President’s Message December 2015
Happy New Year to you all! I hope you’ve had a nice festive season and have found some time to relax and reflect as we begin another year in our exciting and challenging life journeys.
I have spent the last several months rehabilitating my home in preparations for a move. I am correctly designated an amateur in the arena of home building and design so I cannot speak to the finer details of much of this work. I have noticed however how important it is to have the first base layer of any project level and true. While laying tiles on a wall we spent as much time properly setting the first placing of the first layer as we did placing all the layers above it. We knew any deviations on the first level would have to be adjusted for later on, so we made sure to do it right.
Hours of repetitive work gives you plenty of time to think, so I have been thinking about the ascension career we have before us. Let’s face it: we are living a crooked first layer. On a standard world there are programs in place to help us gain level experiences, and those first world lessons are corrected and made true on the mansion worlds. But we have been given a decimal planet rocked by rebellion and default. We have skipped standard mortal epochs and had two emergency revelations given to us. We have never been visited by a Magisterial Sons, our Bestowal Son was the creator of the local universe, and The Urantia Book provides us with a cosmological view of Deity generally imparted by the Trinity Teacher Sons.
Toward Weaving the Tapestry of the Supreme
In October, Urantia Association International joined with Urantia Foundation and The Urantia Book Fellowship in participating in the Parliament of the World’s Religion’s 2015 gathering in Salt Lake City. It was a great learning experience and benefit to many of our members while having dissemination value to a very large audience.
A project that began in 2009 to build a website where readers could find study groups has matured into an independent institution with broad sponsorship and a wide reach. Over 400 study groups representing 42 countries have chosen to list their study groups with the online search engine called The Urantia Book Study Group Directory (UBSGD). Each month nearly 1,000 people visit the site. The site serves pages in four languages and there are translations underway for additional languages.