Child’s Realm of Shimjeon

Each human being is born as someone’s child, and we find ourselves having no freedom of choice in the matter. We cannot choose to be born the son of the President or the daughter of the world’s most beautiful woman.

From the moment of our birth, we are destined to receive our parents’ protection, which enables us to grow and develop. We attend our parents and share their lives. Here we learn the child ’s heart of love and filial piety towards parents. In the ideal, this inspires us to be ready even to sacrifice our lives for our parents. The relationship between parents and children is a vertical relationship of above and below.

Parents do not teach this love to their children by their words or direct instructions, nor is it taught at school. Rather, God implants it, and children acquire and understand it by watching their parents dedicate their lives with true love for their sake.

As children grow and mature, their hearts also develop. Eventually, the children’s hearts are perfected, achieving the standard of being able to offer everything for the sake of their parents through eternity. Before the parents speak, the child can read his parents’ minds and serve them according to their wishes. The child understands his parents’ heart just by the look in their eyes, and does what is needed to fulfill his duty.

Serving our physical parents is the foundation to offer the same absolute standard of a child’s heart to God, our True Parent on the vertical plane. This is how the realm of the heart of a child is perfected. A perfected child’s heart is infinitely valuable. It creates a realm of absolute value. And we cannot even dream that it could come about outside of the framework of the family.