Category Archives: Courage

On Fear, Quick-Fixes & Standing by What We Believe

Recently someone forwarded me the following clip:

My first thought was – why send me this?

What is shared in this clip is one very basic truth that is discussed and built upon in far more depth and detail in recordings of events that I was present at and can be viewed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here… in fact there are over 1200 hours of video on our youtube channel that bring a far broader context and meaning to the importance of emotions and discuss how they relate to the human soul, God, absolute truth, eternal growth, physical healing, and much, much more.

So this video is not news to me. The people involved are discussing something that I discovered a long time ago.

So why send it?

I can actually think of about four reasons why a person who knows me might send me this clip.

Below are two.

These are also reasons why I think this video will likely be forwarded in unsolicited emails and shared on Facebook feeds by many people who I know and who come to our seminars.

1. The Dynamics of Living in Fear

I often hear excitement from people we know when an element of Universal Truth that we teach becomes more widely known and discussed.

I know that many would like to claim that this is an innocent joy that arises because of knowledge and feeling that more truth in the world might mean improvement in the lives of others. But mostly I don’t believe it.

Greater than their love for humanity, people who attend our talks often have a fear of being judged and considered outside of the mainstream.

When some element of what is already shared in depth via Divine Truth becomes more ‘acceptable’ to ‘normal’ society it can help those of us who fear this kind of judgment to feel less afraid. ‘Excitement’ can actually be because fear is momentarily avoided, and the addiction to popular acceptance seems like it might be able to be met while still loving Divine Truth after all.

In the six years since I met AJ again I haven’t met a single person who was drawn to him because of his (our) identity claims. Most people listen in spite of the fact that the guy making so much sense is also saying that he is Jesus.

No one worships him. In fact, the reality of how Jesus is treated is so starkly in contrast to this idea that the thought of people blindly adoring him makes me laugh out loud. Most people want to argue with him, to doubt him and delay engaging their hearts with what he teaches for as long as possible.

Nevertheless they still attend and if you ask them why – and I have asked a great many – resoundingly they all say that it’s because what is spoken is the most meaningful spiritual truth that they have ever encountered. They say it satisfies questions they have asked for a lifetime.

Yet I know for a fact that many, indeed most, of these same people don’t talk about their excitement for what they have heard from us with others. They don’t mention that they know us when others speak of us publicly, and most certainly don’t forward our youtube clips.

In fact, people I have known for years, who have asked us to their homes, shared their deepest fears and sought advice from us, still wish to hide from everyone in their lives that they know us at all.

Jesus and I currently exist outside what the mainstream accepts as normal. While many people like what we have to say they still live in fear of themselves being ostracised by others. This means that they often ostracise us. But even more sadly for me is to know that while in the company of others they often diminish or minimise their passion for God and don’t speak freely about what they believe. Instead they speak in terms that they think will be less contentious to others. They do this rather than sharing the broader context of God’s Love, God’s Laws and the human soul and how that has made so much more sense than examining only the fragments that the world currently presents and accepts.

And when someone more ‘publicly acceptable’ than Jesus or I states even a small element of the extensive truth that we have been teaching for 2000 years then the sudden rush to share their message is not always altruistic or noble. It is often led by the desire to have someone else to pave the way, to ‘take the heat’ and to make things easier to live and believe Divine Truth freely without fear of attack or criticism.

Coming from a state of fear, it’s tempting to search for ways to present Divine Truths in a form that isn’t so challenging to others.

But Divine Truth by its inherent qualities and existence challenges all error. So, in order for lasting change to happen challenges can and must occur both within us and around us. The fears in you, and in me, the false beliefs the whole world over, are all going to need to be exposed and dealt with. There is no quick-fix or magic bullet that will get us over that line.

2. The Quick-Fix Phenomenon

The second reason I believe that, at least in the short term, that the E-motion clip will get more hits than most of those on our youtube channel is that most of western society has a diminishing attention span. We are also becoming increasingly comfortable with, and even demanding for, things that require little effort on our part in order for us to feel better.

In this fast paced, globalised, fast food, iPad, facebook world that we live in – that is all geared towards instant gratification – we love sound bites. We love small morsels that we can digest without much mastication, or thought. We want things that are easy.

We live on a media staple of programmes in which someone has already made up their mind about a topic and simply tells us what to think. Journalism, once a profession filled with idealists engaged in the quest to discover and expose truth, has become increasingly dominated by big industry concerns about profit and driven by the need to please a consumer that no longer desires to be challenged. Journalists I meet seem jaded and cynical about the world around them.

The 10 minute grab used in the E-motion promo uses devices we are all by now comfortable with and welcoming of. I suspect that the longer movie will be in keeping with the format of the clip – present a simple idea, expound a little, move on to the next idea. Colour, movement, nicely packaged portions to digest.

While this format can be a handy way to expose people to new ideas, it lacks capacity to delve deep into topics. And sadly, this is what we all seem to want.

We are so geared towards instant gratification that we feel it’s an imposition to attend for longer than brief periods. We want to be able to know without learning. Our attention span is quickly diminishing through conditioning of a world that’s news cycle is so ever changing that we hardly have time to process one great crisis before another is upon us. We are loosing the will to think deeply, to reflect, to consider and to engage in processes that require reasoning and learning. Ironically we are loosing the desire to do exactly what this video is suggesting we need to do – to feel deeply and to change emotionally.

By and large the trend in the west is that more and more people want change to happen in neatly packaged parcels that they can control and direct. Before we even begin, most of us want to be told what to do, for how long, what to expect and what we get as a result of doing it. Frankly, we are becoming dummies limiting our lives and our experience simply because we want to avoid fear and discomfort. When I think of great explorers and discoverers that have changed the face of how we live and the comforts we enjoy today, I know that they did not approach life in this way.

In fact the greatest person I have ever known – across two centuries and much experience –is one who’s spirit of exploration, dedication, patience, humility and desire has led him to discover the Great Truths of God and how we may each encounter them. He did not achieve this quickly; he did not purchase the pre-packaged all expenses paid deal. He set out on a voyage of discovery, without all the answers, without Google and without a therapist.

By contrast to popular mainstream culture, Divine Truth tells us that we are responsible for who we are what we do; that healing is first and foremost in our hands and we can place it in hands of God but only if we will it. It calls us to search ourselves in honesty and humility and to summon our deepest desires and longings in order to know our Creator. It doesn’t give shortcuts.

It does give solid, practical answers that aren’t always easy to hear or to implement when we live steeped in addiction and the desire for immediate gratification. And I happen to know the guy who teaches it best.

He has dedicated his life to sharing these Truths with anyone who will listen, and often in very harsh conditions. I am proud of him and I want the world to know it.

Watching any two hour presentation on the Divine Truth channel is sure to challenge you on one or more levels. It won’t offer you a two minute technique, a tapping exercise or rote prayer with which to engage your Creator or commence your healing. And really, thank goodness for that. Surely our Loving Parent wants more of us than an intellectual recitation or a 5 minutes practice per day. Surely in Her Infinite Love she would want to know our hearts, what pains us, what we dream of and what makes us come alive? She would want us to engage our desire and longings in our relationship with Her. Anyone on Earth who wants to truly know us wants those things from us.

And surely a Parent who really wants the best for us wouldn’t want us to settle into addictions when we could have real joy. He wouldn’t want us to lack ethics and morality, a state that harms not only us but those around us, all for the sake of short-term comfort. He wouldn’t want us to ignore a challenge and limit our lives just because of something as illusory as fear.

Walking the Way means facing our fears, embracing challenges and giving up our addictions to minimum effort for maximum comfort. While I believe that a growing focus on emotional healing would do much to assist the world, I know that it will take more than that for the world and us as individuals to be authentically and lastingly happy.

What is required is humility to new ideas, a love of truth, and a loyalty to ethics and morality no matter the threat or fear we encounter.

Postscript:

In this post I speak to you not as someone who is free of fear or who is without the desire for a quick-fix solution to my problems.

But I am someone whom, from lived experience, understands the temptation to want to have others share the journey with Divine Truth so as to not feel so alone and weird. In fact I really would have preferred the entire world to join me in acceptance of who I am and what I believe before I fully committed my heart and life to it.

I long ago left the world of facebook but freely admit that while still a user myself, I was much more likely to share snippets of what I knew to be truth if they were presented by someone other than Jesus. While I knew that Divine Truth was the answer to ending war, poverty, starvation, illness, abuse and every type of suffering I had ever encountered or heard about, I lived in fear about how other people would judge me if they knew everything that I believed. I also thought that I should be a ‘special case’ as my fears were ‘bigger’ since they involved, not only what I believed, but who I am.

Over the years, many times, I have had to face the decision to stand by what I knew to be true or to run and hide in fear. I didn’t always make the moral choice. But sometimes I have and it’s been very, very good for me (smile).

Know this, the fear of being judged, the fear of negative public opinion won’t be gone from you just because Divine Truth becomes more acceptable. Our fears reside within our souls and their existence is not dependent on what happens around us.

Challenging fears and releasing them is a process under our sole and direct control, and even if external acceptances of Divine Truth change, the fear of being ridiculed will not be gone from us until we engage our will to make it so.

I also think that the dynamic I outlined in the post poses some interesting ethical questions to us all:

When new people in the mainstream begin to present other small elements of Divine Truth in a way that society finds less confronting than a man called Jesus stating it, will we be sharing and forwarding that on in all eagerness?

Or will we state that we’d heard it long before from an unassuming Australian guy who practises what he preaches – Truth, Humility & Love – even in the face of attack and condemnation?

Another thing I know for sure is that no truth is easily accepted by the majority if it’s very existence challenges large fears and addictions within that same group.

The world is pretty messed up right now and in order for it to change someone, or some people, will have to show up and disagree with what everyone accepts as normal.

That is my passion, to surrender to what I believe in so fully that no fear will impede my journey, and no threat will be enough to silence my voice or halt my steps towards living an example that demonstrates the power of God to heal all things.

Love,

Mary

Obit for Love

In December of 2008 I met AJ in passing. He was at my parents’ home to give an informal talk and we hardly spoke a few words to each other. I didn’t really listen to much of his talk and after he left I didn’t give any of it much conscious thought but our meeting sparked some deeper process in me – an awakening of a deep spiritual longing that, in my desperate, decades-long, quest to numb my pain, I had also kept anesthetized.

A week after he left our home, I bought my first official journal. One morning I got up and opened it. This was the first entry I wrote.

There is a feeling of disillusionment inside of me – the world is full of damaged souls – causing hurt and pain. Cynical and harsh no-one is prepared to believe in anything true and beautiful, these things must surely be trodden on, tainted and weak. The power of love seems lost – a fools belief in the face of hatred and hardship.

I mourn the loss of Love, the death of beauty and hope.

I have shut it down, closed it off, left it outside in the cold to suffer and struggle.

Love – I’m sorry I left you – abandoned you.

Can I welcome you back in? Am I strong enough to support you? To believe in you in such dark, dark days? Can truth and beauty really touch all of the ugliness?

Or are we destined to carry on without you? To leave you to suffer and starve – as we carry on using vices and strife to grapple with life?

Should we become hard with a bitter taste in our mouth – striking out in anger, taking power in order to survive?

And as we struggle and fight to take our place in the world – in our corner that we have claimed – tell me who will warm that corner that we huddle in? As we shiver together – our families, our clans, our gangs – in the tiny spaces we have taken with iron fists and fear – then will we miss you?

Will we remember Love left outside in the cold and damp?

Love – we will miss her then and say SHE has forsaken US. Why doesn’t she come? We will miss her warmth and beauty and wonder why she left us – how could she be so cruel?

And so you see the world will end – tiny groups of tortured souls, huddling in darkened corners, feeding off fears and victim hood.

No-one will remember Love.

She will die and so will we all. We will descend into eternal blackness – screaming with pain, dried up with sorrow, skin tight on our bones, our teeth sharpened by years of bitter struggle and anger.

And it will all have been for nothing.

Simply we aren’t strong enough to stand for Love. WE have left HER – forsaken HER. We have seen her as weakness – to be avoided and laughed upon as a silly child’s thing, a trick of the light, pathetic and simple, to be scorned and left to die alone.

Am I the only one who remembers Love? Me, who has shut her out and treated her so unkindly. Do I have the courage to open the door? – For I know she waits just outside, cold and alone and crying for all of the madness she sees.

In fact I want to go to her outside – and cry. I see what she mourns. The crazy fucked-up world so lost that it believes it is ‘found’. All of the humanity so arrogant to think it can ‘go it alone’ without Love. Humankind, that to exist amidst the madness, has itself gone insane.

I want to grieve with Love, to join her outside and cry an ocean of regret and disillusionment.

We can sit by the door,

on the step,

in the wind and rain

and feel forsaken together.

For the only alternative is to ask her in – to give her tea in the sitting room and be willing to stand for her, to ask her to warm my heart, to ask for strength to face the insanity, to heal the pain and then to be regarded as insane myself.

I don’t feel strong enough – to face the darkness –

Will Love be there to take my hand? Can I trust her? Will she forgive me for leaving her, laughing at her? Can she really warm the shady corners of the world – where vultures circle and victims hold themselves together in packs ready to fight threats and murder?

How can the world change?

I want to sit with Love on the cold front step and mourn the death of Love.

In the past four years I’ve learned that in order to open to love again I have to be brave enough to feel all of the sharp and painful parts inside of me that are hurt and disillusioned about life, relationships and the world that we live in.

So this week on the blog is a journey of reflection on love.

One of my biggest fears is still opening to and trusting love again. There is a huge dam of grief inside that the healing warmth of love threatens to burst open. So I’m writing on a mission – to foster courage and trust in this process.

Join me if you desire.

If you write a blog and want to share your reflections on love in response to each post, link your url in the comments section. Or if you just want to share reflections in the comments, you are most welcome here friend.

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Arvarna mentioned this song to me a long time ago. Its so haunting and beautiful. Sometimes I hunger for love, other times my heart trembles at the thought, this song always moves me.

Brave.

The bears are sleeping at Vilhemina, hunkered down, preparing to raise cubs in the spring.

We arrive at night by propeller plane.

It is snowing as we cross the tarmac and I am grateful for the jacked loaned to me by one of our welcoming committee in Gothenburg this morning. We have travelled all day; on three separate flights, joined by friends along the way.

Anna & Anna join us in Gothenburg

Joy & Rita join us for the final flight from Stokholm to Vilhemina

on the tarmac

Eva meets us and bundles us into a warm, waiting car to cover the distance remaining to her and her husband, Per’s, new home.

We wind our way along a road lined with birch and fur trees, their branches bravely holding up under the 40cm of snow that has fallen in the past week. Ice and softly falling snowflakes reflect the light from the headlights as Eva drives us north.

Already I know that we have landed in a wonderful place, so strange, striking and crazy beautiful.

It takes us 40 minutes to drive to ‘Heligfjall’, which means holy mountain in the language of the indigenous Sami people. A people who believe, that no land is ever owned except by God.

Heligfjall lies in south Lapland, just a few hundred kilometres shy of the arctic circle. It is the place that our friends, Eva and Per, have chosen to make their new home and to create a place of learning and growth they hope it will become a Gods Way of Love Learning Centre.

We turn into an arching driveway that just last week bore the prints of a passing lynx, and the small 2WD car fails at this final leg. So we walk to the house in the snow, dry, white and thick below our boots, and still falling gently upon our heads and faces. Per greets us with a warm hug and we pass into the kitchen complete with combustion stove and candles burning.

We have been up since 4 am and by now are bone tired but still we sit in the cosy kitchen for hours more, till past midnight, listening to the story of this couple and their adventures and turmoils of the past few months.

Per has spent his life a company man, a successful engineer working for a large car company. He has been accustomed to working amongst men and machines, to variables, which are concrete, controllable and fixable.

He tells us of a decision he made to finally remove the armour around his heart and soul, and to and heal emotionally. Within a few short months, this man with a Masters degree in Science but no experience in classrooms, now finds himself the Principle of a local high school. In this tiny outpost of community, where the local industries are fishing and hunting and teen pregnancy, unemployment and alcohol abuse are common, Per has challenged himself to become a leader and a creator of new possibilities for the youth that frequent his new office. His days are now filled with different, less controllable variables and he will freely admit that the armour is challenged and falling away.

As Per tells his story I can feel what a gift this tiny school has been given. These people, this community has engaged his heart. What better gift to offer youth but a leader who is humble? A person who listens not just to the nuts and bolts of their stories but one who feels the nuance and hardship and wants to work with them to find new solutions.

And we all reflect on the perfection of Gods Laws that always bring us exactly what we need in order to heal and serve well. The gifts are ever present and if we only trust in a Wisdom far greater than our own, not only do we receive but so often the opportunity to give our own gifts is created.

My heart nearly bursts at the beauty and power of God to alter our souls towards joy if only that we follow our hearts in humility and a desire to love. But such journeys commence with sensations that feel like risk, and loss, and it is too easy to panic and clamour to know what next strange thing may lie just over the horizon. Courage is needed to take our first steps outside of what is comfortable and familiar, and I believe we will be called upon again and again to dig deep, and breathe hard and have faith. We may quake in our boots many times if we are to stay the course.

We finish our tea and smile at our friends. These people are brave – and it inspires me.

Eva and Per will tell you such things are not comfortable or easy. But their growth is evident and adventure hangs like an excited newcomer in the air at Heligfjall.

The Gifts of Truth

I’ve been feeling inspired lately, recognising that

Change is possible

There is a quiet joy and celebration in me, as I notice “Wow, I’m different”

These are little changes, but they inspire me forward.

I am steeped in the quiet knowledge that

Courage is required if we are to truly Change

This quiet mantra is with me now. Not as an overbearing demand “You must change! You must grow!”

The cries of “If you don’t grow you aren’t worthy, if you’re not perfect noone will love you!” that have plagued me in the past are gone or fading.

Instead there is desire to change and grow. A deeper knowledge of Grace. And an understanding that

When we live in fear we loose sight of change

When we substitute fear for Truth in our lives, fear becomes our ruler, it restricts us, controls us, and limits our capacity to change. In fact fear screams at us “It’s not possible!” and without Truth we have nothing to combat the command.

I can see that the changes in me are only happening because I am growing a sincere desire to not only receive Truth about all things in my life, but also the willingness to live in Truth and to honour Truth at all times. This is where the courage bit really comes in!

But as always, when we step into more harmony with God, there are gifts.

I am finding, through my living and not just my thinking, that

One of the gifts of Truth is trust.

When a person is loyal to Truth – always and no-matter-what – the people around them can trust their word and their actions. A gift is born – the gift of closer bonds and deeper intimacy.

When I have the courage to live in Truth I literally feel the warms of God’s Love and Laws supporting me. Our relationship – the magic connection between me and my Creator (how humbling it is) – can truly commence. It is enabled by my willingness to acknowledge that it is He, not I, that controls how this Universe and the course of my life runs.

Fear, that harsh tyrant, would have me believe that I must control and protect every aspect of myself and my life, or all will be lost. This position places me, not only in opposition with all of the Loving Laws that God has created to guide me home to Him and who I truly am. But it also, in its arrogance, says that I must be the creator of who I am and what I become.

The Truth is something far more magical.

The Truth is that a Greater Hand than mine created me. He imprinted within me the design for a creature that I, in my current fear bound state, cannot even imagine. I must only surrender to His Love and Laws to enable the more beautiful, creative and loving creature to be born.

Or it would be truer to say

I allow myself to be born again.

All of this grows, this trust in my Father, the deeper intimacy in my relationships, through my honour of Truth and thus my refusal to accept fear as my ruler.

Trust can only grow as we live in Truth.

In this season when there is such an emphasis on ‘gifts’ my wish for you, dear reader, is that you may begin to receive the gifts that Truth can bring to your life and to know that all things are possible with the One Who Loves the most.