In sitting down to write an update for you all both Jesus and I realised that perhaps, for reasons you will read about below, our monthly ‘newsletter’ to our regular donators needed to be a little more in depth than usual. And since only a fraction of those who listen to our teachings also donate to us and I was going to be sharing in depth explanations about a lot of things people seem to speculate and wonder about but never ask us directly (which is a separate issue in itself) I decided to make this update a little more public than usual so that more people receive more information straight from the horses mouth as it were.

So here we go! What follows is an inventory of our person projects, spending and progress over the past few months. As is our custom I’ve made this direct and detailed so as to avoid confusion and convey as much accurate information as possible.

Progression of Divine Truth

Since early January we have received of a lot of attack both from people on earth and in the spirit world. These people and spirits have been attempting to stop us from presenting Divine Truth, and are attempting to influence people who have supported us financially and voluntarily in the past to no longer support us in the future. They are also attempting to stop us from being able to receive donations of any kind which included closing down the aj@divinetruth.com Paypal account. Of course, if we do not receive donations this would make our passion to deliver Divine Truth much more difficult for us to carry out. Many people are being influenced to create gossip about us in order to attempt to stop us from presenting Divine Truth. This has included stories and accusations that:

1. Jesus and I no longer live together, and;
2. Jesus has met another “Mary Magdalene” and begun a relationship with her, and;
3. Jesus and I are no longer teaching Divine Truth, and;
4. Jesus and I have a lot of funds at our disposal and are using those funds unwisely, and;
5. Jesus and I lie about how we use our funds, and;
6. Jesus and I do not deserve the donations we receive.

In short, we hear a lot of second hand gossip, rumours, and often, slanderous accusations about us which very few people attempt to verify and incredibly most people seem to believe. We even hear of people who live quite near to us, who could easily check the truth in what they are saying, repeating and spreading lies about how we live, what we do and our relationship. This makes it very clear that the people involved aren’t interested in discussing or discovering truth about us or themselves but rather are driven by unloving emotions and are quite willing to harm, or attempt to harm us, through their words and actions.

In fact, given how transparent and approachable Jesus and I are, no matter where a person is in the world they have avenues to contact us and simply ask us things directly. So, those people who want to engage in idle and often vicious gossip are demonstrating that they don’t really want to know the truth about us at all and instead want to avoid finding out truth and are even willing to resort to creating lies. Frankly, they demonstrate their own true motivations by their actions.

However since we love truth, and since we haven’t done much publicly lately (as you will read further on we have been super busy) I thought that this note might be a good time to dispel some of those rumours and let you know a bit of background as to what we have been doing and why.

Our Personal Life

Although our personal life is really nobody’s business but our own, we are open and transparent about it. This is why we place all of our financial records on the internet. We are also always very open about our own personal emotional and spiritual condition, and our relationship.

Since that is the case, I’d like to say that Jesus and I are still together, and in fact are becoming closer and closer each day as we work through different emotional issues. For the past 12 years Jesus has either been celibate (for 5 years), or has known that I am his Mary Magdalene. He has no intention of having any kind of sexual relationship with another woman. Anybody who truly knows him would know that. He spent a lot of time waiting for me, and, even if I did leave him for any reason, he would not have a relationship with anyone else. I am one lucky, lucky woman with a devoted, compassionate, passionate man. Any claims about him to the contrary are just malicious slander and lies.

We never have photos of the two of us! One of us is always behind the camera. So here we are at the tube station in England back in 2013. As you can probably tell by his expression Jesus doesn’t really go for selfies.

Jesus and I are still teaching Divine Truth. In fact, even though we haven’t run a group or held a presentation over the last 6 months it has been one of the most busy time periods in our entire time together. Jesus is working around 6 days a week for 10 hours each day on different projects to help the long term delivery of Divine Truth for the next 10 years plus. He hasn’t had much time for his own emotional work, which is something he is attempting to remedy lately.

His day usually begins at 4:30am when he wakes up. He then works on programming projects for the next 3 hours. As anyone who has emailed him knows, he has had very little time to respond to any emails. I have done that for him when I get the chance. From 7-7:30am he usually works either on the studio we are building, or on landscaping around the studio making it ready for visitors. He has personally moved over 20 tonne of rock and sand, along with over 100 cubic metres of mulch – by hand! He’s completed all of the planning and design for the interior and exterior of the studio, the electronic and computing requirements of the studio, along with doing all the investigations and ordering of materials, and answering all of the questions everyone has, as well as almost all of the wiring.

Jesus shoveling

He does our accounts, and handles all legal requirements. He maintains the Divine Truth server, websites, video sync services, and all technology, along with programming applications to speed up the transcription of documents. He keeps all of our computer and related systems up to date, along with doing backups of all Divine Truth material produced. He usually stops work around 4pm, at which time we have our evening meal. We are both usually in bed sleeping by 8pm.

As for myself, I am working on streamlining and standardizing the office and FAQ email accounts and becoming involved with planning and preparation for interviews and FAQ sessions and questions. I handle all business phone calls and appointments, and look after the bookings of all trades persons working on the studio project. I handle planning for all future events. I liaison with volunteers, and arrange and participate in meetings with them so that I can keep a list of what Jesus needs to do to complete his tasks for the volunteers.

In addition, due to the amount of time Jesus is spending on other projects, I am doing all cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping and other general necessary daily activities. I am fortunate to still have some personal time for myself, which has meant that I am working through emotions. Jesus still assists me with that and I am incredibly grateful that he finds the time for it amongst all of his other tasks.

We both miss spending time teaching Divine Truth more actively but are very aware that the projects – physical, emotional and spiritual – that we are working on at the moment are crucial to our ability to do that effectively and efficiently in the future.

Studio Work and Landscaping

As you can see from my comments above, we have heard a lot of gossip and rumours about how we can afford to build our studio and do the needed landscaping work in order for it to be functional.

I will give you a bit of background about how the project began, and how we obtained the funds to complete it. We do not receive enough funds by normal donations to do any structure based infrastructure work (buildings). Any spare funds we receive by donations we would normally spend on technology replacements, overseas travel and accommodation, special Divine Truth projects such as the delivery of materials to third world countries, giving gifts to Divine Truth volunteers, and doing environmental recovery experiments that we can use for gathering information to help others with their environmental work.

In 2014 we were approached by a beautiful friend we know who wanted to give us enough funds to build a larger home for ourselves.

We currently live in a single bedroom home which also doubles as our office, which includes 5 computers, 8 servers and ancillary equipment, and out meeting rooms when we have volunteers and visitors. It is 80 square metres or 860 square feet in size, with a lot packed inside. So space is quite tight. At the moment one shipping container stores many things we really need in the house, kitchen utensils, beds, half of Jesus’ clothes and other things which we are constantly swapping in and out of the container.

Our friend made it clear that she had gifted the money to us personally. She did not want us to spend any of the money on a Divine Truth project. She knows us well enough to know that we usually spend everything we have on Divine Truth projects. (smile)

So we began a lot of preliminary planning to work out what we would need in a home, and drew up some plans.

Concurrent to all this we had been considering another long-standing problem we had had. This was that we were using Lena and Igor’s lounge room in a rented home for the location of our studio, and another two bedrooms of their home for the editing studios. This meant that Lena and Igor, or “Legor” as we call them, did not have the use of their own home, since almost all of it was taken up with our equipment. So when drawing up our “new home” plans we attempted to build in space for a studio in order to solve these problems.

The ‘studio’ in Legor’s living room

However, it soon became apparent that, besides our friend offering the funds only for our personal use, that;

1. We had an increasing problem with the location of the studio and editing rooms at Legor’s home. Varying weather and temperatures precluded recording and editing at certain times of year, there were very often sound and noise problems, all along with the fact that it was always only meant to be a temporary arrangement, and

2. Having a dedicated studio was becoming increasingly important for many reasons. For example we could see that with a studio our time and energy would be saved from setting up and dismantling the equipment. This would mean we could focus more time on preparation and delivery of Divine Truth material to benefit the world. We could remove the studio and editing facilities from a rented home. But we needed to create a recording and editing environment that could be used all year round and that was stable in terms of noise and sound, and

3. We would need to build a shed which would store and protect a lot of the sensitive building materials and equipment before either the house or the studio projects could begin, and

4. We did not have enough funds to complete a home and adequate studio together, and

5. The studio alone would probably be a similar effort and cost to building a complete home, and

6. The house would have to be built after the studio due to the location of the studio and house on our land if we separated the two structures.

Due to these problems, we went back to the friend who offered us the funds and discussed these issues with her. We stated that we could not build our house at this time, due to the issues with requiring a studio. We offered to return her funds to her if she could not agree to our using this money that she had gifted to us personally to build the studio and get it operational for recording.

She agreed to allow us to loan the funds to the Divine Truth business in order to build the studio.

Editing equipment and filming set-up in Lena & Igor’s home

In order to complete the preliminary requirements of a storage shed, we also borrowed $77,500 additional funds from another friend. We budgeted that we could afford repayments on this loan from our usual donations and the shed would provide a place where we could store all of the materials we needed for the other structures out of the weather.

The shed was our first building project, and all people who worked on the shed were paid wages. No volunteer effort was involved. We still owe $60,000 on the loan, which we are now attempting to pay off (but this of course depends upon the size of our normal donations).

So, all of the work on our property that we have completed over the past twelve months has been enabled by the personal gift of one single person, the loan we acquired from another, and our desire to share Divine Truth with the world rather than use funds for our personal welfare.

Any spare funds from Divine Truth donations we had received from July to December have been going towards assisting paying some wages for workers and contractors working on building the studio. Of course, wages alone far exceed the donations we received during the period, and so the main source of funds to pay for wages and materials have come from the gift we personally received from our generous friend.

We have now run out of money to pay wages and so for the past three months, we have had 4 other people volunteering their time on the studio. We were paying them until December, but we did not have enough money after that to purchase the final materials for the project and continue to pay wages. Cornelius (David Walsh) has been the project leader and builder, and he has been volunteering his time since November (nearly 6 months). Vlad Klobucar, although no longer working here, volunteered one month of his time this year after we could no longer pay him. Igor (Shakhanov) continues to volunteer his time, both on video editing and studio work plastering and construction, and he has been solidly working on the studio for the past 3 months as a volunteer. Robert Griffiths has volunteered to complete all of our painting, which will take approximately 4 weeks of his time.

The workers at morning tea break

Donations

Normal donations generally just cover Divine Truth operations and our own personal expenses. We currently do not receive enough general donations to regularly give money to our volunteers, or to do major infrastructure work related to the delivery of Divine Truth such as the provisioning of servers and other technical services, or to build.

At the moment, expansion of our services is dependent upon one-off donations or gifts. In the past these have come from a maximum of 5 different sources (families or individuals) and have been large enough to cover these more costly services and infrastructure. If it wasn’t for the significant donations mentioned we would not be able to complete the studio and Jesus or I would need to obtain work elsewhere in order to do so, and to do other technical infrastructure for the delivery of Divine Truth worldwide.

At the moment Lena and Igor aren’t receiving enough donations to live on, and they have been looking for work locally. Once the studio is complete, if they are still not receiving many donations they will have to continue working elsewhere. Obviously, this will significantly affect our ability to continue the process of video editing to the degree we have in the past.

Jesus has spent a lot of time over the past months streamlining Divine Truth operations. We have cancelled one of our Divine Truth servers in order to save some funds. Another friend, Eugene from the USA, has setup a backup server for us, and this has taken over the operations of the second server that we cancelled.

We had many problems with a previous server provider. They totally deleted our entire server for no reason whatsoever, which completely stopped the website, our emails, and other operations. They then refused to communicate with Jesus about the problem for two weeks, and then made it very difficult for Jesus after that to reinstate the services. As a result, Jesus had to find another company with better support (iWeb in Canada), and then migrate all of the servers contents which he had backed up to the new location.

This was happening at the same time that he was making a major modification to the website, which is the first stage of our plans to build a database into the website, which will allow for a search engine. It was very busy and he was juggling a lot of things at once. At times like those I see how beneficial it is that he is always so thorough with procedures and back-ups. Without that it would have been a problem that took up far more time than the already enormous amount that it did.

As a result of these problems, Jesus developed a system so that we no longer need to rely upon our content server for email and website operations. Email and website are now with larger scaled enterprises, which means that we have less maintenance and these services are much faster than before, but the recurring costs for these services are higher. It also means that the content server now only serves content for our synchronization services, which allow you to download all of our material and websites onto your own computers for free.

During this period, Paypal also shut down our main receiving account for donations, and since we have had no other mechanism setup to receive overseas donations, from January we were without a large percentage of our donations. This meant that Jesus had to develop new methods of receiving donations. Sorting out these donation problems has taken a significant amount of Jesus’ time, since many donation methods either were not legal in Australia, did not operate in Australia, or the approval processes were under so much spirit influence that we struggled to receive replies from certain service providers – let alone approvals!

However we have now found 6 methods of donation that are the only ones possible for us to use. Four of these have already been placed on our website in the donate section. Jesus is currently working on the other two.

We have seen loads of wildlife around lately. This beautiful carpet python made its way along the front of the house and onto the break table outside our kitchen while all of us were chatting and working one day.

New Methods for Donation

So we wanted to let you know that we now have a number of new options available for people wishing to make donations to us. Jesus redesigned the donations page on the website and it now has very informative drop down menus that let you select from various donation methods and indicate what you would like your donation to be used for.

The page also provides information about each of the donation methods including minimum and maximum transfer amounts, fees charged etc.

We know that many people liked the convenience of using PayPal and we have left my PayPal account listed (mary@divinetruth.com) as an option for people who would like to continue to use this method.

We now transfer any donations made to this account very regularly so as to avoid any future risk of money being held there by PayPal should they choose to freeze that account as well.

For those concerned about the donations that they made to the Divine Truth PayPal account aj@divinetruth.com after the account was frozen by Payal during the period between 2^nd January 2015 and 27^th February 2015: PayPal has informed us that those funds are frozen for a 6 month period after which we will be able to withdraw them. So we will be able to get those funds, which are all related to donations for assistance groups in North America or Europe, sometime after July 27^th 2015.

It was always Jesus’ usual practice to transfer funds from that account very regularly in the past however since we had started to receive donations towards covering the cost of International Assistance Groups this meant that some extra accounting (international money conversions) and specific transfers to separate accounts were required each time we made a transfer. Because of that it became much more time efficient to transfer out and do all of the extra accounting for the groups once a month. That is why donations from a four week period were frozen rather than a single day or couple of days.

Seminars & Groups

At the moment we don’t have any current plans for Divine Truth seminars however we are always eager to talk about Divine Truth with people who are interested and open hearted about God, love and spiritual growth.

We haven’t heard from many people recently who are expressing a sincere desire to attend a group or seminar which is why (apart from the fact that we are very busy with building the studio) we haven’t made any plans for one.

For a long time we have had expressions of interest open via Eventbrite pages to hold seminars in various places in Australia and overseas. I recently cleared out all of the old registrations so that we can get a better idea of the current interest levels in hearing us speak in regional locations. I’ll be monitoring these pages more closely over the coming couple of months. So if you feel you would sincerely like to hear us speak in your area you can visit the Divine Truth page on Eventbrite and register.

Of course, as usual, our ability to be able to visit any location depends upon our available funds so we can’t guarantee to visit your area but we would definitely like to know where people are who would like to hear us speak, especially if you are very enthusiastic. That way we can keep a possible event in mind when we receive enough donations to consider it.

If you are interested in helping to host or organise an event in your area you can get in touch with me via office@divinetruth.com.

We are still receiving donations towards the possibility of holding Assistance Groups in North America and Europe. You can find further details about these groups along with regularly updated running totals of donations received so far and the total amount needed to fund our expenses to hold these groups on this blog on the International Assistance Group page.

So that is a big update from us that hopefully helps those interested to understand how we manage things, what we have been up to and how we have been able to undertake our new big project building the studio. I’ve heard from a lot of people that you are enjoying seeing the progress photos of the building and so we’ll continue to add them as we go.

Thank you again to all of you who donate to us. I feel immensely blessed to be able to do what we do and I know that each of you make that possible.

Hope to see you at a talk or group later in the year!

The guys put in the hanging ceiling in the studio