Discovering What God Wants to Teach Us

The ocean is a great source of comfort and nourishment, offering us a wide range of rewards and challenges. It can also teach us invaluable lessons. National Ocean Challenge Program (NOCP) Co-Director Tasnah Bercy, alongside her husband Lukas, led the 21-day program from July 5 to 27, bringing together 32 young people from around the USA, South Korea, Poland, and Andorra for this unique hands-on immersion experience of God's Creation.

Below is Tasnah’s report on their recent journey, as well as testimonies from participants:

With the ocean as the training ground, our NOCP participants develop character and confidence through seamanship, while experiencing the heart of stewardship and cultivating faith through experiencing God’s love through nature. This incredible program is modeled after Father and Mother Moon's tradition of utilizing time on the ocean for prayer, meditation, and seeking guidance, insight and inspiration. Through the program our participants could come to experience and understand more deeply True Parents’ heart for the ocean and Ocean Providence, and why they loved Kodiak so much.

Many participants came seeking clarity and direction for their futures, and they experienced that Ocean Challenge is about much more than fishing and the ocean has much to teach. When Mother Moon came to Kodiak with young people from around the world, she shared, “I did not lecture or preach to them. I only offered the advice, ‘Go out to sea. On the sea, you will discover what God wants to teach you.’”

Each morning began with morning devotion — a scripture reading and a short morning service on that day’s theme, framing the focus and intention for time on the ocean. The group heads out after breakfast for a full day on the water. Our senior captains, who spent many years with Father and Mother Moon, shared their stories and experiences with the participants.

While the whole day is spent fishing, NOCP is about more than just catching fish. The lessons the ocean teaches are many: patience, perseverance (especially in rough weather and seasickness), teamwork, resilience, gratitude, humility, joy, and love. Behind every king salmon and halibut caught are tears, prayers, hopes, and questions answered.

We take care of what we love. Part of a heart of stewardship is learning to love the Creation God made for us, and to understand what it means to be proper stewards of our earth. The group does a service project each year, partnering with a local nonprofit, cleaning up marine debris from the local beaches. Our evening programs include testimonies from captains and local church elders who experienced True Parents’ visits to Kodiak each summer starting in the 1980s. Testimonies are often shared in the historic North Garden, True Parents home in Kodiak.

NOCP’s 40-day extended Captain-in-Training (CIT) program provides a leadership training opportunity where the elder captains can pass on the heart and legacy of captaining to the younger generation, sharing their wealth of spiritual and technical experience. CITs spend their prep week beginning each day with morning devotions and guidance from their elders. Some of the training themes include the heart of being a leader, stewardship, and faith training on the ocean, as well as developing a captain’s heart in caring both for your boat and passengers.

Our CITs work with the historic Good Gos, the boats Father and Mother Moon and many early members fished on in the 80s. They are instructed in the basics of boat preparation, safety, mechanics, maneuvering, as well as charts, navigation, and a handful of fishing techniques. During the main program they are assigned a boat and are paired with a senior captain. They are given the opportunity to implement all that they have learned — driving, navigating, teaching teams how to fish, and continuing to learn and inherit from the senior captain. They also teach the Boating Safely course for all our participants, passing on what they have learned and preparing the group for the three weeks ahead. After the main program, CIT also experience an overnight fishing trip with the captains and staff and learn how to winterize a boat in preparation for the following year.

Throughout NOCP, the ocean is the teacher. Lessons and takeaways are thus unique to each person, their goals, and their journey in life. We invite you to come to Kodiak next summer, walk in Father and Mother Moon’s footsteps, and experience all the ocean has to teach.

Participant Testimonials

“Kodiak is a place of meditation, healing, nurturing, and prayer. There is a strong sense of mission and goals here. God is able to give freely here. Pure cultivation of brother and sister relationships, centered on our faith. A taste of career paths and the spirit of Ocean Providence.”

“Ocean Challenge was my next step in my life of faith, a place I could go to the zero point and reconnect to God and myself before starting a new chapter in my life. I felt extremely grateful for realizing that everything I was looking for in this moment of life was right in front of me, a community and people I could experience God’s love with. I learned that God has always something to teach us, we just need to go out there and listen/experience. Surrender and trust seems easy on paper but much more difficult to execute in life, but letting go of fears, concepts, and control was a good way to allow God into my heart and life.”

“I just realized that one of God’s gifts to us is nature, and to ignore it is to ignore an aspect of God’s heart. I’m not able to receive love through nature that well because I don’t spend that much time appreciating nature when I’m at home, so I want to go home and spend more time in nature to better receive God’s love. Also, I learned that I need to trust that God has a plan that can bring me to the path of most happiness, but that’s only possible if I am willing to put myself out there and embrace the risk of failure in order to let God work in my life.”

“I have gained so much perspective. I was really able to reconnect and recreate my relationship with God. I’ve learned so much about the heart of gratitude and the importance of surrendering to and trusting God ... I really gained the desire to work on my faith and focus on what I can do to make God happy and really strive towards the vision True Parents have shown and given us, and what True Parents and my parents really worked so hard for and sacrificed so much for. I couldn’t be more appreciative of this program which helped me to test myself, challenge myself, and show that I can really do something if I put my mind, body, and heart to it.”

“I experienced forgiveness and the heart of God. There was a moment in my life where I felt like I betrayed God. I was stuck on things I wasn’t able to do and felt like I couldn’t recover. NOCP made me realize that God continues to love regardless of the scars you may have. Surrendering to God’s love, and surrendering in general, is often seen as a loss — to give up, to be defeated. I learned that surrendering is doing everything in your power and taking responsibility. Surrendering is accepting your reality and accepting what is in store for you in the future. Although I may not know what God’s plan is for me, I trust that it is where I need to be.”

“I experienced and learned many lessons here, like the heart of repentance, heart of an offering, and trusting and surrendering to God. To let go of my expectations and allow God to work in my life, that all things are already prepared for me and God made all of this for me — just for me — and that I cannot do it all alone.”

“I learned that fishing is a spiritual practice, and if I go on the ocean God will show me what I need to learn. True Parents invested so much into Kodiak, and I am standing on that foundation.”

You can learn more about the history of NOCP here.

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