Now & Then Contest: Photos and Memories Come Pouring In
We’re excited to share the latest submissions from the Now & Then Contest in the above video. In the testimony below, Lilly Gundacker from Austria shares about her and her husband’s experience as a 2,075 couple. There’s still time to submit your entry for a chance to win a trip to Hawaii (see instructions below)!
Australia-Austria
I am Australian. He is Austrian. I joined the Unification movement in Australia on August 5, 1975, and he in Austria on August 10, 1975. We were matched by photo in December 1980. He went to New York. I got his photo afterwards. I imagined us at the front of a column of brothers and sisters sorted by nations.
The atmosphere in New York was electric. Despite only a few hours of sleep, we were bright and cheery. We found each other and tentatively made our introductions.
Josef had met True Father shortly after joining the church in Europe. Very few of the Australians had personal experiences with True Parents. All my dreams of standing up when True Father says, “Who is seeing me for the first time?” changed, as I walked up the ten white steps in Madison Square Garden. I walked past True Father on the top step, together with my new husband and three other couples in a row. There were 2,074 other couples being Blessed at the same time.
We look back and know we need to tell our story. We would not have even looked at each other had it not been for True Parents. We are grateful for the Blessing. We are still totally different in many ways, but we are both determined and faithful. We want to make a difference. Our Blessing motto was “World Peace Through Ideal Families”. Is our family ideal? We are challenged. We philosophize. We communicate. With each other and our children. And now, with the world.
How to Enter
If you or your parents were Blessed in marriage at Madison Square Garden on July 1st, 1982, send in a couple of photos of them at their ceremony, now, and in-between! Use the hashtags #peacestartswithme, #msgjuly15, and #greaterthanourdifferences, and we’ll enter you in a raffle where you could win free tickets to HAWAII, among other awesome prizes! Bonus points if you include a little blurb about why your couple rocks. Deadline July 15!
Laura Taylor Hayashi
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I think I entered: I posted on Facebook, put the hashtags in my comment, tagged the photos familyfed.org. Is that it?
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editorial
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Edit your post so that the hashtags are in the post caption itself. Follow this guide: https://2021.familyfed.org/news-story/now-contest-enter-38956/
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Mary Jane Anderson
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(We sent in our photos about three hours ago, so here is now a little bit of our story)
From Mary Jane Anderson; my husband is Gordon Anderson.
We were both at UTS when we were matched. I was a junior and Gordon was a senior. The matching was in May 1979 right before Gordon was to graduate and go on for an advanced degree. We were unique couple in that we knew each other quite well and both of us joined in Minnesota. We have similar ancestry and found out after the matching that our physical families had past connections to our great surprise. Even, there was a spirit world connection. Our match was unique in that my spiritual mother prayed for three days and three nights to find a replacement for Gordon as she felt responsible for his spiritual daughter who had left the church under her care. Somehow she felt that they were to be a eternal couple and she had spoiled it for him. Not long after her prayer she met me, I not knowing about her condition. Needless to say, when she came back from her foreign mission after our matching, she told us the story and we were pretty shocked at the power of prayer as True Father did indeed put us together!
Gordon almost missed the matching as he had gone to Minn. to visit his family. His spiritual mother was looking out for him and wouldn’t stop until she exhausted every possibility of reaching him. Finally she found him through his old boss who gave a clue on where he was and soon he was on the next plane back to NY. Through the UTS grapevine at the time, I knew there was problems finding him. When I saw him enter the ballroom, I said to myself, “That’s great..Gordon made it just in time!” It wasn’t long before we looked at each other as future husband and wife!
We have had a wonderful marriage and enjoy being in Minnesota where most of our joint families live. We have four children and two grandchildren. We are so thankful for True Parents and all that they have done for us and the world to build ideal families.
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