just wanna share this information to everyone. Hoping that you have healthier body and mind on this Autumn Season and towards the Winter. Happy reading


EJ Rapada

7 Natural Ways to Avoid the Flu


By Dr. Maoshing Ni - Posted on Wed, Oct 21, 2009, 12:43 pm PDT

Dr. Mao's Secrets of Longevity


With cold and flu season around the corner and H1N1 virus still making appearances, it is more important than ever to bolster your immune system this fall and winter. Here are some natural, simple solutions that will help protect you!

1. Chestnuts bolster immunity
In both Asia and the Mediterranean region, chestnuts have been popular for centuries. Chestnuts differ from other nuts with their low fat content and high fiber. They have a mild, sweet taste and a crumbly consistency. An excellent source of potassium, folate, vitamins B6 and C, chestnuts strengthen the kidney-adrenal system and bolster the immune system to fight off the flu and combat infections. This flu season, introduce more chestnuts into your cooking: they are good roasted in the oven, cooked with chicken, lamb, beef, or pork, or in any dish with beans and legumes.

2. Stimulate your thymus
Your thymus is a fist-size gland located behind your sternum in the center of your chest.  It plays a critical role in the functioning of the lymphatic and immune systems. It develops over time, reaching peak size when you are in your early 30s, then begins to physically diminish until it shrinks to the size of a pea around age 70. You experience the gland's waning as waning energy in your body.

To support thymus health, the Chinese use astragalus root. Studies show astralagus is an adaptogen, which means it corrects both high and low metabolic imbalances, acts on invaders wherever they attack the body, and promotes overall vitality. The usual dosage is 100 to 150 mg per day in capsules or you can drink astragalus tincture or tea.

Another way to stimulate your thymus is to use acupressure. With your index and middle finger, gently tap against the sternum (midway between the nipples) 50 times, in the morning and evening.

3. Immune-supporting herbs
You can use the following herbs to help strengthen your immune system:

• Ligustrum has undergone much research recently, which has revealed this herb's immune boosting functions. Its actions include increasing white blood cell production, phagocytosis, and T-lymphocyte help cell activities.

• Cherokee Rose is traditionally used to protect the body from external pathogens with its astringent properties. It is also one of the highest natural sources of vitamin C.

• Honeysuckle is a natural anti-microbial herb that has been used for centuries to increase resistance and fight against bacterial, viral, and fungal infections.

You can find these herbs in health food stores, online, and at the offices of acupuncturists and Chinese herbalists.

Or look into a formula that combines all of these herbs in one immune-boosting herbal formula, called "Perpetual Shield."

4. Be healthy with bee products
Royal jelly has long been regarded in Asia as a longevity tonic that enhances energy, virility, and immunity. Rich in vitamins and collagen, royal jelly is used to feed queen bees. An antibacterial protein in the substance, dubbed royalisin, is effective against certain bacteria, including streptococcus and staphylococcus.
 
Bee propolis is rich in flavonoids that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. It also contains terpenoids that possess antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and antiprotozoan agents. Not unlike some prescription antibiotics, propolis prevents bacterial cell division and breaks down the invading organism's cell walls and cytoplasm.

Find royal jelly and bee propolis in enriched honey or in supplement form from herb shops and health food stores.

5. Beta-carotene Builds Immunity
Beta-carotene is a powerful antioxidant that improves immune function and promotes mucous membrane health. In fact, a 1997 study conducted by the Institute of Food Research in the United Kingdom suggested that dietary intake of beta-carotene can enhance cell-mediated immune responses. How to get these beta-benefits this flu season? Eat more orange-colored vegetables, including carrots, winter squash, butternut squash, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and yams. Additionally, these are all an excellent source of Vitamin C, a famous immune support.

6. An all-in-one immunity soup
Cook up a broth of shiitake mushrooms, any kind of seaweed, cabbage, any type of squash, carrots, fresh ginger, oregano, and onion in chicken or vegetable stock. Shiitake mushrooms contain polysaccharides, sterols, and coumarin, as well as vitamins and minerals that increase your immune function. Seaweed cleanses the body, cabbage has ability to increase your body's ability to fight infection, ginger supports healthy digestion, and the remaining ingredients promote general health and well-being.
Eat this soup every other day to build a strong and healthy immune system.

7. Treat Your Body Right
Encourage your body to fight flu and other infections by giving it the care it needs.

• Get at least 7 hours of quality sleep every night. Studies show that your immune system function drops by an average of 60% after just three nights of poor sleep.

• Keep your stress level low with meditation, tai chi, or yoga.

• Dry body brushing daily can activate lymph circulation that is important to clear out toxic debris and stimulate immunity.

• If you feel your immune system has already been compromised and illness is on the way, consider this Cold & Flu elixir, which supports recovery as it boosts your immune system.

I hope you find the ways to build your immunity for a winter free from cold and flu! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you live long, live strong, and live happy!

-Dr. Mao

 


 
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
Bishop WinnyCayme-Kim
(010-5818-3924  / 070-8197-0212)
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
join CKTA family for more educational/valuable materials
Lets learn from one another through educational sharing!


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#1149 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Tue Oct 20, 2009 4:16 am
Subject: Catholic Men & Woman 		weeny.kim
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forwarded note from Dr Lala Magpantay (DD)
 
Catholics at a Coffee House
 
Four catholic men and a Catholic woman were having coffee.
 
 
The first Catholic man tells his friends, "My son is a priest, when
he walks into a room, everyone calls him “ Father"
 
 
The second Catholic man chirps, "My son is a Bishop.? When he
walks into a room people call him 'Your Grace'."
 
 
The third Catholic gent says, "My son is a Cardinal.? When he
enters a room everyone says 'Your Eminence'."
 
 
The fourth Catholic man then says, "My son is the Pope.? When
he walks into a room people call him 'Your Holiness'."
 
 
Since the lone Catholic woman was sipping her coffee in silence,
the four men give her a subtle, "Well....?"?
 
 
She proudly replies, "I have a daughter, slim, tall, 38D breast,
24" waistline and 34" hips. When she walks into a room, people say,
"Oh My God."
 
 


 
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
 
Bishop Wini Cayme-Kim
(010-5818-3924  / 070-8197-0212)
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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#1148 From: "weeny.kim" <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Oct 18, 2009 3:32 pm
Subject: UC members in the list 		weeny.kim
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Hello families,

Those Unification Members in the list who wish to receive more news & HDH materials from True Parents and other speeches may join the CKTA-globalcommunity.

click this link to join:  CKTA-globalcommunity

need some self introduction for membeship approval.

Wish to see you there!

BishopWini


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#1147 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Sun Oct 18, 2009 3:22 pm
Subject: The Holy Alphabet! 		weeny.kim
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The Holy Alphabet--THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!

Whoever came up with this one must have had some Divine guidance!

A lthough things are not perfect
B ecause of trial or pain
C ontinue in thanksgiving
D o not begin to blame
E ven when the times are hard
F ierce winds are bound to blow
G do is forever able
H old on to what you know
I magine life without His love
J  oy would cease to be
K eep thanking Him for all the things
L ove imparts to thee
M ove out of "Camp Complaining"
N o weapon that is known
O n earth can yield the power
P raise can do alone
Q uit looking at the future
R edeem the time at hand
S tart every day with worship
T o "thank" is a command
U ntil we see Him coming
V ictorious in the sky
W e'll run the race with gratitude
X alting God most high
Y es, there'll be good times and yes some will be bad, but...
Z ion waits in glory....where none are ever sad!
 
And God Bless

"I AM Too blessed to be stressed!" The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the distance between your knees and the floor. The one who kneels to the Lord can stand up to anything. Love and peace be with you forever, Amen.


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#1146 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:44 pm
Subject: Rev In Jin Moon: The world of CAIN 		weeny.kim
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Rev In Jin Moon of Lovin' Life Ministry
The World of CAIN
September 27, 2009 Manhattan Center
courtesy of familyfed.org
 
 
How is everyone this morning?  Did you enjoy the special treat this morning?  Not only did we have the musical Jesus, Ben, in town, but we also had his younger brother Victor, who is visiting for a week and volunteered graciously to come and be a part of our service.  It's just so wonderful to see so much love and so much brotherly unity on stage, is it not?
 
I am so proud of our Lovin' Life band because we have great singers, our lead vocalist, and many great band members.  We have the tempo Nazi, Alistair, who keeps the band in check, and we have the executive vice president of HSA on bass to ground it and drive it forward.  And then we have Diego in the front, always brimming with so much love.  He just loves to soak up the love in this auditorium every Sunday.  Then we have the lovely Laurel, who's always encouraging us with her smile and with her beautiful spirit.  We have Omar on the drums.  And we have a new member of the band, Joe Young, who's a fantastic guitar player.  And we also have Kurt.  Sometimes we get Billy, and sometimes we dont.  But all in all, the band is a wonderful mix of people.
 
Not only am I just so inspired that I can share this great music together with you, but when I look at the band, I see a collection of really, really fine people.  In particular, this Sunday I am so proud of Chris Alan, one of our favorite vocalists here at Lovin' Life.  When you work in the entertainment industry like I do, whenever you're talking about different artists, and lead vocalists in particular, you're really talking about the management of their egos.  But it was so wonderful when I called up Chris Alan and said, "We have Ben's younger brother in town, and he's volunteered to come and sing for our congregation.  Would you be open to that?"  He just immediately, with a loving older brother's heart, said, "Yes, of course. I think that would be wonderful."
 
Then I gave him a song list, and he knew that he was not going to be singing today.  But as one of the lead vocalists of the band, his heart of wanting to embrace new, up-and-coming young ones and to share the stage with other stars was just so beautiful to me.  I tried to make it to the rehearsal yesterday because I just wanted to give him a big hug, but I heard that even as he was coming in for rehearsal, he had a tough day, too.  When he tried to buy a ticket to come into the city, there was a homeless person refusing to allow him to purchase the ticket until he bought her one also.  Then when he was on the train coming in, there was a gentleman seated next to him who basically divulged all the problems of his life and his marriage. Im sure Chris Alan was thinking, "Is this really happening to me?" 

But he came to the rehearsal, and he just really put in his heart and soul.  Even though he's a main lead singer, today he was the accompanist.  How wonderful it is for me, as someone who works in the entertainment industry, to see, not the fighting of the great titans or the egos on stage, but truly everybody wanting to celebrate each other's beauty and God-given talent with the rest of the room.  What more beautiful band could I have than the one I have already?  So could you help me give everyone a great round of applause?
 
Here at Lovin' Life as we come to close the month of September, lots of things are going through my mind. In particular, the month of September calls to mind for a lot of American people, subliminally or consciously, what had happened on 9/11, the act of terrorism.  When you think about terrorism, it's really a war amongst brothers.  My father has spoken time and time again that all the major religions belong to one family.  All the major religions are like siblings, like brothers and sisters.  When one wars against another and actually wants to kill and destroy the other, it's probably one of the most tragic things that our Heavenly Parent, God, has had to witness time and time again.
 
We know that even with the first family, within the family of Adam, we saw fratricide, Cain murdering Abel, out of Cain's inability to digest what was going on. Out of his anger and jealousy and out of pure spite, he destroyed the very thing that he needed so much a wonderful family.  Perhaps if the foundation of faith and substance had been accomplished in Adam's family, God could still have worked through Adam's family, but we know that this didnt take place.  We know that the Bible tells a story in Genesis 4:1-26 about the murdering of Abel by his older brother.
 
When you read this passage, its quite interesting. You can take it as a literal story, or you can understand it as a metaphor for a lot of things that people of the time or in different periods of human history have had to go through.  When you look at the story of Cain and Abel from the historical point of view, you can look at it as symbolizing the enmity or the rivalry between Cain, representing the sedentary farmers, and Abel, representing pastoral nomads.  The Bible tells us that Cain was a tiller of the ground and Abel was a shepherd who had his own flock.  When you read on, you see that in verse 5 it says that when these two brothers made an offering to God, God had no regard for Cain's offering but had regard for the younger brother's offering.
 
Then it goes on, with God asking the very question to Cain, Why are you so angry?  Why has your countenance fallen?  (Meaning, why has your face fallen?)  Why are you so ashamed or embarrassed or outraged that your younger brother's blessing was received but yours was not?
 
Heavenly Father goes on to talk to Cain and says in verse 7, If you do well, will you not be accepted?  Heavenly Father is not saying, If you do well, you will be accepted.  It's not a conditional tense, a future tense here.  He is asking the question almost as if Cain knows the answer himself: that if he does well, he will be accepted.  But God asks it almost rhetorically in the form of a question because he's provoking Cain to think, Will you not be accepted if you do well?
 
Now he follows this question with almost a warning, saying, If not (meaning, if you dont do well), then sin is lurking at the door.  He goes on to say, Its desire is on you, and you must master it.  God is trying to help Cain along as much as he can.  As we know, God can do 95 percent , but the last 5 percent responsibility our choice, really is our own, and we have to choose to do good over evil.
 
God is almost trying to provoke Cain to remember, If you do well, will you not be accepted?  But at the same time, because Heavenly Father and Mother is our parent, he is also warning him, If you do not, sin is lurking at the door.  Its desire is on you, and you must master it.
 
What were the feelings that Cain was going through when he thought about his younger brother and the fact that God had no regard for his offering but did have regard for his younger brother's offering?  Cain, as the older brother, probably felt like, What is God doing?  I am the elder son.  How can God overlook me?  Cain should have known that his parents caused the Human Fall, when his mother tempted Adam and took Adam away from the proper position where he could truly mature in love and stand as a perfected man, together with Eve by his side as his bride and as a perfected woman, and thus be a perfected couple.  God was going to do many incredible things, like substantiate for the first time the ideal family.  This was God's grand design.
 
The children of Adam and Eve would have been direct descendants, inheriting the true love of God and the true lineage of God.  Thus, all their children coming thereafter would have been under the direct dominion of God.  But we know that the Fall took place.  So when God was thinking about restoring Adam's family so that he could somehow still work through it, God was looking to the two sons.  Through Divine Principle, we know what we need to substantiate the foundation of faith.  We know that we need an object of condition. In the story of Cain and Abel, that offering was the offering made by Abel; he was the central figure.  So by God having regard for Abel, the foundation of faith was laid. It was a wonderful foundation. Cain needed to understand his providential role as an older brother, in particular, that because of the Fall, God had to work through the younger brother because the younger brother represented God whereas the older brother represented evil.
 
Because Lucifer, an archangel, took something that did not belong to him and took Eve for himself, what had to happen in Adam's family was the restoration of the whole process, utilizing Abel and Cain as central figures.  So Cain had to truly unite with Abel, understanding that from God's standpoint, he was in a providential and historical position to really humble down and unite with Abel because Abel was God's chosen representative. If he could truly unite with Abel with that heart, then he would have restored what the archangel did when he committed sin with Eve.
 
The problem with the archangel, or Lucifer, as we call him, was that he did not see himself from God's standpoint.  He saw himself as God's most trusted adviser, who had all of God's love.  Even though God's love for Lucifer did not decrease at all, Lucifer was overcome with jealousy because God's love for Adam and Eve looked like it was so much more.  Instead of understanding that his job was to help raise Adam and Eve, like a teacher, protector, and nurturer, he took it upon himself to become selfish.  As William Gladstone, who was a four-time prime minister of Great Britain, said over and over again, Selfishness is probably the greatest curse of human history.
 
Lucifer had the selfish desire to see himself not in terms of God's grand plan but rather to concentrate only on himself, he himself, and his own sense of the decrease in love. This pushed him to leave his proper position as the guardian of the children of our Heavenly Parent: and not just leave his position, but reverse dominion.  Adam and Eve, under Lucifer's care and under God's protection, should have been raised up as a beautiful son and daughter of God.  They should have stood in the position of lords of this world.  They were supposed to be the first true parents.
 
Lucifer, having really done his best to help Adam and Eve become a perfected man and woman and then become the perfected first couple of the world, should have worked under Adam and Eve as their best and finest adviser.  So understanding his position and understanding that Adam and Eve were supposed to be his central figure, he would have worked together with them to multiply good, not evil.
 
But because Lucifer, an archangel, left his position and not just left his position but reversed dominion so he became lord over Adam and Eve, not the other way around then the world witnessed and experienced the multiplication of evil.  When God was looking at Cain and Abel, he thought, Okay, Adam and Eve were not successful, but let me try with their sons. So Cain, the eldest son, represented satanic lineage because it was Satan who took God's lineage away from God, and Abel represented God's lineage. Cain should have known and he probably knew that he had an incredibly important role to play in satisfying the foundation of substance.  That was really within his hands.
 
Had Cain really united with Abel had he really acknowledged Abel and seen him from God's point of view, realizing that he was God's representative—then he should have loved Abel with all his heart, regardless of what he was feeling inside, regardless of his desire to say, But, God, I want to serve you.  I want to bring the world to you. I want to be the one who makes the clarion call to wake up the brothers and sisters of my time and bring them to you.  I am sure he felt like that as the eldest son.  At the same time, Im sure he felt anger: What is the difference between my brother and me?  Why should he be chosen?  Why should his offering be anointed?  Why should his gift be accepted?  Why should whatever he does be better than my sacrifice, my offering?
 
God was giving Cain an incredible opportunity to grow and to overcome the selfishness that caused the Fall, to really subdue it and master it.  When you feel that something has been taken away from you, your anger and rage can sometimes turn into a desire to kill.  Cain's biggest battle was, How do I subdue, how do I master this desire to get rid of this little pipsqueak who is my younger brother?  How do I overcome this urge to kill with love?  This was what our Heavenly Parent was asking of Cain.
 
Because the archangel left his position and reversed dominion, what God hoped was that not only would Cain see Abel from God's point of view, understanding that there is an opportunity here for great victory if the two brothers could unite in love, but also that Cain would not leave his position as an elder brother but would really love the younger brother, really acknowledge the younger brother as God's mediator and representative. But like the archangel, who reversed dominion, Cain killed Abel, taking an almost God-like stand.  Only God has the sovereignty to end a life.  So Cain became God-like, just the way Lucifer wanted to be God-like, Eve wanted to be Godlike, and Adam wanted to be God-like in the process of the Fall.
 
Cain needed to understand that, even though he was the older brother, he had to really submit, not in a humiliating way but in obedience and for the purpose of unity, so that through his own sacrifice, through his own annihilation of the self, of the selfishness that has so corrupted human history, then he could stand in the position to be instrumental in bringing about the multiplication of goodness.  That was what God was hoping that Cain would do.
 
If we take this story in Genesis as having a moral lesson, we can look at it and say, It's not good to kill your sibling.  Or we can say, God was really trying to do something here.  But what the writer of Genesis was trying to do was introduce us to the two themes that recur throughout the Genesis story.  Those two themes are, first, the strife amongst brothers, and second, the desire to leave your position to become something else.
 
When we look at Cain and Abel, we see that in verse 13, after Cain killed Abel, God said, What have you done?  Cain comes to his own realization of what he has done.  He says, This punishment is more than I can bear.  He knows it's more than he can bear because what he has done, which is to allow the failure for the foundation for the messiah to take place in his family, is not only going to affect him but also his posterity.
 
When you read the passage in Genesis 4:17-26, you can sense a certain level of ambiguity in the progress or advance of humankind.  It's interesting to note that God still performs his mercy by allowing Cain not to be killed by putting a mark on his head.  But when Cain leaves his home, one of the first things he does is to build a city.  When you read that, you have to say to yourself, somebody who can build a fine city must be someone with some kind of capability.  He was no dummy.  Maybe he was a very capable person, and he created a city.
 
But the Bible also gives us a premonition of what is to come because there is a certain feeling of ambiguity when it comes to the advance of human civilization.  There's almost a fear that the more civilization progresses, the more violent it might become.  We realize that the Bible is setting up a warning when we reach Genesis 11, where it says that the ambiguity that we felt in Chapter 4 is very much a reality; the city that was built by Cain’s descendants actually becomes something that challenges the supremacy of Yahweh in Chapter 11.
 
It's a reminder to us, brothers and sisters, that as we progress forward in history and as our technology becomes more and more advanced, we have to be careful not to become isolated from God.  We have to be careful not to become a fragmented society where we think the only thing we need is Me, my laptop, and the Internet.  We need to remind ourselves that we are part of something bigger.  When we start emphasizing or thinking about only ourselves, this can degenerate into an act of violence because we don’t need anybody: If somebody is better than we are, then we may act out of anger or jealousy; we may react out of an urge to kill.
 
The heartbreaking passage of what happened to Cain and Abel describes what has unfolded in our own history. Time and again, this historical story takes many permutations in our own individual lives.  Cain doesnt represent only the older brother. Maybe this kind of rivalry exists between the First Generation and Second Generation, between the leaders and the members, between a certain nation and another nation.  This kind of sibling rivalry exists all the time.
 
Maybe a First Generation is confronted with the difficulty, What do I do with the pipsqueak Second and Third Generation that are coming up behind me? God's love for First Generation never decreased.  In fact, God's love for the First Generation remains the same.  If we cannot learn how to be happy for the generations that come after us, like the Second and Third, and have a parental heart, if we cannot learn to be happy for our children and our grandchildren, then human history is not moving forward; it’s almost at a standstill.
 
If the First Generation feels that it's not being loved enough, then it needs to understand what happened in the story of Cain and Abel so that it can maintain its position.  We must maintain our relationship with our Heavenly Parent, understanding what an incredible opportunity it is to be the founding building block of this great movement that we call our own.  Instead of thinking, Why cant I be the brick that sits on the second floor, lets be satisfied that the second floor, the third floor, the fourth floor, and so on and so forth, as high as we can imagine, rest upon our roles, upon our sacrifice, and upon our love.
 
We need to maintain our positions and not reverse dominion by holding our children back, by saying, You can never be better than me. Get behind me. Let me be the one who ushers in the new millennium; let me be the one who brings the greatest victory to God. You're just a pipsqueak.  If the First Generation only thinks about itself, it will not stand in the position to multiply goodness, love, peace, and prosperity in our movement.
 
The same applies to a leader in a similar position.  When you're looking at your congregation, at the members, remember that a teacher's role is to make the student better than you.  You are a fine teacher if you can raise the men and women in your classroom to be better than you.  The teacher or the leader should have a heart of wanting something better, and not being dissatisfied or angry because somebody new coming along seemingly has it easy, seemingly has all the luck, seemingly has all the prosperity. We need to understand that we are really playing a providential role in this building of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, building this incredible mansion that represents God's love.  Then each building block has its position and place.  By working together, we can create something that will ultimately reach the sky and the stars.
 
But we must be grateful, knowing who we are.  Sometimes you might find yourself in the position of Cain; other times you might find yourself in the position of Abel.  But no matter what position you find yourself in, always remember that if you find that situation to be unbearably difficult and you just want to get out, be grateful for the opportunity to grow into the more profound and deeper person that God is asking you to become. Sometimes the best thing to do is have almost an out-of-body experience and learn to see our lives from a bird's-eye view point, seeing ourselves from the standpoint of God: What is God trying to do by putting me in this incredibly difficult situation?  God is putting me in this incredibly difficult situation because he believes in me, and he's hoping that through my sacrifice, through my love and through my desire to multiply good, he can work miracles and miracles upon this community that I call my own. Or upon the family that I call my own.
 
We have a lot of siblings in the True Family.  My mother gave birth to fourteen sons and daughters: seven sons and seven daughters.  When you're born into such a big family, there is a love of tlue rub [true love] that needs to take place.  Just like the different religions, every one of us is so different.  One of the first things my husband said to me when he married me and entered into my family, getting to know all the different characters, was, I thought you guys would be a homogenous lot.  I thought you guys would be very similar.  The only similarity we have is that we love God, we love True Parents, and we have very obsessive personalities, all of us.  Other than that, we are so different.
 
My husband often said to me, Getting to know the True Family is like meeting an Eskimo, meeting a Japanese person, and meeting an American.  It's all different cultures represented, thrown together into this thing called the True Family, with all the different strengths and all the different weaknesses.  Imagine all these titans coming together and tlue rubbing each other, learning to build an ideal family meaning that every one of us has to deal with each other and overcome the obstacles and difficulties by living for the sake of others, by practicing and applying true love in our daily lives.
 
Let me be a living testament.  It is not easy.  Everyone has his or her own desires.  Let me be the one, God, to bring the world to you.  Let me be the one to do it this way, or do it that way.  But if we think about the Cain and Abel story and about the incredible importance of understanding who we are from God's standpoint, we must not be mesmerized by our own desire to serve.  Maybe God is calling us to serve in a different way.  We must not be tempted by our desire to love by saying, Let me be the one, the only one, when God is asking the whole family to love and everybody to love the world as this incredible first family of true love.
 
We must not be confused in thinking that maybe God is asking a certain kind of responsibility from the youngest son of the family by anointing him as the spiritual head.  In a way, he is like the Abel of the family.  He is God's representative in our family, but this doesnt mean God loves any of us any less.  In fact, God is giving the greater and perhaps more difficult responsibility to the elder members of the family by saying, I know how incredibly difficult it might be for elders to humble themselves and honor, respect, and acknowledge a younger brother as the head of the family. But if God so wills it, then it must be done.
 
There is no room for others in the family to say, Let me be the one.  We must all be the one.  And being the one means listening to the word of God.  Our God has anointed our True Father at the age of 16 to carry out and fulfill Jesus Christ's mission.  Father has taken us thus far, and so successfully, in more than 90 years of his life.  God is working his mysterious magic through our True Father and through our True Mother; for the first time in history, God is working his mysterious magic through our True Parents.
 
When you think about the story of Cain and Abel, also think about going into a room full of theologians. There will be a great deal of debate and back-and-forth about Let's get this story from this perspective, or from that angle.  One of the things that they all like to say is, It's a mystery why God had regard for the second son and did not have regard for the first son.  In fact, that's the second time that this mystery occurs in the story of Genesis, the first being the strife amongst brothers, and the second being this mystery of why God keeps on picking the younger one.
 
But when we see Cain and Abel's position from God's standpoint and realize that Cain represented satanic lineage and Abel represented God's lineage, then we begin to understand why God accepted Abel's offering as the foundation of faith and was hoping that Cain, representing satanic lineage, could really, truly become humble and truly annihilate the self, take the self out of the equation, to say, I am in a providential role to deny the self, to take selfishness out of the providential history, so that together in unity my younger brother and I can usher in a true world of peace and love.  This is what should have happened.
 
As a member of the True Family Im always thinking, okay, this is a story about two brothers, but we know that in most families there are sisters, too.   Im thinking, where are the sisters?  What about the mothers?  History has been male dominated because providential history has been that of restoration, trying to create a foundation for the messiah to come, or the perfected Adam.  But now that we have our True Mother, who has restored the fallen Eve's position, stands in the position of a perfect woman, and stands together with our True Father in the position of True Parents, there is a whole lot of work to be done by us women.
 
God, through our True Parents, announced the dawn of the Pacific Rim era and is encouraging the daughters, mothers, and sisters of this world to come together to ring in the new millennium with a new atmosphere of love, compassion, kindness, and strength.  God is hoping that the women can really play a major role in a lot of these things that we call Cain and Abel struggles.
 
Think about it. Here we are, each of us, like a single strand of thread.  One might be the color red, one might be yellow or brown.  One might be French or Belgian, maybe a little sophisticated color here.  But each and every one of us is weaving together this incredible tapestry that we call the human experience.  God wants to create a masterpiece, so he brought out a canvas, along with different colors on an artist's palette or threads on a loom, and is weaving a tapestry.  We are the different threads.
 
We may be men; we may be women.  We may be girls; we may be boys.  We may come from different religious backgrounds.  We may come from different cultural backgrounds.  But what God is hoping for is for us to continually weave each other into this human family, into this one family that he has been waiting for. Let me remind the men in the audience who might not have experience with needlepoint or weaving or knitting that it's a laborious process.  It takes a great deal of patience; it takes a great deal of application and effort in order for one to complete a needlepoint masterpiece.
 
Think of our lives as this masterpiece needlepoint tapestry that God wants to put up in the sky for all to enjoy.  Each of us with our own eccentricities, with our own God-given talents and gifts, are just that extra spice that adds a certain highlight or a certain dimension to this incredible tapestry that God wants to create.  Instead of thinking, I am the highlight; I am the mountain but you are the valley, instead of thinking, I am the light; you are the darkness, remember that it's very difficult to see the light in the painting if there is no contrast, darkness.  It's very difficult to experience the full ecstasy of climbing up an incredibly high mountain if you have not experienced the beauty and the profundity of a deep valley.
 
What God has given us through our lives and through all these different things that I call growth opportunities is that he's taking us through this journey of self-discovery and he's throwing a little bit of pink here, a little bit of brown here, a little bit of blue here, a little bit of yellow here.  Sometimes we're thinking, What is God doing?  But if we can pull ourselves away and take God's bird's-eye view and see ourselves from God's standpoint, we realize that each and every one of us has an incredible responsibility to play a part in this masterpiece that God is creating.
 
Instead of concentrating on what I didnt get, or what I dont have, or why do I have less, lets see that it really needs to be about what I do have and look what God has given to me.  Are we not beautiful men and women?  Are we not healthy men and women?  Sometimes it's a wonderful thing to remind ourselves that we are not alone in our difficulty, our suffering, our moments of confusion.  Everybody goes through it.  God takes us through the slow burn in order to make us into an incredibly beautiful man or woman of God.
 
Instead of fighting against the slow burn, let's welcome the slow burn by realizing that the slow burn is there for our benefit, to make us better.  When Cain was experiencing the excruciating pain of this slow burn, a feeling like he'd been cast aside, was not loved, and God had no regard for him, how incredible would it have been if Cain said to himself, I am God's son, and I always will be.  I am his eternal son, really concentrating on who he was, what role he was meant to play as that providential older brother figure and what he could bring about by mastering his demons and his desire to kill by instead learning how to love, how to be grateful, but, most importantly, learning to accept the will of God.
 
We are a movement in America, an incredibly important providential country.  My father has said so, time and time again.  Americans pride themselves on the word diversity.  There are so many different types of people in our country.  But what God is asking us to do is not just celebrate our diversity but also learn to love through unity.  When you think about the word unity and you realize that it comes through the Latin word unis meaning one you realize that God's desire for humanity is for all of us to live as if we belonged to one family, to one parent, as if we were brothers and sisters.
 
The Cain and Abel story reminds us that we must not kill our own.  We must not destroy the ones whom we were meant to call brothers and sisters.  But in this call for unity, Father and Mother together as the True Parents are asking the women to play a crucial part.  If you really think about it, when you put males, strong testosterone figures, into a room together, they want to butt heads.  Here we have the gift of mothers, the gift of sisters, the gift of daughters who did not have a voice until our True Mother could stand in the proper role of womanhood.  But now that our True Mother has done so, it is an invitation in this time of the Pacific Rim era for women to have a voice, saying to our brothers who might be going through a Cain and Abel situation, Lord, Lord, brothers, why not just love each other?  Let me be the glue between you two.  Let me be the glue that binds us together into a family.  Instead of thinking about our own egos, why not think about the beauty of unity?
 
This is where a feminine touch can come in really handy.  I grew up with seven brothers, and they were all big and strong.  Many times they butted heads, and many times it was the sisters that kept them well behaved.  Father and Mother sometimes jokingly said to the family, There is a purpose and a reason why there are exactly seven sons and seven daughters.  Not eight sons and six daughters, not nine sons and five daughters, but seven sons and seven daughters. It's like the yin and yang of the True Family.  Many times it takes the feminine touch to invite the different yangs of the family to unite together.
 
This is a time when the sisters and the daughters can play an incredible role as unifiers, not just in the context of their own individual family but also in the context of society, the world, and the cosmos.  And also in the context of our own movement here.  Lets work together and celebrate our strengths and acknowledge our weaknesses, the boys and the men realizing they have great strength but certain areas that need a little work, and the women knowing they have great strength, too, but certain areas that also need a lot of work.  So lets come together and concentrate on what is truly important, and that is the creation of unity.  After all, isnt our church the Unification Church?
 
Are we not here to unify the family, society, world and cosmos?  Are we not here as a symbol and an example of unity?  We need to remember who we are, brothers and sisters.  We need to remember that we are God's sons and daughters.  When our Father established this as the Unification Church, what our Father and Mother were asking us to do is to truly open up our eyes so that we can see beyond the diversity, beyond the differences, beyond the different cultures and packages that come along with each and every one of us.
 
Just as the acronym of the Unification Church says, UC, we need to open up our eyes and begin to see, inviting different religions of the world as our brothers and sisters.  It is with our own opened eyes that we must encourage all the different religions to think of ourselves as one family and in that way usher in a new millennium of peace.
 
As a mother, not a day goes by without my thinking, what do I want to leave my children when it is my time to go?  I want to leave a world of peace.  Brothers and sisters, we can accomplish this world of peace only when we first and foremost acknowledge God as our Heavenly Parent, when we see ourselves as the eternal sons and daughters of God, and when we promise and commit to a life of living for the sake of others, just because,  not out of some reward system.  Let's practice on a daily basis the meaning of the word compassion and be strong in standing up for our different liberties, understanding that we must stand up against violence of any kind, especially the violence within the home, and educate our children to be not just internally excellent but externally excellent.
 
This is a simple reminder that we are here not for ourselves, really, but for each other.  Unlike the young men who shed their lives because they were promised an eternal life with seventy-two virgins and crashed into the Twin Towers of New York, instead of thinking of some kind of reward system that supposedly promises you a life of debauchery in the hereafter, how wonderful would it be if young men and women could be inspired to live a great life now and continue that life onward into the hereafter? There is no promise of sex with seventy-two virgins that will be used to take the precious life that God gave you and use yourselves as missiles of destruction. Once you realize that you were placed here for an incredibly important reason, which is to be the son or daughter of God and learn to live in peace and in love as members of one family, then peace is just around the corner.
 
Brothers and sisters, Im hoping that as our movement goes forward through the different permutations of the Cain and Abel story, lets please be mindful of who we are and of our need to be absolutely obedient to and united with our Heavenly Parent, God, and with our True Parents.  They will not lead us astray.  What they want more than anything, as it says in John 10:16, is one flock, one shepherd.  That shepherd is our True Parents, brothers and sisters.
 
Have a great week, have a great month, and God bless you.  Thank you.

God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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#1145 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:12 pm
Subject: Rev In Jin Moon: Predictions about the Second Coming 		weeny.kim
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Good morning, brothers and sisters.  How is everybody this morning?  What a wonderful band, right?

We had an exciting week.  Just last Thursday we had a celebration for the debut of the English translation of my father's autobiography, which continues to be a best-seller in Korea.  As you know, early in the spring we had a celebration for the autobiography in Korea with 3,500 dignitaries from all around the world, including titans of industry in Korea.  My father truly showed his heart by digressing from the text and giving an extemporaneous, three-hour speech, standing as the True Father and true grandfather of humankind, cajoling, compelling, provoking the audience to be the kind of children that our Heavenly Parent, God, would like us to be.
 
Fast-forward a couple of months, and we celebrated his autobiography debut in Washington, at the Sheraton National Hotel with our True Parents again.  On Thursday night we had 1,500 dignitaries and representatives from our community all across the states and all around the world.  It was truly a magnificent celebration, together with our True Parents.  Knowing my father's custom to truly give his heart and soul to every congregation and audience that he comes across, I remember hearing my mother beseeching my father, "There are lots of VIP guests today".  Is it possible to stick to the text.  My mother asked him several times if that was possible. Father said, Dont worry.  Be happy.
 
Our Lovin' Life band did a phenomenal job of really creating the right atmosphere. Once Father got on stage, my mother and the family knew we were in for another treat.  Lo and behold, my father went off on another digression for two and a half hours.  The lovely audience really took it very well.  Father, being 90 years old, not only is a prophet and teacher, but, first and foremost, thinks of himself as a true father and true grandfather.  When he looks upon the beautiful faces of his children, he's always trying to provoke us, trying to stimulate us to live a life of true love, to apply it each and every day, to practice patience.  Sometimes the way he helps us practice patience is by participating with us, such as in the 12-hour Hoon Dok Hwe that preceded the evening.  He spoke from 5 a.m. until 5 p.m., taking only a moment of rest in his room before the evening.  Then for his speech, he went on again.
 
Truly his heart is that of somebody who wants to wake the world up with the breaking news that our True Parents are here, that the son and daughter of our Heavenly Parent, God, are here.  It is truly an incredible opportunity for us lucky people to unite in spirit and heart and work together to share in the breaking news that the Second Coming is living, walking, and breathing along with us.
 
I heard how this autobiography came to be.  It was published by a company called Kyung Young Sa, which is the equivalent of Random House in the West.  The CEO of that company happens to be Madame Park, a devout Buddhist.  She tells how in one of her meditations Buddha appeared to her and asked her to seek out this man named Reverend Moon and to publish a story about this extraordinary man.
 
Because she had this revelation in her meditation, she reached out to our community and compelled our True Father to write his autobiography in his own words. Thats how it came to be.  It is a phenomenal book in that we get a rare glimpse into a man in the form of different stories.  The book unfolds almost like a mysterious Eastern fan, with a series of vignettes that give us glimpses into different aspects of my father's life. It traces his humble beginnings as a little boy born in the hills of North Korea and sees him become the man whom we have come to know as our True Father and as the peacemaker of this new millennium.
 
In the book's foreword, my father writes that, as he has been reminiscing about his life, his heart is filled with the love that he still wants to share with his sons and daughters and with the world.  He tells the reader that it is his firm belief and prayer that his life and his path of love can become like a river of peace, saturating the drought-stricken lands and truly infusing the world with the new understanding of love and peace that he so longs to share.
 
When I think about this man, my father, I realize that he is the fulfillment of Luke 17:24-25, which talks about how the Son of God will come like lightning, flashing and lighting up the sky.  Lightning comes in an unexpected fashion, right?  We dont know when it will strike, but when it strikes, not only do we hear but we see.  We see our Father, and we hear him.
 
But in verse 25 the Bible predicts that the Son of God will first suffer greatly and be rejected by his generation.  So when we look at Father's life, we realize that it really has been a life of suffering, a life of being rejected by society, by established religions, by his brothers and sisters, over and over and over again.  But Father has asked, What do we want to leave behind as a community? or What do we want to leave behind as a father or mother, as a man or woman, or a son or daughter of God?
 
This question has intrigued me and given me a lot of inspiration during my meditation.  My father answered his own question in a speech he gave in 1976, but I think it's still pertinent today as we march forward on our road of self discovery.  My father has asked, What do we want to leave behind?  He has answered it with, We must leave a tradition behind, a tradition of living for the sake of others with the spirit of sacrifice.
 
If you really think about it, what our True Parents have come to do is to awaken us to realize that our Heavenly Parent, our God, our father and mother up in heaven, is truly our parent, and that we are meant to be God's eternal sons and daughters.  What Father and Mother are asking us to do in this wonderful gift that we can call our life is to live our lives in gratitude, in truly understanding that we have an incredible eternal flame, like God's divinity, within each and every one of us.  God is just waiting for us to shine unto the world like an incredible light bulb.
 
How do we go about doing this?  How do we go about living for the sake of others?  My father is encouraging us to have an understanding of unity.  We must be a community that symbolizes unity. Every time, every Sunday when I stand before you here, when I look out into the audience, I see a congregation that symbolizes unity of the world right here at the Manhattan Center.  We have men and women, we have young and old; we have red hair, black hair, blonde hair, blue eyes, hazel eyes, brown eyes.  You represent the world.  In the spirit of unity, in the spirit of understanding that God is our one Heavenly Parent, we have come together to honor him, to honor our True Parents who have taught us who we are, to honor each other, and to appreciate and celebrate each other as truly the lucky ones in human history who share this incredible time with our True Parents.
 
Anybody who reads the Divine Principle will come to realize, after studying human history and especially providential history, that our True Father is the Second Coming; together with his beloved wife, they stand as the first True Parents of humankind.  But we're not the only ones who have this understanding.  Throughout the centuries before us, different prophets, seers, and believers have talked about an incredible time to come when we can experience a thousand years of peace.
 
One of the key figures that I revisit from time to time is named Nostradamus.  I read a book written by a gentleman named John Hogue titled Nostradamus: The New Millennium.  I read it about 20 years ago, but recently I came across it again. In reading it I was astounded at the fulfillments of prophecies of Nostradamus that have taken place and are taking place, even as I speak.  He was a phenomenal doctor, thinker, and philosopher.  He was an herbalist and also considered a celestial scientist because he was so well versed in astrology.  But he was really seen as somebody who was like a gift from God in the 16th century.

He was born on December 14, 1503. Throughout the course of his life he was able to help many people; he even helped cities that were plagued by the Black Death.  He came to be known as an incredible son of God, a healer, somebody whom everyone wanted to meet and greet so they could better understand themselves and their own destinies.
 
He wrote volumes of predictions called The Centuries.  What I find so incredible about his quatrains when Im rereading them is that he's talking about a man who will appear in the East and find his home in the West.  He's saying that this man will be like the Prince of Peace, will be the one who will usher in a thousand years of peace that we will enjoy here on earth.  He gives us ten clues.
 
John Hogue, in researching and interpreting these sixty or so quatrains that pertain to this incredible man who will usher in this new millennium of peace, tried his best to solve the riddles of the words in the quatrains and created a grid of ten possible candidates who might fit the model of who this man is supposed to be.  He looks at various teachers and even includes Ron Hubbard, the father of Scientology.  But he says that Ron Hubbard doesnt quite fit the fact that this man will appear in the East and come to rest and call the West his home.
 
He names my father as one of the ten candidates in his grid.  He goes through the eight clues that Nostradamus gives as to who this man might be.  He checks off most of the squares, but there are a couple that he cannot check off.  But when I reread the quatrains and reread what Nostradamus was really saying, I felt an urge to write Mr. Hogue a letter because if he truly understood our church better than he did at that time he wrote the book, he would realize that our True Father and our movement are truly the fulfillment of the prophecies of Nostradamus.
 
Nostradamus talks first of all about how this man will be from the East, appearing and taking residence in the West.  Then he goes on to say that he will fly through the skies and strike everybody with the rod of Hermes.  In philosophy and in religion, the rod of Hermes can be understood as a new stream of consciousness or enlightenment, if you will.  The rod has the power to transform and liberate one to experience the truth.  So understanding the rod of Hermes in a philosophical and religious sense means that it's a time when this new awakening will come and hit everybody like a rod of lightning.
 
For those of us who understand mythology, Hermes was the god representing also commerce and science.  This Mr. Hogue did not point out, but I feel that it's very interesting that my father was studying to be a scientist, an electrical engineer.  Many times my father has been seen almost as a god of commerce, not as a religious figure.  Many people have seen him as a businessman.  Although we may look at this as something perhaps strange, and even if the world wants to persecute my father as a businessman, these are the clues that Nostradamus is pointing out as to how to find who this man is supposed to be.  He comes with a new conscience; he comes from the East.  He has the reputation of being a god of commerce, a businessman, and he comes from the area of science.
 
Nostradamus goes on to say that he will be seen as an outlaw.  The quatrains talk about how he will be charged with the destruction of temples and religions.  The quatrains specifically say that this man comes to harm the rock but not the living.  What are the rocks of society?  They are the established organizations, the established religions, the established dogmas that have kept our societies in check.  But truly this man comes to usher in a new understanding, a new time.
 
The quatrains are amazing, going on and on.  Mr. Hogue forgot to check off the square regarding the color red.  Now anybody who knows the Unification Church and understands the symbol that represents the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity knows that our symbol is the color red.  Nostradamus also goes on to say that the rose will appear in the middle of the world's scene, in reference to this group that will be symbolized by the color red.
 
I thought it was extremely interesting that my father has professed to a group of scientists that his favorite color is pink. At the same time this is a new religion that puts women in the forefront because of the success and completion of our True Mother in restoring the position of Eve so that we are no longer standing behind our men but standing together, and maybe even forward, encouraging our brothers to understand this incredible time.
 
Many times the rose, or the flower, represents the feminine touch.  This is a new religion that will be symbolized by the color red but will carry forth into the world's scene the feminine touch, this sense of a beautiful flower blossoming.  Our church symbol can be seen as almost like a rose, almost like a flower.
 
Then Nostradamus continues, saying that this man will be under the protection of Mars.  The planet Mars symbolizes the passions, the outward manifestation of things.  When Nostradamus says that this man will be under the protection of Mars, he is basically saying that this man will be embraced and loved by the people who have had a new awakening of their passions, in knowing who they are, in knowing they are the sons and daughters of God, in understanding that God is our Heavenly Parent.  The people with those passions are us, brothers and sisters.  It is under our protection that our True Parents will be embraced, comforted, and loved.
 
The quatrains talk about how this new man coming from the East will have somewhere in his name the word Moon.  How more obvious can you get than Reverend Moon?  I dont think I need to expound on that clue, do I?
 
Then it also talks about how this man will travel through the skies.  When we read the Bible, we see many references to the Second Coming arriving on the clouds of heaven.  Daniel 7:13 says that, and we hear the same words repeated in Matthew 24 about the Second Coming coming on the clouds.  We know that this figure has something to do with the sky, flying through the sky.  Im sure a lot of us have wondered, Is this guy going to be like a superhero, coming the world stage with the letter S and a cape like Superman, saving all of us from our sins and our evil ways?
 
But if you really think about it, imagine living in the time when the book of Daniel was written, or imagine living 2,000 years ago when the biblical writer said the Second Coming would come on the clouds.  Just imagine being one of the people who lived in the time of Nostradamus, trying to explain something called an airplane.  Would you not think it was something coming on the clouds?
 
One of the clues is that this man will travel far and wide, igniting the world with his words as well as igniting a lot of anger and resentment because people dont understand what he' all about: again, the reference that this man will be misunderstood, as the Bible tells us in Luke 7:24-25; again, this feeling that he will suffer, be mistreated, be maligned, be blamed for harming the rocks.
 
As a daughter, I watched my father travel all around the world, keeping an insane schedule, flying from Korea to America, to Europe. He is an incredible man who is traveling and flying through the skies to deliver this new and breaking message that our True Parents are here and that God is our Heavenly Parent.
 
Mr. Hogue forgot to check another box, which includes the quatrain that talks about rare birds that will give a clue as to who this man is.  It's interesting that when the prophets and various teachers talked about the Second Coming, they spoke about a male figure.  But we know that our Heavenly Parent's desire in creating the world was not just to have a first son but to also experience the beauty of a first daughter.  In our True Parents we see God's reasons why he created the world and all of us.
 
The interesting thing about Nostradamus's predictions is that although he talks about a man, the more he talks about the religion, he very much references the feminine touch; for us, that comes in the form of the Holy Spirit manifested physically in the body of our True Mother.  It's interesting to note that her name means heavenly crane.  Is she not a rare and exquisite bird?  Nostradamus goes on in his quatrains to say that these rare birds it's a plural will fly through the skies, proclaiming to the world, Now, now, now is the time.  Now is the time of breaking news.
 
If you really think about it, isnt it our True Mother who is leading the way at the dawn of the new millennium, to challenge and inspire the sisters of the world to say, Let's bring the message forward, let's empower our families, let's raise decent children.  Let us be the guardians of peace and love.  Our True Mother is the one bringing this spirit, bringing the feminine touch, the mother's touch, to the world.
 
Just as throughout the Bible the dove symbolizes peace, when Nostradamus is talking about these rare and exquisite birds flying through the skies, chirping, singing, Now, now, what he is envisioning is a time when these birds, our children, understanding themselves to be a generation of peace, will be the ones flying through the skies and sharing the message of true love with our brothers and sisters all around the world that our True Parents are here and that it's high time to graft onto the true olive branch.
 
The Bible teaches us in Philippians 2:3-5 that we must be of one mind; in verse 4 it beseeches the children of God to live a life thinking about the interest of others more than the interest of themselves.  What the Bible is pointing to is this new stream of consciousness that Nostradamus predicts will come at the end of 1970 and will peak during the 1990s.
 
If you look at the history of our movement, our Father and Mother arrived here in December 1970. There was a lot of excitement, and Father was given the key to cities in each state.  It was an incredible time when he was emerging on the world scene in the West, which he would call his home for the next three decades.   What Father and Mother are reminding us of is that not only are we here just to share in the good news, but we are here to live the breaking news.  This is not a call just to believe; it's a call to apply, to realize, and to substantiate.
 
The best way to start on a life of faith and a life of applying this wonderful thing called true love is with understanding who we are and believing in ourselves, just the way the band sang.  We need only to look around us and realize that the one thing we need to change is our heart.  That's something that we all need to learn sometime in our lives, brothers and sisters.  If we can do that, we will fly through the skies, not with the speed of sound but with the spirit and on the wings of true love. In that way we will come together as one family under God, our Heavenly Parent.
 
Brothers and sisters, this is an incredible time.  This is the time of breaking news.  Let us not be confused.  Let us not lose heart.  Let us be vigilant in knowing who we are and realizing that every one of us here was born with a divine purpose and that every one of us here is incredibly and extremely important in weaving this incredible tapestry that we can call one family.
 
I want to wish all of you a wonderful Sunday and a wonderful week.  God bless.


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#1144 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 15, 2009 12:22 am
Subject: Ex-President's Daughter in Unification Mass Wedding 		weeny.kim
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http://english. chosun.com/ site/data/ html_dir/ 2009/10/14/ 2009101400827. html

Ex-President's Daughter in Moonie Mass Wedding

Shin Dong-uk (left) and Park Geun-ryeung at their wedding
 
Shin Dong-uk (left) and Park Geun-ryeung at their wedding
Park Geun-ryeung, the younger daughter of former president Park Chung-hee, affirms her marriage vows in a Moonies mass wedding on Wednesday. Park and Shin Dong-uk, a professor of cultural studies at Baekseok College, tied the knot in October last year but participate in a mass wedding of the Unification Church at Sun Moon University in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, along with 7,500 other couples from 160 countries.

Shin told the Chosun Ilbo, "Although we did not convert to the Unification Church, when the idea was proposed by the church, we agreed because we wanted to get a blessing from the Rev. Moon Sun-myung, a global religious leader."

Shin denied he married Park for her political connections. "I'm aware that many people suspect that I'm using this marriage to fulfill my political ambitions. But although there were difficulties, we are living modestly and happily and rely on each other."

The colorful couple were both married before, and their union has set tongues wagging because Shin at 41 is 14 years younger than his wife. There have been rumors that the marriage met with disapproval from the bride's older sister, former Grand National Party chairwoman Park Geun-hye, and her equally colorful younger brother Park Ji-man, neither of whom attended the wedding.  

The mass wedding will be broadcast live on the Internet, and thousands of couples will tie the knot simultaneously around the world, the Unification Church claimed. 
.


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#1143 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Fri Oct 9, 2009 3:39 pm
Subject: Miracle Man Walks Again 		weeny.kim
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--- On Fri, 10/9/09, Dennis Wong <denniswong1188@...> wrote:
LIFE GOES ON.
Learn and practise to be grateful ...........  
See the enthusiasm, confidence and  tenacity on his face?  Can we ever be distressed, impatient or complaining for frivolous reasons after witnessing this? 

Miracle Man Walks Again  Monday, July 9, 2007 
He survived against all the odds; now Peng Shu Lin has astounded doctors by learning to walk again. 

FunAndFunOnly (www.mails4u.net.tc) - SridhaR
When his body was cut in two by a lorry in 1995, it was little short of a medical miracle that he lived. It took a team of more than 20 doctors to save his life. Skin was grafted from his head to seal his torso? But the legless Mr Peng was left only 78cm ( 2ft 6in ) tall. 

Bedridden for years, doctors in China had little hope that he would ever be able to live anything like a normal life again. But recently, he began exercising his arms, building up the strength to carry out everyday chores such as washing his face and brushing his teeth.   

FunAndFunOnly (www.mails4u.net.tc) - SridhaR
Doctors at the China Rehabilitation Research Centre in Beijing found out about Mr Peng's plight late last year and devised a plan to get him up walking again. They came up with an ingenious way to allow him to walk on his own, creating a sophisticated egg cup-like casing to hold his body with two bionic legs attached to it. 

He has been taking his first steps around the centre with the aid of his specially adapted legs and a resized walking frame. Mr Peng, who has to learn how to walk again, is said to be delighted with the device. What A Self Confidence! 

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#1142 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 8, 2009 3:32 pm
Subject: What Are Lunar Maria? 		weeny.kim
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--- On Thu, 10/8/09, elena gastalla <egastalla@...> wrote:
 


What Are Lunar Maria?
The lunar maria (singular: mare) are the dark spots on the Moon.  Maria
means "seas" in Latin, and the lunar maria have their name due to their
ocean-like appearance in contrast to the lighter spots on the Moon.  The
lunar maria are not liquid, however, just a darker type of rock.  The Moon
is completely devoid of any moisture whatsoever.  The first mission to land
a man on the...
http://www.wisegeek .com/what- are-lunar- maria.htm? m

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#1141 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 8, 2009 3:33 am
Subject: Brad Pitt's non-profit organization: Make it Right 		weeny.kim
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History of Make It Right

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The slow reaction to the initial
emergency and to the ongoing crisis exposed troubling realities about the
response capabilities of the American government when the citizens of our
most culturally diverse city were in desperate need of help.
 
When Brad Pitt visited the Lower 9th Ward for the first time after the storm,
he was shocked by what he saw: the remnants of people's lives strewn
across the streets and an entire neighborhood torn apart and turned upside
down. Pitt was even more disturbed by the lack of a clear plan to address the
situation. Many were quietly saying there was no chance the Lower 9th Ward
would ever be re-built.
 
In a series of community meetings, residents of the Lower 9th Ward told Pitt
about the challenges their community faced, both before and after the storm.
The rising cost of energy placed a strain on the low-income households of
the neighborhood, and residents expressed concern about worsening
environmental conditions. Their concerns have been validated by many
scientists, who have concluded that climate change is increasing the
frequency and strength of hurricanes, resulting in the erosion of wetlands
and barrier islands that once protected the coast. The residents of the Lower
9th Ward told Pitt that, while their terrible crisis had exposed their
vulnerability, Katrina had also created an opportunity: to build something
better than what had existed before.
 
Inspired by the courage and hope of the residents he met, Pitt resolved to do
whatever he could to help them rebuild. Just as importantly, he wanted to
help recreate and nurture the unique culture and spirit of the Lower 9th
Ward, which symbolizes the soul of New Orleans. He understood instinctively
that a New Orleans rebuilt without the Lower 9th Ward would never be
whole.
 
He began by working with Global Green to sponsor an architecture
competition aimed at generating ideas about how to rebuild sustainably. Pitt
worked with local community leaders as well as experts from around the
world to develop viable ideas for the Lower 9th Ward. That successful project
inspired Pitt's new focus: Make It Right.
 
The Mission of Make It Right is clear: it is to be a catalyst for redevelopment
of the Lower 9th Ward, by building a neighborhood comprised of safe and
healthy homes that are inspired by Cradle to Cradle thinking, with an
emphasis on a high quality of design, while preserving the spirit of the
community's culture. The goal is to accomplish this quickly, so that the first
residents can begin returning to their homes as soon as possible.
 
The Make it Right core team assembled by Pitt includes experts such as:
William McDonough + Partners, a world leader in environmental architecture
Cherokee Gives Back Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Cherokee, a firm that
specializes in remediation and sustainable redevelopment of environmentally
impaired properties

Graft, an innovative architecture firm that Pitt has collaborated with on
projects around the world

Trevor Neilson and Nina Killeen, advisors to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation
This core team is working in tandem with leaders of a local, neighborhood
led coalition of not-for-profits, and has expanded to include renowned local,
national and international architecture firms, to ensure that the focus on --
and commitment to -- the Lower 9th Ward is demonstrably diverse and
reflective of Brad Pitt's dedication to giving this critical neighborhood access
to the best expertise available. In short, they are working to "Make It Right."
===========================
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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#1140 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Thu Oct 1, 2009 3:12 am
Subject: Rev In Jin Moon: Follow Me 		weeny.kim
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Rev In Jin Moon of lovin' Life Ministry
Follow Me
Sept 13, 2009 Tarrytown NY
courtesy of familyfed.org
 
 
[Lovin’ Life Ministries took place this Sunday at the Double Tree Hotel in Tarrytown, NY]
 

Good morning, brothers and sisters.  Did you all have a lovely week?  It’s nice to be out of the city every once in a while.  I’m delighted to see all of you again, and so close to where I grew up at East Garden.  We had a lot of memories as we were driving here today.   

 

Last weekend was truly an incredible weekend.  We were celebrating the 21st anniversary of Pal Jeong Shik, as well as also celebrating and honoring my younger brother, the Reverend Hyung Jin Moon, who just completed his 21,000-bow condition.  I don’t get to see much of my younger brother because he is based in Korea.   In addition, at the Lovin’ Life Ministries we celebrated the end of our 21st week.   
 
But I was especially honored and privileged to have the presence of our True Parents here in the United States.  I felt that their presence foreshadows a great fortune that we’re about to harvest here. At True Parents’ direction, I had a chance to tour the United States together with my younger brother, which set a wonderful foundation for our work this year and beyond. 
 
One of the things that my younger brother and I have been emphasizing and encouraging the members to do is to take this call to unity very seriously. This comes from God, our Heavenly Parent, and also from our True Parents.  They’re giving us an opportunity to use this time to come together in heart and spirit, in heart and soul, to realize our value as sons and daughters of God. Instead of concentrating on our differences—the different cultures or the different types of baggage that we bring to the table that we call our community—we have a chance to really concentrate on the common denominator that binds us together into this incredible community that we have here. 
 
As I was thinking about the weeks to come and of the great gift from our Heavenly Parent to go forth in our second 21 weeks, I found myself meditating a bit, reading the Gospel of Matthew.  The Gospel of Matthew is really a church-affirming literature.  I was reading the passage in which Jesus stills the storm, in Chapter 8:23–27.  That unit is preceded by a unit, titled “would-be disciples,” in which Jesus comes across a scribe and a potential disciple. 
 
The scribe says to him, “I want to follow you,” and Jesus acknowledges what he says.  And then another would-be disciple comes up to him and says, “Just give me a minute while I go bury my father.”  Jesus tells this potential disciple, “Follow me,” in Matthew 8:22, “and let the dead bury the dead.”   
 
This phrase, “Follow me,” is a very important one because it ties this unit, “would-be disciples,” together with the next unit, which is the account of Jesus stilling the storm.  The next passage begins by stating that the disciples “followed” him into the boat.  So this repetition of the word follow links these two passages together and gives us a sense of what the story is going to be about.   
 
Then the followers, the disciples, follow Jesus into a little boat; many times in Scripture a boat symbolizes the community, what would become the church.  This is really a story about Matthew’s community and the different kinds of tribulations it was facing.  The author is asking us to think about how we keep the community together, how we keep the community strong, how we keep the community focused on the important thing, which is our faith in our Heavenly Parent and in Jesus Christ. 
 
In this unit we learn that after the disciples followed Jesus onto the ship and faced the open sea, they were met with an incredible storm, a really violent storm. For any of you First Generation or Second Generation in the audience who have had the experience of Ocean Challenge, I am sure you understand how scary it is when you cannot see the horizon or the sky and the waves are something like 25 feet tall, crashing down on your boat.  You feel like a little mosquito in the middle of a bathtub, wondering, where is my lifesaver, who is going to save me? 
 
For the disciples in this tiny boat, which symbolized the “church” of Matthew’s community, this is exactly how they felt.  The storm represents a lot of things, but in this particular passage it symbolizes all the tribulations that Matthew’s community was dealing with:  for instance, their expulsion from synagogues, the trauma of actually allowing Gentiles into their community, or persecution by the Roman authorities.  Each and every one of these things was a huge obstacle for the community as it was trying to stay together.  A relentless storm was crashing down on the boat.   
 
I remember when I was 12 years old my father, the crew of the New Hope, and I were stuck in one of the worst storms of the season.  Usually my father took me out fishing because I happened to be the lucky child in the family—or unlucky one, depending on which way you look at it—the one who didn’t get seasick.  My father used to drag me out at 4:30 in the morning, and off we went, usually to Northwest Corners, which took us, on a good day, more than 30 minutes’ travel and, on a really bad day, sometimes more than an hour.  I knew that this day in particular was going to be really bad because the rain looked like sleet. 
 
As we were driving to the New Hope, we could barely see.  But for some reason my father was really determined to go out that day.  The driver said, “Father, today is really not a good day.  It’s quite dangerous.”  And Father said, “Drive.”  Another leader sitting in the front said, “Father, there’s a storm warning up.”  Father said, “Don’t stop.”  So off we went, and I felt like I was being pulled into something in which I didn’t know what was going to happen.  It was quite frightening.
 
When you leave at 4:30 in the morning, it’s pitch black, and you can barely see anything.  We finally made our way onto the boat, the captain started the engine, and off we went.  From the get-go, the waves were relentless.  The boat was literally bucking up and down and side to side.  For a girl who never got seasick, I started to get scared.  We kept on steamrolling right ahead into the open sea.  When we got to the open sea, I could not tell the difference between the sky and the ocean.  The only thing I felt was being jostled from left to right.  All the contents of the cupboards started falling out.  I felt like I was stuck in the middle of a hurricane. 
 
At that time my father was sitting very quietly on the sofa, looking out the window in his usual way.  He had a really serious expression on his face.  I said to him, “Appa [Daddy], I’m scared.”  He didn’t say anything and just looked at me.  He said, “I’m here.”  So I said, “Appa, I think you didn’t hear me.  I’m really scared.”  Then my father said, “I’m here.”  Then I said, “Appa, I want to go home!”  Then my father said, “Come here,” and that was the end of our conversation.   
 
But, see, on that day the waves were so huge.  They looked like the skyscrapers that you see in New York City.  I really didn’t know if I would make it out of this movie alive.  For the first time in my life I started feeling queasy.  I was never seasick before, but this time it was really, really difficult.  I started feeling a little blue and woozy.  I couldn’t focus anymore.  That was the first time that I got really sick.  I was literally lying on the sofa with my security blanket that I didn’t go anywhere without, thinking to myself, “Okay, if I go, at least I have my security blanket here with me, and also I’m here with my father.  Maybe I will be all right.” 
 
The interesting thing about that day was, even though we could barely stand, my father managed to catch one of the biggest tunas of that season.  After fighting the fish for a couple of hours, he was able to haul it in the boat, and we were finally able to go home.  I’ve never been so happy to see land as when I arrived.  I think I literally mowed my mother down because I was so happy to see her.   
 
The things that I was feeling and going through on the boat are exactly what we go through when we’re confronted with a difficulty or an obstacle many times in life: We feel like we’re just being thrown left and right.  It’s like mayhem; we wonder what’s going to happen to us, and we’re overcome by fear.   
 
In Matthew 8:25, it says that Jesus was sleeping on the boat.  Can you imagine Jesus Christ sleeping through all of this?  While the disciples were scared out of their minds, probably screaming bloody murder, “Get me off this boat,” Jesus Christ was asleep.  Maybe he was thinking about all those wonderful promises that God had in store for him and for his brothers and sisters.  Maybe he was reveling in all the things that he could share with his future family.  But then his disciples woke him up and said, “Lord, Lord, save us.” 
 
It’s interesting that the author of the Gospel of Matthew (which is a church-affirming literature), instead of calling Jesus Christ master, meaning “teacher,” consistently used words like Lord in reference to Jesus, which was a title of majesty in the church, again to emphasize the ship as a church.  His disciples say, “Please, please save us, Lord, from perishing.”  The first thing that Jesus does when he is being pushed by his disciples to save them is to ask them, “Why are you so afraid?  Why do you have such little faith?” 
 
Jesus is imploring them to think about the situation at hand.  Why are we always afraid of dying?  Why are we always afraid of an obstacle or a difficulty that’s placed right in front of us?  Why do we have such little faith?  As a student of Scripture, when I read this passage I said to myself, “Well, at least in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus does say that his disciples have little faith, whereas in the gospel of Mark, Jesus referred to his disciples as people who do not have any faith at all.”  I felt, we’re doing a little better here.  But little faith or puny faith is what Jesus has to work with.   
 
I’ve always wondered at how incredible our Heavenly Parent and True Parents are because they are willing to work with us and work through us, regardless of how puny or how big our faith might be; as small as the faith shown in this passage was, it gave Jesus Christ a starting point to work on when it came to his disciples.  I think that during the storm my father was probably thinking, “Why does this girl want to go home; why does my daughter have such puny faith in me?  She might be scared out of her mind, but couldn’t she just believe because I am here?”  What my father was trying to say to me was exactly what Jesus Christ was trying to say to his disciples.  “Why are you afraid, my disciples?”  “Why are you afraid, my daughter?”   
 
President Franklin Roosevelt said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  When we’re afraid, it’s because somehow we’ve lost our sense of direction or something that grounds us.  But if you really think about why Jesus was asleep in the middle of this incredible storm, it’s because he did not allow the tribulations of life or the difficulties of politics, social problems, economic problems, or religious problems to affect his time with God or his time of peace. 
 
Jesus was secure in knowing that he was the Son of God.  He was secure in knowing that God, our Heavenly Parent, is our anchor. He knew that whatever might come, it was what was meant to happen, and he would find ways, no matter how difficult it was, to be grateful for whatever our Heavenly Parent put in his path.   
 
When Jesus said to his disciples, “Why do you have little faith?,” it was almost like he was waking up from his slumber, looking at this vision of his disciples being scared out of their minds because they thought they were going to die even though they were in the boat with the Son of God.  You have to wonder, couldn’t they at least have believed that as long as they were with the Son of God, maybe they’d be okay?  But his disciples were scared. 
 
Jesus was basically asking that question to diagnose the situation.  When we see a doctor, the first thing he or she does is take a look at our vital signs and gives a diagnosis on what our ailment is.  At that moment, when Jesus said, “Why do you have such little faith?” he was giving his disciples a diagnosis: “Why are you afraid?  Why do you not have faith?” 
 
What’s the next thing Jesus did? In verse 26 it says he immediately stood up, and not only that, he rebuked the wind and the sea.  Not only did he stand strong as the Son of God, but he actually took control of his situation by fighting back, by standing up for what he believed in.    
 
My younger brother was so overwhelmed last Sunday by the “Tithe Rap” that he asked me, “Do you think I could get those three guys to do the ‘Tithe Rap’ in Korean, and could I have them in Korea just to remind our community of the importance of tithing?”  I said, “Well, maybe, but you might have to get them inspired.”  So before my brother left he gave the kosher bling-bling [necklace] of the Unification symbol to my eldest son, who is proudly wearing it today.   
 
I said to my husband before walking in, “I tried my best, home schooling the kids and sending them to the best schools to keep them rap free.  And here at Lovin’ Life Ministries, not only is my eldest son singing ‘Tithe Rap,’ but he’s wearing the bling-bling.  God works in mysterious ways.” 
 
But back to our story of Jesus stilling the storm.  So Jesus stood up, just the way we should and we will stand as proud Unificationists.  Jesus rebuked the winds and the sea, just like the way we can start fighting back, not in an offensive way but defending ourselves as the decent community that we are the minute we are confident and comfortable in our own skin, realizing that we have this incredible opportunity from our Heavenly Parent to become true sons and daughters of God and to establish ideal families. 
 
What happened when Jesus Christ rebuked the wind and the sea?  His environment became still and calm.  It’s almost as if the environment, with all the tribulations, difficulties, and suffering, is like a massive satanic force trying to swamp us, trying to drown us.  But the minute that we stand strong in knowing who we are, all those things will die away.  The disciples witnessed this calming of the storm.  Then the disciples realized, as we read in verse 27, “Who is this man whom the wind and the sea obey?”  Is this man not a man worth following?  Is this not a man worth obeying?  Is this not a man worth uniting with, to try to create a beautiful community and a world and a cosmos? 
 
This unit in which Jesus stills the storm ends with a question, which is actually preparing the reader for an answer that is to come.  In the second crossing of the sea, the answer is given at the end. Who is this kind of man? This man is God’s son (14:33). 
 
When we listen to the story, yes, we can understand it as a really exciting event that took place on a boat with Jesus Christ and his disciples, who had puny faith.  But if we understand the boat as symbolizing the church that was Matthew’s community, then we can see that the boat may symbolize our community here in this huge and blessed country of America.   
 
I have five children, and they’re well on their way. My youngest, being 12, is ready to enter the door of adolescence.  When he was much younger, my oldest used to have a little plastic steamroller.  Every time he took a bath, he would take his rubber ducky and his plastic steamroller.  The only way I could coax my son into the tub was to put those things in there first.  Then he would dive into the water.  Being a mother but also someone trying to learn from different situations, I used to watch my children to see what they would do.  My son would get in the tub and play with his rubber ducky and his plastic steamroller. Then he would start creating waves in the tub, pushing the water this way and that way, causing the water in the tub to almost turn into a violent storm on the open sea. 
 
Then he would try his best to dunk the ducky and the plastic steamroller. The minute he let the ducky go, it would pop out of the water.  He kept trying his best to saturate this plastic steamroller with water so it would start sinking.  But it was quite tenacious, so it took him quite a bit of time to get it to sink.  When he was not successful, he got frustrated and realized that all the waves he made in the tub weren’t doing the job. Then he would suddenly stand up and sit down on the steamroller. Then I would hear the water splash, and then hear his little voice, “Gotcha!” 
 
When I was reading this story of Jesus and the storm in the Gospel of Matthew, I was reminded of that kind of visual experience from when my child was much younger.  Our church, which has experienced the backlash to our own success, probably felt like that plastic steamroller, and this huge Godzilla of a monster, like my son, was constantly trying to sink it.   
 
Unless the Godzilla of a monster is big enough to stand up, sit down, and smash our community, I think we’re going to do all right.  But more than that, just as the journey across the sea is a parable of the journey of the disciples, and we fast-forward 2,000 years to the time of our True Parents, we realize that this is our journey, our chance not just to be disciples of Jesus Christ, not just to be disciples of our True Parents, but to really be sons and daughters of our True Parents.  This is the time when we are given this incredible opportunity to take a journey as God’s sons and daughters and as the sons and daughters of our precious True Parents. 
 
That’s why I’ve often said at Lovin’ Life Ministries, Jesus Christ brought us the good news, but our True Parents brought us the breaking news.  I was on the phone with a good friend of mine who reminded me, “Did you know that last week somebody won $350 million on Wall Street?”  He and I were having this little conversation.  I said, “The odds of winning are like 1 in 200 million, right?” 
 
What are the odds of being born at a time when our True Parents are here with us?  If you really think about the hundreds and thousands of people who have come before and who will come after our True Parents are no longer here with us on earth, everybody in this room looks like a lottery winner of the finest kind.   
 
So the only things we need to concentrate on is having a heart of gratitude and exercising our faith just like the way my boys loved to exercise their biceps with barbells, every morning and every night.  We need to exercise our faith as well so that, while we might start out scrawny and skinny, if we exercise, practice, and live our faith every day, we can become the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of faith.  Not that he’s my model, but we can be just as strong, just as magnificent by our own effort. 
 
I always say that there’s nothing more satisfying than a job well done.  Why a job well done?  If something is just given to you, it doesn’t really have the heart behind it.  I would much rather receive a little scrap of a card that my children have made with all their heart and all their prayer and all their effort, wishing me a happy birthday, than for somebody to buy me the biggest house.  Buying something is easy to do, but when you do something out of the goodness of your heart because you truly love and care about someone, that’s special.   
 
When I’m grateful at the end of a job well done, it’s usually because the job was quite difficult.  I’m hoping that at the end of my life, when I can retire and finally be the café/bakery owner that I wanted to be so badly, I can feel like my time here at HSA was, although very difficult, rewarding and satisfying as well.   
 
We are in a time of transition, as I call it, from First Generation to Second Generation and to the Third. Now the Fourth Generation has arrived.  My younger brother Hyun Jin’s son’s couple just gave birth to their first son a couple of days ago.  So now we have the Fourth Generation in the True Family.  With the True Children really understanding the importance of this providential time frame and deciding to work together as a family to realize God’s dream, in understanding that God has taken so much to raise us up all these years, really loving and investing in us, it’s high time that we all as children become the kind of sons and daughters who are grateful for everything that we have received, grateful for the opportunity that’s right here within our hands, and grateful to be a part of a community that is absolutely phenomenal. 
 
Father and Mother are calling us to unite. Just as Jesus was able to sleep and be at peace in the middle of the storm because he knew who he was, because he knew who his anchor was, Father and Mother are asking us to remember who our anchor is in this time of transition. They are asking us to remind ourselves who our North Star is.  Our North Star, our anchor, is our God and our True Parents. 
 
So as children who really need to honor our parents in our daily lives and in everything that we do, the only thing we need to remember is to love God, love True Parents; follow God, follow our True Parents; obey God, obey True Parents.  We do not need to ask ourselves the question any longer, as the disciples did in Matthew 8:27.  We don’t need to ask what kind of man our Father is or what kind of woman our Mother is.  They are our True Parents. 
 
In them and in our Heavenly Parent, there is no room for fear.  In fact, I John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love.”  We have the certainty in knowing who we are.  So do not be tempted, do not be swayed, and do not be jostled just because you hear different things in the wind.  Do not listen to people who say my father is old, my father is incoherent, or he doesn’t know what he’s doing.  My father is the Son of God.  He has carried this movement this far along.  Shouldn’t we give the man a round of applause?  [Applause] 
 
My father might be 90 years old, but he still has a spirit of that 16-year-old boy who was anointed by Jesus Christ to fulfill and carry on his message.  We must honor the teacher who has kept us together all these years.  We must not listen to people who are saying this and that, just like the winds howling in the storm.  If our True Father says that the youngest son is the spiritual head of the movement, then it is the youngest son who is the spiritual head of the movement.  The only thing we need to do, brothers and sisters, is to come together. 
 
Now when my youngest brother is living and practicing as the spiritual head of the True Family, he’s not saying, “Look at me!  I’m so awesome!  I’m wearing the word pride with the letter I emblazoned on my chest.”  That is not what he is doing.  He is saying, “I may be the head, but without the body of my family, I am nothing.”  And he understands that.  
 
Just as importantly, as a student of religion, he understands the importance of women in the life of a religious vocation.  He is somebody who knows that it takes time to restore 6,000 years of the misunderstanding in the proper role of women in the context of family, society, and world.  I have great hope that we have as the spiritual head of our movement somebody who understands that women’s proper role needs to be restored and needs to be worked toward.  I see it as a huge step forward and we will just continually keep on building: When you want to go to the second floor, you have to take that first step before you take the second, third, and fourth. 
 
My father always says that if the first seven generations of our movement can truly come together, inheriting the spirit of true love and uniting in understanding how precious each and every one is—how precious each and every one of our siblings are, and I am so honored to have my eldest sister here sitting in the audience—and not be overcome by fear, suffering, or tribulations along the way, then there is nothing that we cannot do; there is nothing that we cannot be.
 
Just as the old proverb says, good sailors are not made on kind seas.  In fact, the best sailors are made on tough seas.  God has placed us on tough seas, but that’s because God knows that we’re going to be the best darned sailors around, brothers and sisters.   
 
So take pride in who you are.  Take pride in our community.  Second Generation, honor your parents like no other.  They are the people who allowed you to exist by the blessing of our True Parents.  And the First Generation, be kind to the Second Generation.  Be supportive.  Help them.  Empower them with your love. 
 
If we can come together as a community to realize how special each and every one of us is, then the world is our oyster, and we’re going to reap many great blessings and harvests. 
 
God bless, and have a wonderful week.
-------------------
God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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#1139 From: weeny <weeny.kim@...>
Date: Tue Oct 6, 2009 12:57 pm
Subject: life & lesson: Happiness Lessons & Recipe for Happy Life 		weeny.kim
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These 2 files are taken from Beliefnet.com
 
Happiness Lessons from Around the World
By Eric Weiner
 
As a correspondent for National Public Radio, Eric Weiner often traveled to war-torn or famine-ravaged countries. To cleanse his spirit, he decided to travel to some of the world's happiest places to find out just what made them so joyful.
Weiner's journeys from Iceland to Qatar to Bhutan are described in his book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. In this gallery, Weiner tells some of the things he learned and shows photographs of the places he went.
 
Happiness Is Taking Pride In Who You Are (Iceland)
If it is possible for language, mere words, to nurture happiness, to tickle the creative soul of an entire people, then surely that language is Icelandic. Icelanders love their language. Love it even more than their country, which is saying something. For Icelanders, language is the tabernacle of the country. That's what one person here told me. In any other country, I'd dismiss such a statement as nationalistic hyperbole. Not in Iceland.
 
 
Happiness Is Knowing Where You Come From (Switzerland)
The Swiss are deeply rooted in place. Their passports list the name of their ancestral town. Not their hometown but the town of their roots. Maybe they weren't born there. Maybe they've never even been there. But it is their home. It's been said that the Swiss only become Swiss upon leaving the country. Until then, they are Genevans or Zurichers, or otherwise defined by where they happen to come from. No wonder it was the Swiss who invented the modern concept of homesickness; they were the first to put a word, heimweh to that nagging feeling of dislocation, that feeling of loss we experience when uprooted from the place we call home.
 
Happiness Is Spreading the Wealth to Everyone (Qatar)
Water in Qatar is free. So is electricity and health care and education. The government even pays a small salary to Qatari college students. When a Qatari man gets married, the government gives him a plot of land to build a house, an interest-free mortgage, and, to boot, a monthly allowance of roughly seven thousand dollars. And unlike in European welfare states, Qataris aren't burdened with high taxes. No income tax. No sales tax. Nothing.
 
Happiness Is Taking Care of Yourself and Others (Bhutan)
In the last few decades, Bhutan has made tremendous strides in the kind of metrics that people who use words like metrics get excited about. Life expectancy has increased from forty-two to sixty-four years. The government now provides free health care and education for all of its citizens. Bhutan is the world's first nonsmoking nation; the sale of tobacco is banned. There are more monks than soldiers. Every trivia buff who visits the city loves to point out that it is the world's only capital city without a single stoplight.
 
Happiness Is Getting to Know You (United Kingdom)
Even in the inebriated atmosphere of a pub, the British remain very economical with their emotions. Personal information is doled out judiciously, like premium chocolate or fine wine. As any economist will tell you, scarcity creates value. So when a Brit opens up, exposes their wounds, where it hurts, this is more valuable, more meaningful, than when an American does it. For the first time since I arrived in Britain, I appreciate the value of reticence.
 
Happiness Is Other People (Thailand)
What the Thais know instinctively is that a smile, a real smile, is not located in the lips or any other part of the mouth. A real smile is in the eyes. To be precise, the orbicularis oculi muscles that surround each eye. We cannot fool these muscles. They spring to life only for a genuine smile. The Thais remind us that a smile is not private. Researches have found that people, sane people at least, rarely smile when alone. The smile is a social gesture more than a reflection of our inner state, though it can be that, too.
 
Happiness Is Realizing All Things Are Connected (India)
Hearing and feeling about one thousand people say "om" at the same time is something to behold. The whole room feels as if it is vibrating. I like this, I think, yes, I like this, and it dawns on me how much I associate India with sounds--the singsong call of a street hawking, the bleating horn of an auto-rickshaw, the chanting of a Hindu priest. Every sound, not just the holy ones, is a vibration. And a vibration is, of course, motion. Air pressing against air. Nothing more. Yet this simple act of physics can result in Mozart's piano concerto or a freeway at rush hour or a lover's whisper.
 
Happiness Is In Your Backyard (America)
My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed every morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try to squelch it before it grows. I don't take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can appreciate a genuine smile from twenty yards.
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From "Authentic Happiness."
Used by permission of The Free Press (a division of Simon & Schuster)
 
In 1932, Cecilia O’Payne took her final vows in Milwaukee. As a novice in the School Sisters of Notre Dame, she committed the rest of her life to the teaching of young children. Asked to write a short sketch of her life on this momentous occasion, she wrote:
 
God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value…The past year which I spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.
 
In the same year, in the same city, and taking the same vows, Marguerite Donnelly wrote her autobiographical sketch:
 
I was born on September 26, 1909, the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys….My candidate year was spent in the mother-house, teaching chemistry and second year Latin at Notre Dame Institute. With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.
 
These two nuns, along with 178 of their sisters, thereby became subjects in the most remarkable study of happiness and longevity ever done.
 
Investigating how long people will live and understanding what conditions shorten and lengthen life is an enormously important but enormously knotty scientific problem. It is well documented, for example, that people from Utah live longer than people from the neighboring state of Nevada. But why? ….Too many insidious (as well as healthful) factors are confounded between Nevada and Utah for scientists to isolate the cause.
 
Unlike Nevadans or even Utahans, however, nuns lead routine and sheltered lives. They all eat roughly the same bland diet. They don’t smoke or drink. They have the same reproductive and marital histories. They don’t get sexually transmitted diseases. They are in the same economic and social class, and they have the same access to good medical care. So almost all the usual confounds are eliminated, yet there is still wide variation in how long nuns live and how healthy they are. Cecilia is still alive at age ninety-eight and has never been sick a day in her life. In contrast, Marguerite had a stroke at age fifty-nine, and died soon thereafter. We can be sure that their lifestyle, diet, and medical care were not the culprits. When the novitiate essays of all 180 nuns were carefully read, however, a very strong and surprising difference emerged. Looking back at what Cecilia and Marguerite wrote, can you spot it?
 
Sister Cecilia used the words “very happy” and “eager joy,” both expressions of effervescent good cheer. Sister Marguerite’s autobiography, in contrast, contained not even a whisper of positive emotion. When the amount of positive feeling was quantified by raters who did not know how long the nuns lived, it was discovered that 90 percent of the most cheerful quarter was alive at age eighty-five versus only 34 percent of the least cheerful quarter.
 
Was it really the upbeat nature of their sketches that made the difference? Perhaps it was a difference in the degree of unhappiness expressed, or in how much they looked forward to the future, or how devout they were, or how intellectually complex the essays were. But research showed that none of these factors made a difference, only the amount of positive feeling expressed in the sketch. So it seems that a happy nun is a long-lived nun.
 
Why has evolution endowed us with positive feeling? What are the functions and consequences of these emotions, beyond making us feel good?
Who has positive emotion in abundance, and who does not? What enables these emotions, and what disables them?

How can you build more and lasting positive emotion into your life?
Everyone wants answers to these questions for their own lives, and it is natural to turn to the field of psychology for answers. So it may come as a surprise to you that psychology has badly neglected the positive side of life. For every one hundred journal articles on sadness, there is just one on happiness.
 
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who in the middle of great wealth are starving spiritually. Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die. The positive feeling that arises from the exercise of strengths and virtues, rather than from the shortcuts, is authentic.
 
The trait of optimism helps explain how a single snapshot of the momentary happiness of nuns could predict how long they will live. Optimistic people tend to interpret their troubles as transient, controllable, and specific to one situation. Pessimistic people, in contrast, believe that their troubles last forever, undermine everything they do, and are uncontrollable. Optimism is only one of two dozen strengths that bring about greater well-being. We need a psychology of rising to the occasion, because that is the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of predicting human behavior. In the evolutionary struggle for winning a mate or surviving a predator’s attack, those of our ancestors who rose to the occasion passed on their genes; the losers did not. …This means that we all contain ancient strengths inside of us that we may not know about until we are truly challenged…
 
When you read about these strengths, you will also find that some are deeply characteristic of you, whereas others are not. I call the former your signature strengths, and one of my purposes is to distinguish these from strengths that are less a part of you. I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths.
 
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God Bless You!
Peace be with you
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum
  
It's what we think that determines what we do;
it's what we do that shapes the kind of person we are, the character that we have.
 
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