Tidings – December 2015
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In This Issue
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Chris Wood  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.
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Gaetan G. Charland  At the beginning of December 2015 I attended a new online study group that is designed mainly for young readers. This new group was initiated by Antonio Schefer and is facilitated by Jeffrey Wattles. It is international and uses a very efficient Web platform called Zoom to gather and unite the participants. This Web application allows participants to see each other if they so desire, and the facilitator can share his screen, documents, power point presentations and even videos. All the sessions are recorded so each participant may review the session at their leisure when it is made available online by Antonio Schefer.
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Katrina Glavan-Heise 
This historic, combined event of the Urantia Association of the United States (UAUS) 2016 National Conference and the Urantia Book Fellowship Summer Study Session 2016 will be held at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. We’re going to study Jesus as the Master Teacher – covering a wide variety of topics exploring his mastery and applying it to our lives. The organization of this event will be sponsored by the Lone Star Urantia Association (the Texas Local Association of UAUS) and the Education Committee of The Fellowship.
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Diane Labrecque 
Happy New Year to you! Here is our greeting video and special announcement for 2016 https://youtu.be/oU-pg04pa9s.
We want to wish you a warm welcome to The United Urantia Family Festival 2016! Celebrating Jesus’ Birthday Together in His Homeland!
The United Urantia Family is beyond pleased to announce our 2016 Family Festival Gathering from August 10-23, 2016 in “The Holy Land of Jesus” during Jesus’ Birthday on Sunday August 21 which will be celebrated in Nazareth itself – the land of his youth.
This pilgrimage will bring you to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mount of Olives, Bethany, Capernaum, Mount of Beatitudes, the Jordan River, Sepphoris, Scythopolis, Nazareth, Cana, Caesarea-Philippi, Mount Hermon as well as the Sea of Galilee!
Our theme is ‘Celebrating Jesus’ Birthday Together in His Homeland’ and for that special occasion, we will have a specially catered meal to mark this unique event while dining together at Nazareth Village amidst the decor of an authentic replica of a Nazareth village as in the days of Jesus.
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Line St Pierre  Toward Weaving the Tapestry of the Supreme
In an upper room at 533 Diversey Parkway (Urantia Foundation), ten women met to share themselves and their spiritual journeys. The facilitators of the retreat, The Daughters of God, led by Line St-Pierre, created and tested a new model for group sharing that worked very well and can be used with other groups.
This handful of women spoke of their inner lives and their relationship to the Urantia Revelation, and its meaning and calling for women. We explored how to help other women value themselves as Daughters of God, to be equally loved and equally endowed as men, and how to embody, nourish, and spread this eternal dance with God through service opportunities as women.
Following are comments from participants of the Daughters of God Retreat September 2015:
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James Woodward
 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.
As Urantia Association’s liaison to the Joint Parliament Committee, I had the pleasure of working with a solid group of our volunteers who were instrumental in the success of the overall effort. I also had the pleasure of working with both staff and volunteers of Urantia Foundation. Working with a large contingent of Fellowship staff and volunteers was also pleasurable, even as we faced some challenges related to organizational diversity. More importantly, the actual joining of hands for meaningful cooperation on shared goals should be counted as true and welcome progress within our community.
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Scott Brooks  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.
A reader who visits http://urantiastudygroup.org can specify a country, city, or postal code and will be presented with a list of study groups that meet his or her search criteria. It sounds simple enough, but the road to this simple interface was far from easy. Issues such as what constitutes a study group, how to fairly administer the directory, how to deal with inactive or errant study groups, and dozens of other thorny issues have been the challenge of the eight-person management team who has worked through these concerns.
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President
Chris Wood worked with the Fellowship’s Education Chair, David Kulieke, to finalize the 2016 co-sponsored UAUS-Fellowship Conference date and establish the planning team. He also worked with Presidents of the Fellowship and Urantia Foundation to facilitate cooperation for the Parliament of World Religions.
Vice President
Andres Ramirez continued to Chair the online continuous meeting of the Representative Council. He also met with readers and leaders in Guatemala, served as a member of the planning team for the 2016 Latin American Conference, and liaised with Wilson Leon on a Leadership Seminar for readers in Latin America.
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Urantia Association International has a new Events Calendar. Check it out at http://urantia-association.org/events-list. Upcoming events can now be viewed in a List or Calendar view.
Urantia Book reader events provide opportunities for students to gain a deeper understanding of the ideas and concepts presented in The Urantia Book and help to facilitate a personal commitment to the ideals of spiritual living. We hope you can make it along to some of these events and experience the joys of meeting and studying with fellow readers.
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