～～from familyfed.org
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Dear Family,
A very Happy Christmas to all, and best wishes and prayers that the new year of 2017 will be full of blessings and grace for you and your family! Thank you for all your efforts and work for the sake of God’s providence and for our Heavenly Parent and True Parents.
Christmas is above all a time of hope when we remember God’s promise to save and transform our suffering world. Christmas carols remind us of how people have responded to that promise in so many ways: Joy and happiness (Joy to the World), awe and respect (O Holy Night), fear and trembling (While Shepherds Watched), the overwhelming impulse to give (Little Drummer Boy), to worship and unite (O Come All Ye Faithful), and more.
Yet the Divine Principle tells us that God expected much more. Our Heavenly Parent wanted to build the substantial, everlasting Kingdom of Peace through Jesus and his sought-for Bride, who would have been the True Parents. No one truly understood this, not Jesus’ family, not the chosen people, and not even the generations of saints and holy people who followed in his footsteps. True Father and True Mother often spoke about the wide gap between our human perspective and God’s point of view:
“The first person truly to celebrate should have been God Himself, who caused His son to be born. Furthermore, the angels and all spirit world joined together, glorifying and praising that great day. Here on earth, however, Jesus’ birth was only quietly welcomed because few people knew of his coming. We can see that the birth of Jesus was truly celebrated in heaven, centering upon God, but on earth hardly any celebration took place.”
The True Meaning of Christmas, December 25, 1979
True Mother elaborated on this point in her Yankee Stadium 40th Anniversary speech and again during her very successful visit to Washington DC and New York, pointing out that without the grace of God and the salvation that comes from the teachings and marriage blessing of True Parents, our nation and our world are really without hope. The endless cycle of conflict, terror, greed, hunger, sickness, etc. cannot be solved by human effort alone.
God has promised that all of this will end once and for all with the coming of the Lord and the Marriage of the Lamb, and the appearance of God’s only begotten Son and Daughter as True Parents. It is a great sorrow that the world today is still largely ignorant of the coming of True Parents, and those of us who do know are still not confident enough about the enormous importance of this fact. On her last visit, True Mother asked us all to take action and do something about this!
This year, it is exactly 40 days from Christmas Day until True Parents’ birthday on Thursday, February 2, (January 6 by the H.C.) Let’s make a new foundation of faith through 40 days of prayer, Hoondokhwe and loving care of our families, neighbors and tribes. And of course, we should not forget the importance of our sincere offering and donation. You can donate right now through your local church or on our website via the link below. As we close this most blessed year of 2016, let’s join together in a renewed commitment!
Once again, thank you and God bless you and your families, and God bless America!