Listen to Dr. Kelly Kohls, founder of the National School Boards Leadership Council, speaking at the Strengthening Families and Communities Forum:
#109-Dr. Kelly Kohls: How to Fix Boards of Education
Cheon Seong Gyeong 266
The path we are walking has not ended. You will receive the Blessing through the gratitude you show before Heaven. You should be grateful individually and you should also never forget the value of having received the Blessing representing your tribe, your clan, such as the Kim or the Pak clan, and, moreover representing the thirty million people of Korea and all the people of the world.
Furthermore, you should know that you have inherited the responsibility that True Parents are to carry out on earth. Why do the Blessed Families have to inherit this? If the Blessed Families are going through the course to restore a people, True Parents should be going through a course to restore the world. In other words, they should be going one step ahead. Yet without establishing the victorious standard of having restored a people, True Parents cannot walk the course of worldwide restoration. That is why you must inherit the responsibility to restore a people to ensure that True Parents can walk the worldwide course. Until your death and until the sorrow of this people is removed, you must shoulder the responsibility to restore a people. (13-293, 1964.4.12)
Cheon Seong Gyeong 1242
If you have the opportunity to attend a Blessing Ceremony, you should not go thinking you are just a man or a woman and there is nothing else to it. When you attend the ceremony, you are there representing men and women who have come and gone in the world over the past six thousand years. You must understand that you have been invited as such. You should experience this reality deep in your heart. (30-169, 1970. 3.22)
FAMILY
The Basic Form of Life
2. The Family as the School of Love and Virtue
Teachings of Rev. Sun Myung Moon
The family is the most important school in human life, for it is the school of love. (271:80, August 22, 1995)
The family is the training ground of the heart. You are trained in brotherly and sisterly love, so treat your classmates in school with that same heart and your fellow citizens in the nation with that same heart. Hence, the education your parents give you to be loving brothers and sisters is for the sake of the school, the community and the nation.
Parents should bequeath their heart and sensibility to their children and descendants. As parents you are role models, but this involves more than teaching by example. By your love you are laying the emotional foundation for your children, so that they are able to live for the family, the community and the nation. (180:131, August 22, 1988)
The ideal family is a school; it is also a textbook. The husband and wife are its joint authors. When their children can live by the lessons from that textbook, they can make it anywhere in the world. This is a formula. (131:112, April 22, 1984)
The family is the textbook for attaining the Kingdom of Heaven. God prepared it for human beings as an instruction manual for connecting with Him. If you take its lessons and apply them to the nation, you become patriots; apply them to the world and you become saints; apply them to heaven and earth and you become the divine sons and daughters of God. (137:78, December 18, 1985)
Morals are the universal virtues acquired by training in the family. The Chinese character for virtue (德) contains the character 十, ten, with the shape of a cross whose vertical and horizontal lines symbolize heaven and earth—hence the entire universe, as well as man and woman—two beings. Next it has the character 四, four, which represents the four-position foundation; then 一, one, and 心, mind or heart. It means that virtues (德) are established when the four (四) parties of the fourposition foundation of heaven and earth (十) become one (一) in heart (心). Since the character 十 means ten and also two, it symbolizes twelve entities: grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, son and daughter, six people each composed of mind and body. When these twelve become one, they indicate virtue. (375:59, April 13, 2002)
All around the world today, the family is changing, and the traditional family structure is being challenged in many ways. With increasing industrialization and modernization, humanity’s value systems are crumbling, and our standards of ethics and morality are in flux. In addition, selfish individualism, hedonism, and the worship of money are robbing us of our humanity, and increasingly free sex and immorality are furthering the destruction of the family.
How tragic it is that we are faced with such trends! If nothing is done, in the future humanity will not have any hope. No matter how social conditions may change, the importance of the relationship between parents and children is unshakable. The value of the family does not change. I repeat— love is the source of people’s happiness and joy, and the family is the foundation for happiness and peace. (271:80-81, August 22, 1995)
These days, when we prevent families from breaking down and teenagers from falling, we liberate God’s sorrowful heart. It brings God the happiness that He could not experience in the Garden of Eden, where He could not intervene [to stop the Fall]. (305:273, August 21, 1998)