The Words of the Lajda Family |
50th City, Prague, The Czech Republic
Juraj Lajda and Jorg Heller
October 29, 2005
Report From 100 City Inaugural Tour
True Parents take Prague by Storm
A "Heavenly Hurricane" hit Prague on Saturday morning, October 29th. Long awaited, coming on the clouds of heaven, the plane of our Messiah, Lord and Savior, the True Parents of Heaven and Earth touched down at around 10 am.
Background on the Tour
True Parents announced while in Alaska on September 4th, 2005 that he wanted to hold a 12 city speaking tour in the United States. Of course everyone was quite surprised and in awe about True Father’s announcement and determination to follow through on it. Of course there were concerns about the health and safety of True Father and Mother, at the age of 86 a tour like this would be an extremely difficult task to complete.
Feverish preparations were made by Brother’s and Sisters in the USA and on September 12th, after only 8 days of preparation, the stage was set for True Parents to start the speaking tour in Alice Tully Hall in New York City, the very first place True Father spoke in 1972 in America.
The surprise did not stop there, however. During this tour, to everyone’s surprise, True Father announced that he wanted to extend the tour to the World. 100 cities were to be covered (later extended to 120). Wow! Amazing! True Parents are giving so much and are putting their lives on the line to save the world. Now preparations were made around the world to receive the Lord of the second Advent.
Event in Prague
Prague was the 50th stop on the world tour that our True Parents visited. The European Family had organized well to prepare for each of the 13 cities True Parents would visit on the continent. Brothers and sisters from countries where True Parent could not enter because of legal problems were assigned to support the country in Europe that would host True Parents on this tour.
The Scandinavian countries were assigned to support the Czech Republic. Brothers and Sisters from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark came up to three weeks before the event to support the Czech brothers and sister with the preparations. From the neighboring country of Germany help also arrived. And of course we could always depend on the Japanese missionaries to be there. Four alone came directly from Japan, others came from the Scandinavian countries. Overall there were 14 foreign members two weeks before the event. Finally, in the last week the number grew to 25.
Under the capable leadership of Dr. Dieter Schmidt, regional director of Scandinavia, with the assistance of the National Leader from Finland, Mr. Tetsuo Joshizumi and the help of the Abel National Messiah from America, Mr. Jorg Heller, activities were organized well.
Members were divided into Teams to visit Embassies and NGO in Prague. However, when the progress was slow and after about a week Mr. Schmidt decided to go on the attack with a more direct method. We followed the example of the Polish Family who held an exhibition about our movement with the focus on the UPF. The Polish family had brought great success and signed up many AFP.
We found a wonderful location in the Ramada Hotel on one of the major streets in Prague.
Brothers and Sisters went out on the street with flyers and brochures and invitation letters.
It was somewhat difficult to start, however, soon we broke through and about 45 people came to view our exhibit. That was a great inspiration for all of us "old folks" and we were excited and full of energy at the end of the day.
The next few days leading up to the event brought even better results. And when the day of True Father’s speech came, we were pretty confident that a good number of Czech people would attend.
The Saturday afternoon Seminar was already a success. 31 people attended a high spirited series of presentations given by Anton Uhnak and Marcela Rozehnalova.
The hall was full, about 700 people and 200 in the overflow room. There was a strong support from the brothers and sisters from Germany and other countries from West Europe. This created a high spiritual atmosphere. Even True Father could feel that. At the beginning there was a beautiful song by an opera singer from the National theatre. Blessing ceremony was held by Dr. T. Walsh. A member of the European Parliament gave a welcoming speech.
True Father spoke about 170 minutes making many extemporary remarks. Some words of TF were difficult to digest for them but all of them could endure until the end of the whole event. Many of the top level people who participated were left-wing oriented, however, even with them True Father succeeded to touch their hearts. Even though they squirmed in their chairs many times they could not leave as if glued to their chairs, they listened to True Father to the end.
HDH was overcrowded and TF was happy. True Father asked True Mother to sing a song as well. She sang "Santa Lucia". Then TF and TM sand a song together, eventually the HDH session finished with a dance.
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