Last time I wrote was some time back, and a few things have changed in my life since then.

Since around August 2021 I have been regularly attending events held by Gods Way Ltd. These weekly events and activities provide opportunities for people who are interested in the teachings of Divine Truth, to have a go at putting principles of love into action in a practical way. Now, I have been listening to and interested in Divine Truth teachings since around 2010 – that’s almost one third of my life time! But in all that time of attempting to implement what I was hearing, nothing could compare to the past two or so years in which I have spent solid time in the company of Jesus and Mary (AJ Miller and Mary Luck) who are the teachers of Divine Truth.

I can’t help but believe it would be harder to sincerely grow when not spending regular time with people who place truth and love as their highest priority in their dealings with others.  The world is so opposed to truth these days, and our hearts so dulled to its message. Humanity’s highest priorities are the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure – at any cost. It would seem that the first thing we sacrifice in this quest is the seeking for universal truth. It is a fact that there is a truth about all things, regardless of how we feel about that truth. Receiving the gift of truth about my personal spiritual condition, and seeking counsel from the primary teachers of God’s Truth, has been so essential in growing my desire for a relationship with God. I’m eternally grateful for Jesus and Mary’s patience, kindness, wisdom and friendship over the years, and know that I am incredibly privileged to receive it.

Up until fairly recently (June 2023), I was maintaining my studies in Masters of Social Work, and working in a local community organisation as a child protection and family support practitioner. I really enjoyed aspects of my work with these families, particularly the candid and honest conversations about principles of love in action within the role of parenting. I found the more truthful and transparent I was, the more I enjoyed the work. Over time, however, I was beginning to feel worn down by the lack of real and lasting change that my role promoted. In fact, I once heard my team leader state “we’d be out of a job if people actually changed”. It then hit home that it remains the blind leading the blind in this industry which I’d hoped would be more about healing and less about funding and short-term fixes. However, I too felt like an injured person trying to help injured people, and its been an important part of my process to assess my motives for engaging this work (another blog post in itself).

While maintaining this employment during the week, I was continuing to attend God’s Way events on the weekends. The contrast between working with the two different organisations was stark; it was quite difficult to go back to work on the Mondays. I found that when volunteering for God’s Way, I was working in an environment that valued the discovery of universal truth, that required honesty, that allowed for and encouraged truthful emotional expression, and that placed love at the center of all its dealings. It’s unlike any work environment I’ve ever experienced. While this can be very challenging – many of my dearly held beliefs about myself and love began to unravel – I continued to feel drawn every week, like it was my favourite place to be in the world.

Over the past year or so in our after-lunch discussions, Jesus has been intensively teaching us about how to establish and grow our relationship with God, and how essential the development of a repentant heart is in this process. Now, I have been listening to Jesus teach about these concepts in Divine Truth video content for years, and have attended all the assistance groups. But it’s only been more recently that the true preciousness and value of these truths have started to take root within me.

The movings and workings of my desire for God seem to flow in a current that my intellect finds difficult to grasp, and to be honest I don’t fully understand the process that I am in.

To distil some elements, here are some major lessons for me from this last year that I am working on:

• Jesus has spent extensive time teaching us about the importance of wanting to know all about our sin – all those ways that we miss the mark of love. All the addictive and harmful things we have done and continue to do to avoid the experiencing of and taking responsibility for our own pain. All the ways we deny, minimize, shift the blame, distract from, and manipulate to avoid what is really inside of us, and to justify what we choose to do. I have a lot of entitlement – the feeling that “I shouldn’t have to feel my pain”. I have to WANT to know where and how I have, and continue to harm others and myself.
  

• We have also learnt about and experimented with the importance of connecting to our soul through engaging our soul faculties. These are things like singing, dancing, creating music and poetry, spending time in prayer, developing our mediumistic sense, creating art, reading spiritual material that opens us up to loving influence, and appreciating the beauty in nature and creation. Connecting to my soul faculties is so helpful in opening me up to my feeling soul. Its only from my soul that I can have a relationship with God, and its only from my soul that I can feel the emotions that this relationship will expose and evoke.
  

• If I want a growing relationship with God, I need to be willing to feel all the emotions inside of me related to where I have harmed others and myself. God wants to help me understand the reasons why I have done the wrong things I have done. God can help to take these reasons away so I don’t hurt anymore, but I need to be willing to feel about all the harmful things I’ve done while I’ve kept the pain inside me. I have to develop a repentant heart if I want to grow my relationship with God.
  

• I won’t receive personal feelings of love from God unless I ask for this love. The asking is painful and exposes all the reasons why I don’t want to ask. Asking for love feels scary; it feels like a risk and requires a state of humility. I feel unworthy of being loved and have spent a lifetime seeking out alternatives to avoid the devastation I feel about the real thing. But the truth is God wants to love me and give Her love to me.
  
  
• This path is about God. It’s not about emotions – these are a natural part of wanting to love and be loved by God. It’s not about how I have been harmed – it’s more important to see where I harm others so I can seek forgiveness from God. This path is about having a relationship with and receiving love and truth from God.

“To become more loving, you really have to receive some of God’s Love. But to receive some of God’s Love you have to feel the truth that it is available to you, and that God wants to give it to you, specifically. And that you’re not so bad that God would not want to give it to you. The only thing that would prevent it is you”
– Jesus

Experimenting with these lessons in (at times) a sincere way, along with receiving the gift of some pretty direct truth about my personal spiritual condition from Jesus (I will write more on this another time), has made for what somehow feels like an important time in my life. As a result of growing awareness of all the myriad ways I have been trying to avoid myself and my pain, I have made some changes. I have recently quit my job and my steady income, and quit my work as a foster carer. I now volunteer full time for Gods’ Way Ltd. organisation, and am privileged enough to be getting trained in the role of a manager by Mary, Eloisa and Jesus. This means I get to help manage volunteer days which is so much fun as I really like working with people. I have felt moments of happiness for the first time in my life as I spend my days working for a cause I feel passionate about, with people who I admire so much, and who I aspire to be like.

It’s also been an incredibly painful time, as some of the long-held addictive patterns which have dictated my life and seemingly all my decisions have been exposed. When I have allowed my growing faith in God to govern the choice to take actions in a new direction, I have discovered that this is where a lot of the pain has been all along. Like peeling layers of the onion, the process seems to be stripping back all of the techniques I have used and cultivated over a lifetime to get away from my painful feelings. Pretty dark feelings about myself, and my beliefs about love seem to form the core, however I am not there yet.  It’s my goal to continue to unravel all the ways I have harmed others and myself in my career of avoiding pain, and to have the courage to seek love and forgiveness from God so I can truly love others and find lasting happiness.

I want to have a simple heart for God and a pure faith in His goodness.

I feel gratitude for Jesus and Mary, as they have given so much of their life to sharing their love of God and God’s Way. Without them helping me in my relationship with God I don’t know where I would be, as my life was a train wreck. It still feels like a wreckage that I’m sifting through, but now some days I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

You can find information shared directly from the teachers of Divine Truth here: divinetruth.com and Divine Truth YouTube channel

You can check out the Gods Way blog, and God’s Way volunteer opportunities here: godsway.net

“A repentant heart appeals to God”
– Jesus