May Newsletter
Hi guys, Perry here. Welcome to our first monthly newsletter. We are excited to produce this for a number of reasons. We feel it will be really great to…
- Let you guys know about the current/future work we are doing etc.
- Help us reflect and record all the things we have been up to over the months and years.
- Sharing how we are spending your donations.
So the month of May was a very exciting month indeed. Mainly because it was the month in which we created our first ever ‘Divine Truth seminar’.
Towards the end of April, I got to meet ‘Pete’ Nicky’s cousin. He stayed with us for about a week. And in that week we were all getting very excited about DT (as usual really). We had had conversations in the past about giving seminars etc. but for ‘some reason’ we never got around to it. Then one night, Nicky announced something along the lines of ‘Guys I’ve had a realisation, I haven’t been spending much of the donations that I have received from people, and I feel that God would love it if I spend it on more Divine Truth related things (apart from website maintenance/subscription costs), and so, I want to use the money to spend on a seminar’. Pete and I agreed immediately, and before we knew it, we gave ourselves a month to arrange it all! Also whilst Pete was with us, he and Nicky created a video interview and discussed ‘Suppressing painful emotions with physical and emotional addictions’ (click to watch)
Organising the seminar helped us feel much more appreciation than we already had for all the preparation work that Jesus and Mary do in regards to creating seminars for us all. Firstly we needed a venue, secondly we needed more tech, and thirdly we needed to plan what it was we wanted to present. We spent quite a bit of time thinking and mind mapping what we would like to create in terms of topics, and then we put a lot of thought in how best to present the material.
Once we had figured out ‘What’ and ‘How’ we wanted to present, the next step was to think about recording it for future educational resources. This is when we got to really appreciate even further the work Lena and Igor do to record and produce Jesus and Mary’s material for our benefit.
I agreed to find a location for the seminar and then sent out invites to people who had already expressed a desire to attend a seminar if we were to create one. I also sent the invites to people (via text/email) who had expressed a desire to learn about Divine Truth. We were careful to not ‘market’ ourselves, as we wanted to organise the event in harmony with the laws of Love – A few months ago Mary shared an amazing post on the forum concerning the considerations between Marketing VS advertising which we took the time to reflect upon and understand. We were also really excited to watch the law of attraction take place and see who would attend without the ‘formal invite’. 12 people arrived in total (excluding us 3). Most had been to Jesus and Mary’s seminars before, a few were our friends or relations who had an interest in DT, and there was one really cool chap who none of us had met before called Tom, which was great!
In terms of tech and recording equipment, we needed more! So I’d like to give a huge thank you to Nicky for wanting to spend the funds he had received from donations to buy some new high quality gear. I will outline below the expenditures so that you can see how we have spent your donations.
For the Divine Truth Experience channel Nicky had already spent £7,657.00 (just below $15,000 AUD) of his own personal savings from his previous job to buy all the equipment needed for producing high quality videos for the channel. A lot of his time was spent researching which equipment would work best along with determining the compatibility considerations. This equipment included:
- Panasonic Lumix GH4R DSLR Camera & extra batteries
- Panasonic Lumix 12-35mm Lens with lens cover
- Ninja Assassin HDMI recorder & accessories (improves footage quality & has back up function so if the recorded data becomes corrupted, it is not lost).
- Manfrotto MVH500AH 755XBK Tripod
- Rode VideoMic Go
- 15″ Apple MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Processor, 512GB Storage)
- Various video editing software (Final Cut Pro X, Compressor)
- Promise Pegasus2 R4 External Hard Drive 8TB (storing raw data, final videos, backups)
However, we still needed to buy more equipment to successfully create the vision we had for the seminar to ensure that we could capture the event as best as we possibly could for later editing and uploading to our YouTube channel. And so, with the donations that Nicky had received since creating the Hub & Forum, he conducted further research and bought:
- 2x Yamaha BR12 speakers (& stands) = £353.00
- 1x Yamaha P2500S Amp to power the speakers = £290.00
- 1x wireless Mic set which included 2x headsets & 2 x hand mics = £138.82
- Connecting cables and batteries = £132.00
- Miscellaneous costs (board pens, tape etc) = £20.09
We also needed a sound mixer and a digital recorder. Luckily and gratefully Pete had already purchased this recently for his Divine Truth Podcast creation and so we used his equipment in order to complete our set-up. We already had one high quality camera of Nicky’s to film the presentation, but we wanted two cameras in operation so that we could film the audience and make it look more professional. We didn’t have enough funds to buy the camera we wanted, so we borrowed one from a friend. The night before the event, amongst feeling excited (and some fear!) we were all feeling happy that we had managed to get everything in place until we realised that we did not have a donation box sorted out. We looked around our apartment for something we could use and that something turned out to be a cereal box which Peter expertly converted into a donation box using a pair of scissors and sellotape!
The venue cost £120.00 for the 4 hours and £20.00 for car parking. When Nicky was arranging payment of the venue with a member of venue staff, he received a discounted rate by stating that our presentation was being provided free of charge after being asked the purpose of our event. This was awesome!
Total cost of creating the seminar including the new equipment = £933.91
(Now we have all the equipment, the seminars in the future will just have the hall hiring and car park costs, so will be much cheaper to create).
Total donations received on the day for the seminar = £189.56
Receiving this amount of donations on the day was just awesome, as we were able to reimburse Nicky with costs of the hall hire and also pay Pete back for the cost of the parking. This left us with just over £45.00 to split between the three of us, £15.00 each for our time. So we’d like to thank again all those who turned out and donated to us as this helped cover the costs of the seminar with a little left over for us to personally enjoy. We really hope that those who attended found the information that we presented beneficial in some way and to those who watch the videos on YouTube. Here are a few pictures from the event:
More money matters…
At the moment neither of us receive anywhere near enough donations to live off, and so we are attempting to work through the ‘money emotions’ as we continue acting on our various desires. The idea of course is that in the future we would love to be able to ‘live and work’ in our passions, creating and spreading the Truth about God through various endeavours, and we wish to create all of this on a donation basis, sticking to the principles of Divine Truth. We will also be totally transparent with our bank accounts. We are currently working on presenting to you our financial records. At the moment, we have both set up individual sole trader business accounts in which we receive donations, so that we can keep track of our personal attractions with money as we go. In the future we will be looking at amalgamating our personal accounts into a joint one once we are both receiving a similar amount of donations. We both also have other ‘personal bank accounts’ which we have been using prior to Divine Truth. I use this account to receive my wage from my full-time job.
Nicky has enough savings at the moment from his previous job to pay for his day to day living and monthly expenses i.e. rent, food, travel, bills etc and so at the moment, Nicky spends much of his time on a wide range of activities (outlined on our donations page) essential in helping us continue being able to share God’s Truth with others and being of service to others on a day to day basis effectively. Almost all of the donated funds that Nicky has received to date since the Hub site and Forum went “live” almost 10 months ago (total received of £2518.65) has been spent on website maintenance, service costs and equipment purchase apart from £18.20 which he spent on groceries once as an “experiment” to see what emotions it would bring up for him!
I personally have no previous savings at all, and so at present I have a full time job to pay for my rent, food, travel and utilities etc. My donations account went live on the Hub website in March 2016 and since then I have received £125.00 donations thus far (thank you), and that has been spent mostly on my living costs, as my last job wasn’t a well-paid job. I have literally just changed jobs, which does pay me more, and gives me more free time (time to spend on DT) which is awesome.
We have just finished editing all of the footage from the seminar and hope to have that uploaded on the Divine Truth Experience channel really soon – hopefully it will be of benefit for others who were not in attendance to learn and enjoy. The editing of the seminar footage was a real challenge, we spent a lot of time learning and developing our software based skills so this is why there has been a bit of a delay in getting this onto the net.
Also in May…
Our friend Courtney flew in from the United States and came to our seminar, Courtney is also super passionate about sharing Divine Truth. She also helped us film the event (along with our other friend, Becks), which was really appreciated. Courtney stayed at our place in London for 2.5 weeks, and so we also used that time to film an interview with her on the subject of ‘Removing parental emotions towards God’. It was such a great interview, and I think you will love it too. This has already been edited and again we will upload it very soon.
Courtney has also created a Divine Truth blog called ‘God, Love and Truth’. She also helps people with food addiction, cleansing & detoxing, and ‘going vegan’, you can find more information about her work @ Courtney Pool
More media outlets…
I also have my own blog in which I love to write poetry and stories (true personal stories) about my experience on the Divine Truth Path. It originally started out as a blog to journal about my ‘raw vegan lifestyle’ but as I came across DT, I started to mostly write about my experiences on ‘the way’.
Find my blog @ ‘Perry’s Raw Soul’.
I am also currently in the infancy stages of writing a fiction book related to the Divine Truth teachings, however this ongoing and I am not sure when it will be finished, as time is being taken up by lots of other endeavours, including my full-time job at present.
More Inspired Divine Truth media from our brother Peter Howell…
If you haven’t already, then please check out the Divine Truth Podcast created by Peter. We both feel that this is such an awesome idea in providing another effective medium of spreading God’s Truth on the planet, and feel it will be a really valuable source of inspiration to anyone who listens to the episodes. We are looking forward to hearing future episodes! Click the link provided above for more info.
The future >>>
This is the end of our first monthly newsletter. Next month, Nicky will keep you informed on what has been happening in June. If you wish to subscribe to our blog updates, then you can do so by registering at the top of the main Divine Truth Hub website (which you are currently on if you are reading this blog post!)
We will be looking at setting up a second event at the same venue as our first and will be aiming for this to occur towards the end of July. Thanks guys for reading, I hope you feel more informed, and thank you again for everyone who has donated, it is very much appreciated.
With Love
Perry and Nicky