How to Overcome Hardships and Difficulties, June 16, 2020

Morning Devotion Reflection

How to Overcome Hardships and Difficulties

June 16, 2020 (Video of May 12, 2020)

Since I cannot open the morning devotion message today of Dr. Yong due to some youtube copyright and access issues, I would like to reflect on Dr. Yong's message about “How to Overcome Hardships and Suffering “ that was given on the 12th of May.

How to deal with hardships. Hardships are a gift of love from God. 

Don't avoid the pain and face it squarely, head-on. We need to receive all hardships and challenges with love and gratitude. Accept hardship with joy. This is God’s strategy to make your overall environment grow better and large for you. You should seriously feel that the greater is the suffering and hardships, the stronger your conviction grows to move you closer to God.

Who is the scariest person in the world? We need to look at pain and suffering positively with a joyful heart. This kind of person is the scariest person. Why? Because he accepts hardships with a smile of gratitude. People naturally avoid hardships and suffering. However, if we face these trials and difficulties in our life with gratitude each time. We will grow strong and successful. Through this way, we become strong and stable in life. 

You must think that even if you are in a very difficult situation, you should never be bound to Satan by making the situation worse. Think that each hindrance is an opportunity for personal growth and future victory. So we have to look at it as a gift from Heaven. These hardships are given to us with love so we need to receive it with gratitude.

How do we conquer hardships and difficulties?  What do hardship and sufferings mean and where do they come from?  There are reasons why we experience hardships and sufferings. It is not just because of the fall of Adam and Eve. We need to know how to overcome it by following True Parents' guidance and inspirations. We have to solve it from God’s point of view. We cannot solve internal problems and challenges, pain, and suffering by using our human standard of thinking.

1. We need to think it comes from God and this is my destiny. Some of our sufferings come from ancestors. They had to pay a lot of indemnities and they have suffered so much. They also made terrible mistakes that their descendants have to pay many years after. So I have to think, I have to be responsible for them. I need to pay indemnity on behalf of my ancestors. These hardships are my destiny so I have to take with a sincere and responsible attitude. So we should not complain.

2. Believe that God is preparing a gift of happiness for you at the end of hardships. All kinds of accusations against yourself, your family, and your ancestors will not solve its cycle or stop its occurrences if you do not take responsibility for it. Empower yourself to be the person who can solve it for everyone.  If nobody takes responsibility to pay all indemnity, the cycle will just repeat. Unless someone takes the responsibility of the sins and mistakes, trials and difficulties, problems ad challenges in the past, things will not change. 

3. Do not avoid pain and suffering, trials, and difficulties. You should face them squarely and take them all by the horns. We should not avoid suffering. the point at other people as the origin or cause of the problem. Through loving and conquering the environment, we can stop the sins from multiplying. Thatis why we need to love our destiny.  All kinds of complaints and resentment will not solve unless someone takes responsibility and starts paying the indemnity needed to restore everyone including yourself. In this way, you can stop these cycles of suffering and avoid passing it over to your descendants. We have to think: this hardship and suffering is my destiny. There is a meaning to it and so do not complain about it. Those who can accept the responsibility for everyone’s sins and liberation will become closer and closer to God. This is God’s Will. So no matter what,  I have to overcome it. God gave me these because God trusts me and loves me to this extent. God is a suffering God so if you suffer more, God will come to you.

4. Hardships are God’s plan to bequeath a greater environment for you. We are the result of 6,000 years of fallen history. Most of our trials and tribulations come from our ancestors. So someone has to take responsibility to pay indemnity and do an indemnity course. Do not compare your destiny to somebody. If you start complaining and accusing the people close to use from parents down to Adam and Eve, and the Angel. We cannot go back to God. When something is on fire, we need to get water to extinguish the fire quickly. We do not argue to put out the fire, we need to agree and act on it quickly before it becomes big.

5. Face any hardship with joy.  That is why the life of faith is a life of overcoming.  Even each child in the family has a different spiritual background. Each child has a course. That is why we should avoid complaining about why you have such and such a trial and difficulty. If you do this, the problem and indemnity will not stop and it will continue to multiply. So we have to accept it as God’s Will for our life.

6. Suffering makes me become one with God. God will never give you anything you cannot handle. He will not give you any impossible tasks or difficult problems you cannot carry or solve. If you are the teacher, do you give tests and challenges to your students they cannot solve? God will give you difficulties you can overcome. Do not be depressed and do not question God or others why you are having such difficulties. When True Father was in Hungnam prison, some people receive inspiration to give him food.

Accept your trials with gratitude and it becomes easy to solve. If we have that kind of attitude, trials and difficulties will just become nourishment for the soul to grow and for you to enjoy. Believe that God has prepared something great for you at the end of hardships. So when you overcome it, God will rejoice and come to you.

When True Father was in Hungnam prison, some people receive inspirations  The spirit world started witnessing to people around Father. They started having dreams and inspirations so they started attending True Father. We should inherit this kind of spirit from True Father. We should think we cannot solve the problem if we run away. We should have a Messianic attitude.  When we have this attitude, good things will fall into their rightful places. We should welcome all trials and difficulties.

Face all hardships joyfully with confidence. Through suffering and hardships, we can experience “Sanbong” or reunion. It is the best chance to meet God and the best way to console and comfort God.  Without experiencing pain and suffering, we will not be able to understand the heart of God.

7. Suffering is training me to become one with God. Without encountering trials and difficulties, we cannot experience and understand the sorrowful heart of God. So hardships are the best opportunity to comfort God. God is asking me to grow no matter what kinds of trials and challenges come. We can ask God to make us grow quickly. Without paying the price, we cannot liberate ourselves. Even in the market, you cannot get anything without paying money. Heavenly fortune belongs to us. We become villains if we do not pay the right price.

8. Hardships are about knowing the pain of suffering to inherit God’s heart. We have to know the true meaning of suffering. The more we suffer and overcome each level, the more we inherit God’s heart. We have to inherit God’s heart from the individual to the national level.  We will experience God’s true heart through suffering. The more we suffer, the more we understand the heart of God, the more we receive God’s comfort and consolation.  We need to look at suffering from a joyous mind.

We need to reflect and evaluate ourselves whenever we face the mirror. Console God as you look at your face. Feel like you are looking at the face of God. Talk to God as if He is just by your side or just in front of you looking at your face from the mirror in front of you.  Feel that closeness with Him and your mind will expand in recognition of His heart and presence. Look at yourself in the mirror and determine to use your whole being as God's body to give love and comfort to other people. 

Thank you so much,  Dr. Yong, for showing us the way to conquer hardships and difficulties in life. God shared with me His suffering when I was very young. I remember I used to cry a lot every time my mother leaves the house to do her work at the market to buy or find food. It was so hard to eat a good satisfying meal back then. Whenever my younger brother (now the parish priest of St. Vincent’s Church in Siqujor island) and I would wait for the restaurant food to be thrown in the garbage, we felt so miserable and united in that misery. We get that garbage and food and re-cook it for the whole family. Whenever ship passengers throw coins to the ocean and my older brother (the former Vice Mayor) dived to get those coins from the ocean floor, we feel so miserable yet so lucky to have a chance to live the day recognizing God was helping us to survive and experience a difficult life only to rejoice about it later.

Yes, God will never give us anything we cannot handle. He gives us those trying days of misery and hardships because He loves us so much. Honestly, we also enjoyed our misery in those days because it was also exciting to dive for coins, to crawl under the floor of my aunt’s house to find coins. We enjoyed finding broken bottles, scrapped wires, and kitchen utensils for selling at the recycle shop. We enjoyed eating porridge from a can of rice and viand from a cup of pork soup with little meat. Food was more delicious when we seldom have it during the week We suffered but we enjoyed it with God because He always provided us with something we can live on and learn from, to make our lives better, and to see the future now. 

We did not know how we will become, we did not know how things will turn out for each one of us. Eleven of us in the family, including my parents, have a sad story to tell. But we never complained to God of the misery. We only asked to make us survive so we can enjoy life with Him as simple human beings. 

Thank you so much again for healing my heart by exposing the trauma of my past. It was God’s way of loving us and I truly thank God and True Parents for keeping me alive until now and for bringing me to this blessed family so I can multiply His love and blessings to other people. Thank you, thank you so much again.

-Rafael Ablong