After a big year of creating, presenting and editing new Divine Truth material in 2016, 2017 has become a year for us to focus on the reviewing and updating the systems and procedures that will be required for the future growth and expansion of Divine Truth.

Despite our seeming quiet on the world wide web, Jesus and I (especially Jesus) have had a very busy 6 months. Jesus has been doing a lot of behind the scenes work essential for our future goals and desires in a number of areas.

The projects he has been researching and developing will mean that we can expand the number and type of online methods we use to share Divine Truth with the world, as well as ensuring that the data we create is reliably stored and can be readily used for a variety of purposes including database creation, subtitling videos, translation, and other features. All of this will mean that more people worldwide will be able to easily search for and benefit from the information that we have already presented, as well as ensuring that future content fits seamlessly into an efficient system.

I’ll briefly outline some of these projects in more detail below.

Our Thanks

Firstly, Jesus and I would like to send our immense gratitude to those people who have donated to us over the past 6 months.

As always, we never take it lightly that others wish to support our work and supply us with donations to allow us to continue.

We use the donations we receive to maintain our recording and editing equipment, pay for software and hardware updates as required, pay for our overseas methods of serving Divine Truth data to the internet, and to pass on personal donations from ourselves to volunteers who work on various projects including; programming, transcribing, office assistance, sound and video recording and editing. In fact, a very small percentage of what we receive goes towards our personal living expenses.

As often happens when we haven’t released new material for a while, the last few months we have received less donations than usual. This means that we may need to review how much we donate on to volunteers for a time until we can afford to resume regular donations again.

We are grateful to those of you who have kept up regular donations to us these past 6 months. It has given us the capacity to focus on the important changes in infrastructure that I mentioned, and helped us to continue to give gifts to our volunteers who do a large amount of work with little personal reward.

An Introduction

Over the past 6 months, Jesus’ time has been divided between two major areas. The first has been major infrastructure upgrades and the second has been assisting the new God’s Way company to get started.

Jesus has had so much experience in the past in both computer systems engineering, programming and analysis, and in starting and running companies, that his expertise has been vital for the changes to make in Divine Truth delivery and data management. Also, God’s Way Directors have had much to learn as they incorporated the new non-profit company, including the set up and management of legal requirements, accounting, computer systems, templates, and processes for the new company.

Divine Truth & God’s Way Operations

Divine Truth operations were overdue for an overhaul and redesign of our data storage systems. As our core work and passion is to create and deliver Divine Truth materials to the world it is essential that everything we create is stored and backed-up very safely and efficiently (otherwise we risk loosing valuable recordings, documents, templates, plans, books etc). This requires Divine Truth to own and manage a lot of computer hardware. We cannot easily use Cloud based operations, since we have very poor internet bandwidth, speed and capacity in the Australian bush. Most of our computer systems are 5-7 years old, and our server systems are very slow, and at full capacity.

So, we have been overdue for not only an upgrade to our system to enable more reliable and less time consuming storage and back-up processes but we also needed to review the file management structure we have been using to organise the data we have stored and continue to create. Since God’s Way also must set up new data storage and file structures, we have decided to perform our upgrades with God’s Way in mind. This will allow Divine Truth and God’s Way to share the same infrastructure and training systems, and we hope will result in quite a number of people having a large degree of technical expertise.

We currently have around 480TB of raw video and audio data in cold storage, and 48TB of editing video and audio, along with another 16TB of general data storage, along with 3 iMac based video editing stations, 4 small linux servers, 4 windows PC’s and 3 Linux systems. All of these machines are connected to a 1Gbit network, but the video editing stations are connected via a 10Gbit network. Data is stored in many different locations, and managing it is becoming very difficult for Jesus along with managing all of his other work. We immediately need around 120TB of space to allow for Divine Truth video editing, God’s Way video editing, and the storage of data used by both companies, along with a clear upgrade path. Since our data is very important to us, we need to store it all, as well as having methods to backup the data regularly.

Jesus has put off his normal work for sometime in order to research the available hardware and software options that would meet our specialised needs for many years to come. He has had to learn learn about new technological advances (both in hardware and software). This research has taken Jesus huge amounts of time to complete, but he is now up to speed technically on creating large distributed node based clusters of data which have a high level of redundancy and the lowest upgrade cost. We hope in the near future to purchase and maintain our own hardware (4 x large servers able to upgrade to 240TB of data each, using 10Gbit connections to our network, used in a cluster which allows 2 servers to be used in rotation for a backup, and 2 servers live at all times, with each server having a copy of the data), and use open source software to maintain the clusters (GlusterFS on Centos). The proposed system will be able to grow to 240TB by adding disks, and further growth will occur by adding 3 new servers each time once God’s Way has a location of its own connected to our location by fibre (which we hope to set up in the next few years).

Cold storage backups will be produced by 2 x Linux servers with 16 drive bays backing up to large drives for individual project archival and storage. We always create two copies of all archives before we remove projects from our main editing store. These upgrades will allow for hi-speed video and audio editing at speeds that are a minimum of 4 x our current speeds, the ability to have a number of concurrent video editors working at the same time, along with reliable backups onto cold storage for years to come. This work in expanding our storage system and redesigning our file naming conventions and storage procedures is essential for our future expansion and later database creation. Obviously this amount of data needs good organisation for many reasons. The upheaval and reorganisation of our current physical system will occur after we have re-organized and categorised the data, along with producing a database which describes all of the data in detail.

In addition, we already have a team of around 80 volunteers who need to be able to communicate with each other better, and find documentation for their processes. So we are setting up a cloud based infrastructure for internal forums, wikis, and blogs to be used to keep all volunteers worldiwde up to date. God’s Way will eventually have many projects underway, all of which will also need forums, wikis and blogs.

Of course, this requires a lot of work to setup, and again, Jesus is the only person with the appropriate expertise to make these decisions and choices, as well as setup the resulting infrastructure which will be used both by Divine Truth and God’s Way. At this stage we are testing Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 in a load balanced solution connected to a scalable AWS RDS, running a Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP software stack (LAMP) with an open source product alled Tiki Wiki running on top. Data will be backed up to AWS S3, and to our other servers in Canada and the USA.

As you can imagine, this infrastructure needs a substantial financial and time based outlay. We have been putting off making the changes we have had to make for sometime as technology usually becomes more reliable and more affordable over time, and because Jesus wanted to focus on producing information for the Assistance Groups. But we decided that we can’t put the process off any longer and so Jesus has taken the plunge to investigate extremely thoroughly before we make our purchases. At this stage we have some people who want to help financially which is great.

Obviously we need technical assistance, but unfortunately, since a major part of our system has to be local, all of this assistance needs to come from people who live locally so that proper structures and directions can be given to them. Since there a no people locally with these skills, Jesus has begun a training program with people who do live locally, and who are dedicated to living “God’s Way”, who volunteer a lot of their time to us already. Eventually, when we have the funds donated to do so, we would like to pay these people for their services. At the moment this is not possible due to the amount of donations we receive, but Jesus is still going ahead and training the people required.

New Online Delivery Services for Divine Truth & God’s Way

As I have mentioned, as a part of our technological overhaul, and in light of the changes we want to make for Divine Truth and God’s Way, Jesus has been concurrently investigating content management systems. He has been creating LAMP stacks that will allow us to run a variety of content management systems to test. Our goal is to create and maintain Cloud based communication mechanisms, backing up data to our local systems. Due to the amount of data in our Video systems, this is not possible for our video systems without spending millions of dollars. But it is possible for us to use these kinds of systems for our internal documentation, process, and forum insfrastructure.

Our requirements include:

1. Private Forums for our volunteer teams to use to create and store in house procedures, keep up to date with work on ongoing projects (e.g. transcription team) and communicate within and between volunteer teams
2. Wiki Pages (private pages for Volunteer team members) – for sharing of Divine procedures, creating working documents
3. Wiki Pages (for public) – to share data collected by Divine Truth and God’s Way teams in a variety of fields e.g. relationships, education, construction, land regeneration, engineering, computer systems, etc
4. Website and blog redesign

New Document Templates for God’s Way & Update of Divine Truth Templates

Jesus has also donated his time to God’s Way to create all of the new office templates for God’s Way company and project research documents. While he was at it he updated all of our Divine Truth office templates as well. He has updated over 100 templates in total. He makes these things look easy but they take a lot of time.

New Procedures for Clipping & New Vimeo Channels

During this period Jesus, Lena, Maureen (the volunteer who previously created the majority of clips from past talks that can be viewed on our Clips Channel) and Barbara (from the transcribing team) have been working on new proceedures for the rapid creation of Diving Truth Clips. This work started because YouTube placed some new limitations on the creation of clips via their online process. While at first this seemed like a restriction it has created an opportunity to review how clips are selected and named and to utilise completed transcripts to streamline clip creation and integrate the data in a future searchable database.

This has required a cleanup of the transcription and translation process, which Jesus has been involved in with Barbara McNair, who is the volunteer who manages our team of transcribers. Also, Jesus has guided Kate Eckersall, who has been making programs to streamline the automation of sub-title generation for videos, along with cleaning up the e-book and self-print processes.

Jesus has found ways to automate our new video clipping process from transcribed files as long as the video time data in those files is accurate. This has involved meeting with the transcription team, and beginning a process of cleaning up the time code data. In addition, he has loaded open source software that will allow for the production of around 1 video clip per second. This means that in the future, when a transcription is complete, the video clips will match the transcribed file, and can be done in a few minutes per transcription.

Of course, this has also meant that our sound in older videos must be cleaned up. Igor Shakhanov is currently using a new software product to clean up all sound from all videos, including the oldest videos where possible, and then, once the sound has been cleaned up, and the transcription time codes are accurate, we shall be producing video clips again. Jesus has worked out methods to rejoin old videos with new sound, without having to produce the entire video again from raw data. Once these processes are complete, we hope to produce around 15,000 video clips from our current videos, all with sound that is much better than our current sound on old videos. In addition, when a new video is produced, clips will also be produced when the transcription process is complete. We also wish to automate both Youtube and Vimeo uploads using software API’s.

So we have also begun storing videos on Vimeo, as well as Youtube. There is a Vimeo Divine Truth channel, which currently contains the 2016 Assistance Group material. Although we have uploaded all of the material to Vimeo, we have not yet had time to make it all publicly available.

Ongoing Programming & Transcription Team Projects

Jesus continues to meet with Kate (who is assisting us with programming of document changes and data capture from transcripts) and Barb (leader of the Transcription & Translation Team) to develop and refine new ways of presenting our data and reducing the workload of individual team members. Barb’s team has prepared new training documents, and, once we complete the testing of these new services, obviously new training will have to be delivered.

God’s Way Mentor-ship & Directorship

Jesus and I have both been involved in assisting the God’s Way company to get up and running and to focus on their core business as outlined by their constitution.

Jesus has spent considerable time in educating and donating time to Directors, members, and guests of the organisation, in the following areas:

• Creation of a company constitution suiting the requirements for a non-profit organisation in Australia
• Creation and setup of a company
• Legal aspects of running a company, including how to deal with property ownership
• Designing Accounting systems & correct accounting procedures
• Setup of the software and chart of accounts for God’s Way
• Consulting with accountants and leading meetings with God’s Way accountants to ensure they established best and legal practices for receiving gifts and donations
• How to create and protect valuable Intellectual Property
• Technical considerations for the creation of Intellectual Property
• Education and assistance to Directors with decision making for the purchase of hardware and software pertaining to data collection & storage
• Technical assistance and education to set up company email accounts, blogs and management of internet services

After Peter Lytton-Hitchins removal as Director of the company, I stepped in and became a Director to assist with day to day decision making and weighing up ethical considerations and actions in harmony with the company constitution and objectives of God’s Way. We hope Peter will return as Director after he addresses aspects of love that Jesus has identified for him.

Personal Progression

Both Jesus and I continue to prioritise our personal progression in our relationship with God and with each other.

As you can imagine, Jesus has had limited time to focus on his personal work. My guy is busy and he sometimes makes my head spin with how much he acheives in a single day. Once he has completed a lot of the investigation work he is currently undertaking, he hopes to have more personal time for himself, along with more time to produce videos.

I have had more time and I feel that I am continuing to work through important issues relating to my acceptance of my identity, my desire to be myself in the world and in my relationships with both men and women. I am exceptionally grateful for this opportunity to focus on my own progression. I have also been working on a couple of home based projects relating to land regeneration and I have been planting out our front garden full of native plants for the birds and insects to enjoy. I thoroughly enjoy this.

The Coming Months

Over the coming months, Jesus will need to continue work on most of the projects listed above.

Both Jesus and I are missing working on the creation of Divine Truth material. We have so many projects that we would like to start recording on. If things go well we may start back in the studio sometime in June.

We are hopeful to start recording the following:
series “What Happens When You Die/ Life After Death”
series “Developing My Will to Love Q & A”
series “Fundamental Facts”

We are also hopeful that Volunteer Induction Programme will get underway sometime after June. Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins and Tristan Miller will now be leading this group. I will help with the planning and design of the programme and mentor them throughout the process. This will allow things to get started and I can be free to work on Divine Truth projects.

You may have noticed some recent changes to the layout of this blog.  Until our redesign of the Divine Truth main website, Lena and I are often referring people who email our office account to some of the information that can be found on pages of this blog. The rearrangement I’ve recently done and the information I will continue to add is designed to assist people to find certain information quickly and easily.

If you do want regular up dates of changes to our schedule or of Jesus and my activities you can subscribe to the blog and you will receive an email each time I make a new post.

So that is a very brief summary of what we have been up to. Our focus has been on internal operations with the aim to expand and improve our external gifts in the coming years.

We send you all our love.

Mary & Jesus

Summary Information

This programme is designed to help us ASSESS if each individual participant;

Truly has a sincere desire to serve
Has the correct attitudes of service
Has the correct understanding of Divine Truth principles
Has a strong desire to bring their life into harmony with God’s definition of love
Is desirous to correct any unloving behaviour and beliefs
Is able to be educated God’s Way
Is willing to perform any task, from cleaning toilets through to video production and presenting material to the public

In order to participate in this programme you must:

Have a sincere desire to assist in the work of sharing Divine Truth worldwide
Be available to attend and participate one day per week for a minimum of a three month period (in the Wilkesdale area)
Be desirous of feedback regarding your emotions and condition in love, especially in relation to your being of service to others
Be desirous and willing to work and on your emotions and condition in love in your own time throughout the duration of the programme
Be aware that you will be removed from the programme if certain conditions or requirements are not met
Be able to undertake tasks with or without instructions in a loving, self-responsible, and thorough manner

Preference for acceptance into the programme will be given according to the following criteria:

People who we feel at this stage are most likely to complete the programme
People who have the capacity to be directly involved in assisting in Divine Truth & God’s Way projects
People who have already demonstrated some initiative in volunteering for Divine Truth or sharing Divine Truth independently
People who have expressed a desire to voluntarily assist in Divine Truth and God’s Way activities prior to the announcement of this programme

 Who is it for?

People who are already motivated and have a pure desire to assist in the operations of Divine Truth and God’s Way organisations.

 Purpose of the Programme

The programme is really a trial or test period to assess participants current level of self responsibility and current desire to give gifts specifically to the Divine Truth and God’s Way organisations.

Definition of self responsibility:
Self-Responsibility is the Law based requirement of self-awareness, to seek truth, love and understanding of all principles of Love and Law, and the loving ownership and expression of one’s will, desire, passion, emotion, attitudes, intentions, thoughts and actions in harmony with God’s Principles and Laws.

Those who attended our recent ‘Understanding God’s Loving Laws’ Assistance Group would be aware that a person’s level of self-responsibility is measured by God not by perfect embodiment of humility, expression of love or desire for truth but by the sincere desire to attain this state.

Gift definition:
A thing given willingly to someone without receiving payment in return. A gift is given without expectation of any form of emotional, physical or spiritual reward, including attention, approval, ‘glory’, and a feeling of self-importance.

Volunteer Induction Programme vs. Volunteer Training Programme

As I mentioned in my previous post, the volunteer induction programme will not involve training individuals in specific skills. Nor will the programme focus on providing personal emotional and spiritual feedback to participants, although if removed from the programme participants will be informed as to why that has occurred. Participants must be willing and desirous to learn new skills and to receive feedback if it is given but the programme does not focus on either of these things.

The Volunteer Induction programme will be a time where Jesus, Eloisa and I can assess if a person is truly sincere in their desire to give gifts and also if the person has an attitude which will make them someone who can be a productive member of any Divine Truth or God’s Way volunteer team.

The kind of activities I mentioned in our recent Volunteer Training Programme would be engaged only with people who have first completed the Induction Programme, and who have demonstrated over time that our personal time will not be wasted by training the person further.

The Volunteer Training Programme held in December 2016 and January 2017 was  about Jesus, Lena and I gifting our time to others so that they may learn new skills. That is not the focus of the Induction Programme. The Volunteer Induction Programme is designed to help the directors and managers of the God’s Way and Divine Truth organisations identify who shall be trained in new skills and welcomed as members of the teams within these organizations.

We have found over many years that it is not good economy to begin training and working with people who simply state that they wish to give their time in assisting us and to practice the principles of Divine Truth.

Often when we have started to work with these people in the past it has quickly become apparent to us that the person has a great deal of resistance to living God’s Way and has a large amount of demands and expectations upon us rather than a desire to serve. Often the person saying that they want to volunteer has quickly (or sometimes not so quickly) realised that when they said that they wanted to volunteer and said that they were desirous of living according to God’s Way that they really didn’t understand what either of those things mean from God’s Perspective.

In addition, when given feedback, these people have frequently become very angry and upset with us personally, and often have left following Divine Truth altogether, even though we have gifted to them our time. Our Volunteer Induction programme is therefore designed to help prevent these kinds of situations occurring in the future.

The Volunteer Training Programme that we recently ran was a special gift that we gave to certain people who we believed (through our prior knowledge of them) would already be able to complete the Volunteer Induction Programme successfully (although we did find that one participant possibly would not have completed an Induction Programme at this time).

Application & Acceptance to Volunteer Induction Programme

Anyone is welcome to apply to this programme.

Spaces in the programme will be limited.

When accepting people into the programme, preference will be given according to the following criteria:

People who we feel at this stage are most likely to complete the programme
People who have the capacity to be directly involved in assisting in Divine Truth & God’s Way projects
People who have already demonstrated some initiative in volunteering for Divine Truth or sharing Divine Truth independently
People who have expressed a desire to voluntarily assist in Divine Truth and God’s Way activities prior to the announcement of this programme
People who are willing to use their time, energy, and the majority of their personal resources (including finances) to further the sharing of God’s Truth worldwide

While there is some scope for people overseas to be directly involved in assisting in Divine Truth & God’s Way projects it is limited at this time. This means that if you live overseas preference may be given to those who live locally who meet the above criteria.

For those people living locally, very few of you currently meet the criteria for acceptance. Many people are used to Divine Truth and God’s Way serving them and giving them gifts via free education and information.

We anticipate that this programme will be repeated, so if you are not accepted to this round of the programme or are removed part way through, you are welcome to reapply once you feel that you are more sincere in your approach.

Participation From Overseas or By Long Distance

It is not possible to participate in this programme remotely.

In future we would love to be able to run this kind of programme overseas but first we need to have people who would be qualified and be located overseas to run such a programme.

If You Have Already Received Notification of Acceptance to the Volunteer Induction Programme

Because of the limited numbers available in our first run of this programme and due to the increased interest, Jesus and I will reassess all applications according to all the criteria I outlined above.

This means that while you may have previously received email confirmation of your acceptance, your place may now go to someone who we feel will be more likely to complete the programme and become a volunteer.

Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins will email you directly about any changes.

Final Notes & Reminders

I would like to emphasise again that the Volunteer Induction Programme is not a programme to help individuals to gain specific skills to implement their own personal projects or give presentations relating to God’s Way. The ‘Understanding God’s Loving Laws’ Assistance Group, which has just been made available via our website, is jam-packed full of information to help people in learning how to create and share according to God’s Way. This programme is not designed to give people a large amount of free training that they can then either waste or use only for their own benefit.

The Volunteer Induction Programme is designed to assist us to find people who are sincere in their desire to give gifts in harmony with God’s Way of doing things to assist God’s Truth and God’s Way. We will assume that all sincere people will naturally be interested in, and independently taking initiative, to study material already made available to them via our website that will assist them to complete the programme successfully.

Jesus and I notice that very few people who listen to Divine Truth are motivated to develop self-responsibility or to assist in the creation and sharing of Divine Truth materials. This is why we have so few people who are currently volunteering to assist us in the day-to-day operations of our organization. This includes; tasks such as website maintenance, YouTube and vimeo account maintenance, video and audio production and editing, computer maintenance, server maintenance and updates, clips production, office and FAQ email account management and many other tasks which are essential to our ongoing operation. Volunteering to assist in these tasks requires individuals to be thorough, learn independently, be able to follow direction and to do jobs as requested by Jesus, myself or other more senior team members.

These tasks require constant and diligent maintenance but they involve very little ‘glamour’ or public recognition. There are very few rewards other than knowing that God’s Truth is being shared. For this reason it is currently primarily only three people, Jesus, Lena and I, who work hard every day to make sure that the majority of tasks required for these essential parts of the Divine Truth operation get done. There are at this stage only 1 person, Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins, works hard every day to make sure that the majority of tasks required for the God’s Way operation get done, although two others, Tristan Miller and Catherine Spence, are learning and doing more each day to improve. Each of these people receives very little, if any, acknowledgement for the jobs they do.

Most people who receive free material have little or no awareness of how much effort and financial resources are involved in providing the same material.

The volunteers that successfully complete the Volunteer Induction Programme will only be those people who are willing to be involved in any activity that furthers the objectives of God’s Way and Divine Truth and who have the same attitudes about sharing truth with the world as those mentioned above. Once a person has successfully completed the Volunteer Induction Programme we expect that they will need a lot of further training to complete specific tasks, which shall be provided to them at a later time.

 

How to Apply

You can register your interest to participate via our Eventbrite page here.

 

It has been a while since our last update and so as usual I have a lot of information to share.

Here is a list of topics I’ve covered (clicking on each title will jump you to that section within the post):

Thank you
Assistance Groups
Recent Divine Truth Training Programme
Volunteer Induction Programme
Other Divine Truth Projects
God’s Way
Changes to Production Team
Personal Work

Of special note for those wishing to attend any of our future assistance groups are the changes to scheduling for these groups (see below for details).

The Big Year

2016 was a big year for both Jesus and I.

Running three assistance groups in one year was an incredible feat that was largely created, managed, directed, presented, produced and output by Jesus alone. He had some help along the way but the lions share of what was done was done by him. I personally want to thank and congratulate him on the immense gift he has given in sharing this content.  For the early part of the year I made it my daily business to study what was presented in the first two groups and it assisted me greatly.

2016 for me was all about making my own developing my number one priority and through that process I encountered and learned quite a lot about valuing my emotions (no matter what they are) and developing compassion for my injured self. These things assisted me to become more self responsible (something you can learn lots about in the “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” Assistance Group material) and enhanced my personal happiness. This was all essential work that I needed to do and I am immensely grateful to Jesus for doing all the extra things that needed to be done in my absence.

For Jesus this has been a tiring year which is why we have made some changes to our schedule for Assistance Groups, which you can read about below.  2017 is a year for him to take a rest from what has been an intense work schedule the past 16 months and to focus on his progression again. We are both aware of how important our personal progression is in furthering the understanding of Divine Truth on earth.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who has made an individual donation to us over the past few months and to those who continue in their regular monthly and weekly donations. Even though you haven’t seen much in terms of new content via the internet these past three months, as you will read below, we have been quite busy. We are using your contributions to not only create Divine Truth material but also to implement ways and better systems to assist in the delivery of truth with the world.

As I often say, I feel we are only stewards of the monies that you donate. These funds are in our hands for a short time and we are placed in charge of making the best use of what you give us so that it can be best used to serve others in the world who want to grow in love toward their Heavenly Father and Mother.

Assistance Groups

“Understanding God’s Loving Laws”

The “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” assistance group is now on the website and YouTube.

This group was great fun to be a part of. In total 130 people participated. Our venue and the weather were lovely and Lena and Igor offered their own personal gift of a group BBQ on one of the Rest & Reflection days during the programme.

I believe that the material covered speaks for itself in terms of its importance and significance for people individually and for the world collectively. I hope that you find it as exceptional and inspiring as I do.

In this group, we implemented some new procedures for how we run the groups and manage participation. This included a new system for asking questions which turned out to be very effective. Participants preparing questions prior to each session meant that we covered some excellent topics in every Q&A session that was recorded and little time was wasted in addictive exchanges from the audience. We will further enhance these methods for questions in future groups to streamline the process even more.

We made some decisions about tolerance of unloving attitudes in those who register and attend our groups and decided to act (rather than continue to speak) regarding these issues. We have raised these issues many times before, but most people keep on ignoring what we are saying to them, and this is why we will in future be enforcing love and truth through our actions rather than by just speaking about the issues.

These decisions made before the second November 2016 group meant that we began to remove some participants from the second group. This was due to long standing resistance in each of these participants to specific injuries they have either towards Jesus and I as presenters or towards other members of the group.

Each person who was removed had been previously made aware of their harmful attitudes and emotions on many occasions by Jesus or I but was continuing to resist and justify their unloving condition. This meant that they were having a damaging effect on the group and so were asked to leave. Jesus and I both feel that these actions on our part were a positive step towards ensuring a higher level of love is maintained at our events.

Only one person who was removed demonstrated an immediate attitude change and some repentance for their behaviour, and they we allowed immediately back to the group as a result.

There were also a number of people who made very late cancellations of their bookings for this group without providing any reason. As late cancellations prevent the possibility for other people to have attended (and because we had previously advised registrants of the issue of love involved) we have banned these people from attendance at any of the future Assistance Groups in the “Education in Love” series. These people have demonstrated that they cannot be relied upon to be responsible about their booking and we have no desire to see their behaviour repeated.

There were one or two people who did have genuine issues that prevented their attendance (not just a lack of regard for their responsibility in holding a ticket) and these people were not prevented from attending future groups. We have enforced this new principle only for people who have displayed a lack of consideration for how their late bookings affect others and have chosen to be irresponsible with how they manage their planning and booking for our events.

We feel that often, because our events are free, people do not demonstrate even the smallest amount of regard for our own time and effort in preparation, or regard for other people who wish to attend the groups. Many people are ignoring our request to fully prepare by completing the pre-requisites for the events, and if they wish to cancel their seat at the event, they do not do so in the manner we have requested.

This demonstrates that these people are not interested in practicing what we are teaching, which includes demonstrating love for others. If a person cannot demonstrate love to another person who is giving their time for free, then it is highly unlikely they have a sincere desire to grow in love.

In future if we believe an attendee has any unloving attitudes regarding these matters, we will be preventing those attendees from either attending our events, or will remove them from our events if they have arrived at an event.

Our Thanks

Jesus and I would like to thank to our helper team during the group. These people were; Lena, Igor, Kelly, Cornelius, and Eloisa.

Thank you guys. Your efforts helped to ensure that things ran smoothly and we know that you gave a lot of your personal time to the event.

Thanks also to Bruce who transported some of our equipment to and from the venue.

We’d also like to give a special thank-you to Lena. Lena has worked incredibly hard this year, at times while when she was also dealing with stressful personal, emotional issues. She has always been diligent, thorough, helpful and pleasant to work with. Thank you Lena, we really appreciate you. We know that when we put something in your hands you will do it to the best of your ability, while also considering those who will come along after you and have jobs that are dependent upon you.

Eloisa & Kelly

Details about the Material Now Available

The “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” video, audio, outlines and PowerPoint are available via our website. For anyone wishing to have an offline copy of this data, please follow the directions on the download  or gifts pages of the website.

We are happy to receive hard disks and copy the new material for people. Please make sure you supply us with the correct information and large enough disk. These specifications can be found on the gifts page.

This new material is a gift from Jesus, Mary and Lena Shakhanov.

There are 66 new extended videos. Low resolution audio is available for download from our website. Video and high resolution audio is now available from the Divine Truth master synchronization server. All of the videos are also on YouTube.

There have been some new features added to the shared material that will assist you to access the information:

Outlines Package

The “Outlines” package for any group is a single PDF download file which contains all of the outlines for the group indicated in a single PDF file. All of the outlines have been edited by Jesus post production. They include the actual questions answered during each presentation with the timing and person asking the question listed.

Audio Package

The “Audio” package for any group is a single zipped download file which contains all of the audios for the group indicated in a single zip file. The single zip file contains many mp3 audio files which must be unzipped in order to be played.

Document Package

The “Document” package for any group is a single zipped download file which contains all of the individual outlines and presentations (Powerpoint 2016) for the group indicated in a single zip file. The single zip file contains many pdf and pptx files which must be unzipped in order to be accessed.

Many people will find it easier to download these packages rather than downloading the individual files from our website. These download packages are available from the Assistant Group Event Downloads page, or can be selected from a list on the What’s New page of the website for any new group that is added. The packages are a gift from Jesus.

Video

As with the videos in the “Developing My Loving Self” assistance group, these new videos all include chapter markers which can be used to navigate each video when it is viewed in QuickTime.

With the “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” videos we have also added the chapter markers into the description field while playing the video in YouTube. This enables the YouTube viewer to use these chapter timings to easily skip to particular sections in each of the presentations.

New Scheduling for “Education in Love” Assistance Groups

Because of the large work load involved in preparing, presenting, editing, producing and uploading our Assistance Groups, Jesus and I have decided to place plans for future groups on hold until Jesus has had a chance to rest.

It normally takes Jesus around 500 hours to prepare all of the documents, outlines, presentations and technology for a one month group course (2 groups at a time). Also, when he comes home from a group, he also spends another 400 hours immediately after each group finalizing the editing of the presentations, outlines, audio, chapter tags, video production, video compression, video upload to YouTube, website editing, and website upload, as well as maintaining backup copies of all of the data produced. Obviously the group presentations also take an additional one month of his time per group.

This has meant that he has spent over 2700 hours in preparation and post production on 2016 assistance groups in addition to the 3 months delivering almost all of the material. If you calculate this time, you can see that this means he has spent over 330 8 hour days since October 2015 until January 2017 preparing, delivering and post producing the assistance groups. Obviously this is in addition to all of his other regular jobs. He has had to work extremely long hours each day for the 16 month period to obtain the results.

All this work means that he needs a rest!

Those of you who have watched the previous Assistance Group presentations will know that we had already moved the groups initially scheduled for 2017 to 2018. We have now gone one step further and decided to only schedule the next group in the series until 6 months after the material for that group has been prepared.

This removes the “deadline” from our lives (in particular from Jesus’ life) and will mean that we can take our time to prepare material that we feel will be most beneficial to the world. Having the 6 month buffer between completion of the material preparation and the actual presentation has additional benefits including; allowing people wishing to attend the groups time to make plans, arrange their work life, make bookings and complete the group pre-requisites sufficiently. It also means that Jesus and I can be well rested before we deliver the material.

What this means for people wishing to attend our assistance groups:

All dates for assistance groups in the “Education in Love” series are now to be advised.

The dates listed on the EventBrite pages are tentative and used as a guideline only.

We now anticipate holding the “Understanding Sin & It’s Causes” group in November 2018 at the earliest. We may follow this with “Removing Sin & It’s Causes” in February and March of 2019 since we are writing the material for both groups at the same time.

Your current bookings

If you are currently registered for any of our future groups, these bookings will remain valid. You will have the chance to cancel the booking once we schedule the actual date if the new dates no longer suit you. We will confirm dates 6 months prior to commencing the group.

We are now maintaining waiting lists for each of the groups in the “‘Education in Love” series. This means that if we have a large amount of cancellations these spots can easily go to others who would like the opportunity to attend. However late cancellations (within a month prior to a confirmed event) will all still mean that these people will be banned from future events in the series for the obvious reason that if you are cancelling less than a month before the group begins, you obviously had little real intention to attend the group anyway, and are just taking a seat on the group because it is a free event.

Jesus and I feel that a person who wishes to be responsible for their lives and actions knows prior to one month before a week long event if they are realistically going to be able to attend. There are many logistical issues that a participant would need to arrange prior to one month before a week long event. Obviously if there are extreme circumstances that prevent attendance quite soon before the event, we understand this and would not take the same actions towards these people.

Recent Divine Truth Training Programme

In December and January, in addition to all of the normal production work required after the assistance groups in November 2016, Jesus and I coordinated a training programme for a group of people who have demonstrated over time that they have a sincere desire to assist in the work of sharing Divine Truth with the world.

This meant two exceptionally busy months for us after the November groups. Jesus and Lena in particular have managed and juggled a lot. Both were completing the extensive post production work necessary for “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” while simultaneously providing training post production training, and other training, to groups of people during the period.

This busy time has meant that Jesus has been working 7 day a week, mostly 12 hours a day for two months. (He usually begins work at 5am, and finishes normally around 5pm).

Participants in this training programme gained a lot of knowledge of how Jesus and Lena perform their jobs, what kind of knowledge and quality control is required, along with learning about other aspects involved in sharing Divine Truth.

The programme focussed on four main areas:

1. Attitude Required to Share Divine Truth in Harmony with God’s Laws

It is really impossible to share Divine Truth unless Truth is presented by a person wishing to be humble and to share a gift in harmony with God’s Laws, and the person desires to be loving while they share God’s Truth.

So our training in this area involved presentations and one on one feedback discussing attitudes and emotions involved in giving gifts. We focussed on the various ways our injured emotional condition can interfere with serving others and creating material.

2. Production of Divine Truth Materials

Lena and Jesus coordinated this training and were able teach a lot about various aspects of our current production process along with many of the technical and spiritual principles involved in the processes we use.

Participants learned about the equipment we currently use and had the opportunity to take part in practical exercises relating to video recording, editing and production, sound recording, editing and production, marker editing and production, equipment setup, pack-up and storage, and backup of data.

3. Environment Regeneration

Jesus gave presentations about the impact that our unloving behaviours and attitudes have upon the environment and some of the principles involved in land regeneration.

This was followed by practical days in which participants need to work hard physically and had the chance to complete some physical aspects of land regeneration. They also were able to see some of the projects and experiments in progress on our property. We did this to prepare people for what knowledge and effort would be required for participation in a God’s Way Learning Centre.

4. Introduction to Public Speaking

Jesus gave presentations about public speaking, and outlined to the participants the many aspects of good public speaking.

Participants then had the opportunity to prepare and present a short presentation, and to receive personal feedback on the aspects of presenting that they could improve upon. Learning about public speaking from Jesus is truly valuable. I also gave a short presentation of ways that addictions and unloving emotions can interfere with presenting material.

Programme Participants

Joining the programme were three international guests; Courtney from the USA, Nicky from England and David from Barbados. It was a pleasure to have them with us. In addition, we selected some people locally who have a passion for teaching and sharing Divine Truth in a loving and truthful manner. Each of these persons had previously demonstrated to us by their attitude that we could spend this time with them.

We plan to continue to offer training to people who wish to volunteer to assist in the delivery of Divine Truth. In future we will be offering a volunteer induction programme for these people, with the details about these programmes being listed below.

New Volunteer Induction Programme

Jesus and I are currently designing a volunteer induction programme. It is now mandatory for any person wishing to volunteer their time for Divine Truth or God’s Way to complete this programme prior to joining any of the teams in either organisation. Very few people will complete the induction successfully on their first attempt.

Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins and I will implement the programme.

This programme will not focus participants on developing specialized practical skills required for each team. Rather it will offer participants the opportunity to participate in a number of different activities, receive personal feedback about emotional issues relating to love and service, and allow them the chance to work on these issues in their own time.

This is not a programme that will involve a lot of presenting of Divine Truth material in the “teaching” style you are used to at our public events. Rather the programme will focus on giving each participant the opportunity to act, take initiative, follow instructions and complete practical tasks.

This structure allows those involved in giving further instruction from either Divine Truth or God’s Way to see if each person who is volunteering;

1.  truly has a sincere desire to serve
2. has the correct attitudes of service
3. has the correct understanding of Divine Truth principles
4. has a strong desire to bring their life into harmony with God’s definition of love
5. is desirous to correct any unloving behaviour and beliefs
6. is able to be educated God’s Way
7. is willing to perform any task, from cleaning toilets through to video production and presenting material to the public

In order to participate in this programme you must:

1. have a sincere desire to assist in the work of sharing Divine Truth worldwide
2. be available to attend and participate one day per week for a minimum of a three month period (in the Wilkesdale area)
3. be desirous of feedback regarding your emotions and condition in love, especially in relation to your being of service to others
4. be desirous and willing to work and on your emotions and condition in love in your own time throughout the duration of the programme
5. be aware that you will be removed from the programme if certain conditions or requirements are not met

Final acceptance of participants into the programme will decided by Jesus and I and we may cease any person’s involvement at any time if we feel that they are not sincere in meeting these criteria. This means that while to complete the programme involves 12 days over a three month period, a person may be removed from the programme at any time regardless of whether they have travelled from another location or live locally.

If you would like to take part in this programme it is essential that you consider you desire to meet the criteria listed above. If you feel that you do then please register your interest on our Eventbrite page here. Please note that by registering your interest you are indicating your intention to uphold the criteria.

Other Divine Truth Projects

While all this has been going on, we, along with members of our current volunteer team, have been working on a number of additional projects.

E-Books & Self-Print Book Automation

Visual Basic code is currently being written to save large amounts of time during the transcription of video files into self-print documents. Once the automation of the production of e-book and self-print documents is complete, large amounts of volunteer time will be saved in the production of new material for printing, and a large number of self-print and e-book documents will be added to the current list.

Search Engine Database

An offline database is currently being designed to integrate into the static website (both the offline and online copies). This will enable key word searches of many thousands of documents on our site, along with all of the nearly 2,000 hours of videos as well. This is a very time consuming project, and we hope to have this project completed before the next assistance groups in 2018.

Transcription

The transcription team volunteers are currently working on the transcriptions for all of the 2016 assistance group material. Most of these transcriptions will be added to the website in the coming months. Jesus & Mary would like to thank their volunteers and encourage you to donate to them if you are able to help them continue with their work.

Barb McNair who runs this team has also begun training another person in her role. Not only will this provide a back up person should Barb ever be unable to continue in her role, it also offers Barb the chance to have some assistance in managing quite a large team and the long list of talks that she currently does. It also creates the potential of possible expansion of this team into new areas and projects.

Fundamental Truths

Jesus and I are in the process of designing a “Fundamental Truths” series of videos which will provide a summary of God’s Fundamental Truths in a concise and easy to understand form. We hope to start recording some of these videos in the latter half of 2017. This information will be designed to provide all people listening, reading or watching Divine Truth material with clear, concise explanations of the fundamental truths that underpin God’s Way.

Assistance Group Q&A

Jesus and I will begin recording some studio sessions to answer questions related to the assistance group material that was presented in the three groups in 2016.

Due to our new system of collecting and answering questions during this last assistance group, we already have a long list questions to answer that relate to God’s Laws. However further questions about any of the three assistance groups already presented are always welcome. Please send questions to faq@divinetruth.com and label each email with the group and individual presentation that the questions relate to.

Spirit Discussions

Jesus and I still regularly communicate with people who used to live on earth, but who have now passed. Not all of these sessions are recorded, but those that are will be added to the website. Now that the post production work for the assistance groups and our short term Divine Truth training programme are both complete we hope to find some quiet time in the coming months to speak with spirits again. Please check the Spirit Discussions or the 2017 Downloads pages on our website for this new material.

Vimeo Videos

We’ve have decided to expand the avenues available for people to view Divine Truth video. So sometime in the future we will add all of our video material to Vimeo. This means that videos will then be available online both from Vimeo (add-free) and from YouTube. This is quite a process to undertake as it means loading over 1800 videos to a new account. I will let people know via the blog and our What’s New website page when this is finished.

God’s Way

Recently a group of people incorporated a new company “God’s Way”. This company has a very similar constitution to the previous God’s Way of Love organisation, and aims to work in the development, implementation and sharing of projects that demonstrate the potentials of God’s Way on earth. The directors of the company are Tristan Miller, Eloisa Lytton-Hitchins and Catherine Spence.

Jesus and I were made founding members of this company and while we won’t be involved in day to day operations of God’s Way or hold any directorial positions we will be advisors and mentors for the directors. We also hold the power to veto decisions if we can see that the directors and/or direction of the company is in disharmony with God’s Way.

Changes to the Production Team

We have made some recent changes to our production team. Lena has been formally appointed as the leader of the production team (though she has effectively been in this role for some time now).

Igor has been removed from the team completely to give him time to deal with some long standing issues that have been effecting how he works with the team.

This means our production team now only consists of Jesus and Lena. They are both managing and undertaking an enormous amount of tasks. We are always open to new people joining the team, but these people must meet our pre requisites for consideration which include the successful completion of the volunteer induction programme.

Personal Work

Mary

I usually take the time at the end of each update to share a little of my personal progression and reflections since my last post. I’m feeling lately however that it is difficult to quantify or adequately describe my emotions and changes in words.

However, in summary I would say that 2016 was well spent by me personally. I really turned a lot of my definitions of what was “selfish” on their head – e.g. spending time solely on my own emotions – and found that valuing my emotions and giving myself enough the time and compassion I needed in order to experience myself created changes that turned out to exponentially change my ability to share myself, give to others and generally be a nicer person. Being “selfish” (by my old definition) made more giving. So it was absolutely worth it and I continue to view the time I have to spend on strengthening my desire to experience all of me, not only as a gift, but also time that benefits others as well as myself.

At the start of 2016 I had some courage to face more truth about where I was really at at that time. My desire to deal with long standing issues that were causing me pain was really called into question. I’m pleased to say that after many years of simply trying to “punish” myself out of that place and into action, or to punish Jesus instead of myself; I actually started to do some things differently. And the results were good.

Sometime during the year I scrawled something in my journal by a psychologist named David Schnarch. He said:

I think trite dictums like “People always do the best they can at the time” trivializes goodness by taking it for granted, minimizing how hard it is to do the best you can, and blinding us to the ugliness of those who frequently don’t.

At the time, these words seemed to capture exactly what I was reflecting upon and looking at within myself. When considering this update, I remembered the quote and leafed back through my journals to find it. I thought it was worth a share.

God knows that each of us can cope with being overwhelmed, with encountering and embracing immense change in a short period of time, and also that we are capable of more than we currently think. This past year I asked myself many times, and continue to ask myself, “how much am I limiting my experience by saying I can’t cope“?, or as Schnarch would put it, telling myself “I’m doing the best I can” when really there is much more that could be done by me.

And when I notice people really “doing their best” and not making excuses for their injured state or justifying a lack of loving action, I feel the immense gift they offer me and the world. Jesus inspires me in this way every single day. But sometimes there are others I see acting and experimenting and using all that they have to do good and I feel gratitude for them as well. I don’t take it for granted.

Truly doing our best takes courage and to me it deserves to be honoured. Making excuses and calling that “our best” on the other hand is selfish. It harms others and as well as ourselves.

Jesus

Jesus simply needs time. In 2016 he has had no time to relax, take stock or feel anything deeply. Today he has completed the mammoth task of preparing, managing, delivering, producing, outputting and making public material and videos for three assistance groups in one year. I was just explaining to him my new policy that, instead of celebrating birthdays or other nominal and often meaningless holidays and season, I plan to implement new celebration times into our life.

For example when a person achieves a spiritual accomplishment, takes a new and significant action in harmony with love, or gives a gift of great value and importance (such as he just has). So this afternoon will involve a massage for him and perhaps a special pizza for dinner.

Until next time, with love,

Mary

We have just completed the presentation outlines for our next Assistance Group ‘Understanding God’s Loving Laws’.

Jesus has spent over 500 hours preparing this material and I am so impressed with what he has accomplished.

Even if you are not attending the group these outlines are amazing stand-alone content.

They are my recommend reading for anyone wanting to better their understanding of how the Universe works and to deepen their appreciation of what God has done for each of us.

If you wish to download all the outlines for your private reading they are available from the website in a handy zip file.  Or you can visit our  What’s New Page for more information.

If you would like to attend this Assistance Group and haven’t yet registered there are still a very limited number of spaces available in the first group. You can register here.

Due to the high demand for our next Assistance Group “Understanding God’s Loving Laws” I have now created waiting lists for all groups in our “Education in Love” series.

As a number of our groups are now fully booked this enables you to reserve any potential place that may become available in those groups if another person cancels.

To join a waiting list simply click on the ‘Register’ button for the group you wish to attend. If a space becomes available you will be notified via email and have a limited time to take the place before it is offered to the next person on the list.

If you know of others who are interested in attending but are not subscribed to this blog you may want to pass this message on.

Best wishes,

Mary