2007-01-14-Fifteen Year Group Anniversary

Session

Opening prayer

Kenneth: This is an open prayer this evening. Anybody that has a word to say, please say it.

Our friends, our neighbors, our guides, our teachers, our lovers, we welcome you here this evening. We feel honored to stand in your presence. May the next year bring light and joy and happiness, peace and harmony in our lives.

Virginia: May God help us to do our part to reach those goals stated.

Nancy: As I was listening, trying to think of what it is that I am experiencing… it is a very large sense of inadequacy and a sense of not having held up my part of this mission. I recognize that we have been blessed with incredible resources, an amazing gift, amazing knowledge and insight. And I wonder for the… I don’t know how many times… a large number of times… why my resistance to accepting the service, this assistance, remains high. It is much higher than when we started this. I personally would like to melt this resistance through whatever is needed, that I might once again be able to—with enthusiasm and joy—reach out and marvel in the process. I ask this personally in the name of Christ Michael, our Father/Brother, and Mother Nebadonia.

LaReen: Our Divine Parents, I wish to thank you for this university, this campus and each and every teacher for their love of You, their love of us and for our fellow students who have graduated to another university that I feel are with us here tonight. Thank you for each and every time we meet and for all the tools you have given us.

Bob D.: I feel the presence of spirit. And I feel that it is a blessing in my life now for fifteen years to even be able to perceive the presence of spirit whether by sensation or in thought. Thank you for the blessings you have brought to us from the one Source who we all strive to know and love.

Pam: I am thankful that the fear is gone, the fear of approaching You… It is gone. How amazing. And I thank You for the beginning of the new year and for new opportunities and new growth.

Kenneth: Our God, our Father, we Your children, stand here with love in our hearts for You. We open our hearts and we join with those in attendance to us this evening, present, seen and unseen. We ask that this love that we share with one another, this joy, this happiness that we share with You, be expanded and encompass the world. That all that can receive, will receive, now and in the future, accept Your wonderful light. In Your name Father we gather. Amen.

DANIEL: Greetings, my dear friends, I am Daniel, your first spokesperson. It is my pleasure this evening as it was then (1992) to extend my love to you through this service that I am blessed to participate in. Dear friends, my first lessons were on growth and change. These concepts remain paramount and intertwined. If you are unwilling to allow for change you cannot grow, and growth does not happen without change.

While you all know and embrace this in your beings, there have been those areas, issues, topics, that you have desired to fence-off and declare off-limits, unapproachable, immovable. And yet you are each individually beginning even to address these fenced-off, unseen, unknown, aspects of your beings. This is the hard work…to trust our Great Parent enough to reveal these aspects to one’s self, so that they may be given to the Father.

My dear friends, this is not a typical anniversary greeting. And yet I desire to take advantage of this opportunity to meet with you, to greet you, and to express also my admiration for the distances you have come, for the steps you are continuing to take. For some, the early years were easy years because of the newness of the process and the information. You here tonight have persevered, have continued to seek, have taken up Michael’s challenge, request, to bear His yoke and drink from His cup.

You have known great joy, you have known deep faith struggles, and here you are tonight fifteen Urantia years later. Congratulations, my friends, you do well. I have asked PamElla to restate the emphasis of that phrase: Congratulation, my friends, you do well! I am most pleased to be associated with such stalwart, steady, and faithful, yes! faithful! followers of Michael. The world is a better place for your participation in it, and you have benefitted greatly from your seeking of the Source.

My friends, I give the introduction only. However, in remembering the early years, I wish to also remind you of the first tenet of foundation building and in keeping the foundation for your growing edifice strong: Sincere seeking of the First Source and Center, time spent in quiet turning in, seeking the quiet of your heart. You have learned over the years that this can be found in the midst of noise and chaos. The stillness, the quiet, is the place in your heart where you commune with the Father, Mother, the First Source and Center. Make this your moment-by-moment habit, and the challenges of living, the natural experiences of life, are much more easily overcome. What can seem like mountains become but gentle bumps in the road.

I extend my love and pass the microphone.

Lesson

AARON: Greetings, my friends, I am Aaron. It is my pleasure and honor to begin another year with you. As we look behind and have reminisced about the past and some of the circumstances which have brought you here, and as you look ahead to what the year will bring, I would like to offer a couple of thoughts of the present.

If the primary message or realization stemming from the current revelatory phase is the importance of developing personal spiritual experience with your Creator, hoping to broaden the realization of the fellowship of all creatures as part of one family, it stands to reason that this is not intended to be a singular affair. Yes, primarily your increasing comprehension of spiritual realities is an individual journey, but the flow of our mission, on a more universal scale, is intended to be intergenerational and cross-generational. What this might symbolize to you then, is how you can increasingly build bridges with others, sharing the importance of personal experience with God.

One of your methods might be to tell them about this mission, bring them to a meeting. Another might be to hand someone a Urantia book, giving them a summary and wishing them luck in understanding it. Another might be simply day-by-day contact with a consistent portrayal of connection with higher reality through your interactions and behaviors. There are many methods; some may have higher degrees of merit than others. But we encourage you to explore ways that you can be a herald for the future ages where personal spiritual experience and connection with the higher forces of the universe is a common everyday reality. It is the message rather than the method that is of primary importance. So we would ask you to contemplate this year, in the weeks to come, in the months to come, how you can begin ways, whether on a group level or an individual level, to build those bridges in passing along the recognition of this message.

The stillness is a technique. Talking with God as you go through your daily ups and downs is a technique. Service to others in an unselfish way also is a technique. You may say that these are also reflections of your higher impulses, but they are also the manners in which you can deepen your perception of spiritual reality. We leave it to you to be creative in choosing your methods, but we would like to underscore the importance of the primary message for you tonight: Personal experience with God and the increasing recognition of the fellowship of all beings as part of one family. We ask you to look at the insights we have shared tonight and to begin to contemplate how you might become more effective in presenting this for others as well as to deepen your own realization.

There will be another speaker this evening, so I will withdraw and allow them to speak.

Iruka: Good evening my dear friends, it is Iruka. I am overjoyed to be here with you tonight on your anniversary and as you begin a new year. In your culture you have a tradition of creating or at least speaking about New Years’ resolutions. It would be easy for me to suggest what spiritual resolutions you could come up with, you could make your goal. But that is not for me to tell you. This is something between you and Creator Father. Of course that means communicating with the Great Spirit Parent yourself. So I am not giving you any easy answers—a one through five-step program. No, it is on your shoulders. It is up to you to find this joy of communicating, this privilege that has been afforded to you to speak directly to our Most High Creator. There need not be any intermediary. And I certainly stand here pointing towards our Creator, helping you along the path. Yes, it is my joy to do that, encouraging you when you are hesitant, when you are unsure, when you would rather be doing something else. But I want to assure you there is no greater joy, greater satisfaction, than standing before the Creator and developing that relationship that is yours, totally unique. I can hold your hand along the path and I can point the direction and say that’s the way. But ultimately it is for you to walk that path. You are not alone, but the relationship that you develop is yours to create, to enjoy. It is a new year, and what better time could there be than now to begin that.

I again say congratulations on this anniversary. It is a wonderful milestone; it is but a stepping stone. Good evening my friends.

Dialogue

MINEARSIA: I am Minearsia, instructor in residence, delighted to be a part of your lives and to be with you here tonight to acknowledge the completion of another year, fifteen years now, under the tutelage of Daniel and your many other teachers and the greater teaching corp. My thought I wish to share tonight is small. I wish to remind you that while fifteen years is significant to your current lives, it is very brief in the overall reach of eternity. I wish to remind you to keep up the good work, but do not expect that in fifteen years you can achieve that which might take, for example, five thousand.

Virginia: Thanks a lot.

MINEARSIA: My dear friends, this statement is not made to belittle or diminish what you do, but rather to ask you to be gentle with yourselves, gentle with Christ Michael, and gentle with the Father in His plan, Her plan.

To those of you for whom this admonition fits, please consider it. Focus on your achievements, not your failings. Focus on how far you have come, not how far you have to go. Set realistic goals, and then take the necessary steps to accomplish those goals one day at a time, one moment at a time, one year at a time. In this way you will surly stand in the presence of our Father, First Source and Center.

And so I ask you tonight to allow Michael’s peace to permeate your being, to allow hope to ignite your experience, to shine forth the good news that Michael brought to this planet over two thousand years ago and the good news that you all share of the possibility of a personal experience with God our Father, God our Mother, and God the Actor, the Becoming.

And now, friends, the evening is late for those of you with schedules to keep, distances to drive and so forth. We do wish to allow the opportunity for questions or interaction before we close this meeting if any of you so desire or if we can provide a service in this manner.

Virginia: I would just say thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I don’t know whether or not I believe them.

MINEARSIA: My daughter, take them to heart, our gift to you.

Closing Prayer

(group is silent)

Please continue with your custom. Stand and hold hands. Another will bring this time together to a close. As you prepare, allow yourself to feel the flow of love of which you are a part, of which this circle is a part. I leave you my love. Farewell.

Virginia: I would paraphrase what Ruth said to her mother in-law regarding: "treat us not to leave you, help us to not fall away but to follow you, so that one day we might reach you with a clean heart and a pure spirit. Amen