—By Maria #4 31/12/83—With Comments from Dad! DO 1721

1. I GUESS WE'RE READY FOR MY REPORT ON WHAT OUR CREATION UNITS HAVE DONE THIS YEAR, & will D.V. be working on this coming year. You already mentioned that this year the projects that were completed & sent to the Family included: 86 GNs; 8 WNDs; 14 FNs; 7 Family Specials; 10 LINs; 10 KIDz Mags; 2 Komix Books; 4 Heavenly Helpers; 2 Volumes of the Book of Remembrance; Daily Bread; Back to the Basics; Colour Flannelgraph Mag; Colour Heaven Poster; the Black & White Heaven Poster; reprint of the Endtime Poster; the Maria Poster; 1984 Calendar boxes & 13 Notices. One thing you didn't mention was the "Love Songs".—Also, ML Volumes 9, 10, 13 & a couple of little Tracts that Apollos worked on: "Lover of All Lovers", the Christmas Tract & the Endtime Tract. (Dad: If you forget anything, leave it to her to remember it!) Well, that's my department. (Dad: Yes‚ her department is memory & reminding you! She's got a long memory.)

2. THEN WE HAD QUITE A FEW SLIDE SHOWS SENT OUT—97 slides, 7 or 8 slide shows which have been distributed to all the NOs all over the World & are being duplicated by the NOs to go out to everyone that wants to order them.—Also a script tape & a printed script that we put in the Family Specials Book.

3. (DAD: YOU CAN SEE HOW WE'RE MORE & MORE TRYING TO GET THIS WORK DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL—duplication of tapes & even some of the printing & the slide shows, radio shows & all this sort of thing, trying to get them produced on the local level so that when the Crash comes or whatever‚ they can still keep going even without us if they have to. We'll be like the many-headed hydra, no matter how many heads they chop off we'll still grow more, thank the Lord! We'll be going till the Lord comes! PTL? Nothing can stop us! TYL! Hallelujah!)

4. PETER MENTIONED THE TWO MICRO MAILINGS. WE CAN GIVE A LOT OF CREDIT TO MWM FOR ALL THE WORK THEY DID ON THESE BEAUTIFUL TAPES, OF COURSE, MCV TOO—LOTS & LOTS OF TAPES, MANY OF WHICH WE HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO SEND OUT YET. But we hope to have some more mailings this year‚ Lord willing‚ & that's included in Pubs also, right? (Dad: Yes yes, those are publications, they're publishing the Good News! Don't forget my MOFs & my little song tapes too.) They're the best‚ thank the Lord! (Dad: And her Scripture tapes. We've still got more of them, there's more to go!

5. (IT'S JUST LIKE THE LORD SAID, HE'S GIVEN US SO MUCH WE'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO HOLD IT ALL, MUCH LESS EVER DISTRIBUTE IT ALL! We'll never run out of the Word, thank the Lord, & I'm expecting what we can't or don't use now, we'll probably use in the Millennium! Thank God for a Thousand Years to catch up! What we don't learn now, at least we'll have time to learn then!) I think MWM probably has 50 tapes on the shelf just waiting to be sent out when we get the money!

6. NOW I'LL GIVE YOU SPRINT'S FANTASTIC STATS! This includes the stats for all the pubs already mentioned above. (Dad: You need a microphone, don't you?) Oh, I can talk real loud anyway. (Dad: She has a good carrying quality to her voice.) That's a nice way to put it! (Dad: She was a teacher before I met her—good thing, because now she teaches me!) Well I try, but you already know enough. (Dad: Too much!)

7. ALL THESE PUBS WERE SENT OUT IN 44 MAILINGS DURING THE YEAR, WHICH WAS ALMOST ONE A WEEK!—16,000 original pages & 284,000 copies—of all these Books & FNs & even the Tracts & LINs. The actual pages printed for all the Family were 40 million pages! Actually it's 40‚391,900, almost 40-1/2 million!

8. (DAD: I DON'T KNOW OF ANY GROUP OR CHURCH OR DENOMINATION AS SMALL AS WE ARE THAT IS AS PROLIFIC & PRODUCTIVE AS WE ARE! Tremendous! I'll tell you, we are an ant hill of workers, real workers‚ everybody's busy. And that's just what we do & a few WS & Creations & Publications Units do, not counting the whole Family & what everybody else does! That's up in the millions! The Family printed 330 million pages! This is just what World Services has printed, 40-1/2 million pages. That's a lot of work.

9. (I'LL GIVE YOU MY LITTLE REPORT NEXT—IT GETS THE BOOBY-PRIZE! When all these bigwigs get finished with their great work, I'll tell you how little I did!) You made all of this possible! (Dad: The Lord made it all possible!) Amen, the Lord used you. (Dad:—And you & you & you & you & you & hundreds of others! Did you ever figure out how many people are involved in WS work, Peter? Here he's head of this big corporation & doesn't even know how many employees he's got! Well‚ at last count there was somewhere around four or five hundred at least who work just for WS, & I'll bet it's even more now. PTL!)

10. SO IT AMOUNTED TO 36 BOOK-LENGTH PUBLICATIONS. (Dad: That includes all the book-size magazines. Most of the FNs we used to print, they were all book-size, as big or bigger than most paperbacks, & they had more material in'm. We've been a book-publishing house, we've been publishing books like mad! I guess some people think we are mad for publishing so many, especially what we publish! Hallelujah! It pays to be crazy in this outfit!—Crazy about the Lord & His work & each other!—Amen?

11. (WE'VE HAD AN AVERAGE MAILING OF ALL THESE MATERIALS ALMOST ONCE A WEEK, WEEKLY MAILINGS!—Not just one pub in those mailings either, there usually have been several in a mailing. The Family has been flooded with publications & I doubt if they'll get'm all read even before the Lord comes! That's another thing you're going to have to finish in the Millennium. Come on now, you've gotta admit it, you haven't read'm all! Maybe that'll give you time to go back & read some of those old Books.)

12. THE 44 MAILINGS CONSISTED OF 123 TITLES ALTOGETHER. (Dad: That's not talking about the titles of each of my individual Letters, but the titles of all those separate pubs, books & magazines etc., 123!) (Peter: And last year it was 83.) (Dad: Just think, 123 titles, that's an average of 10 different kinds of pubs a month! I don't know of any religious outfit that's doing anything like that! I don't know about the Catholic Church, have you heard what they've been doing lately? They might have done a little more than we did, but I'll bet it wasn't as good. Don't tell'm I said that though! PTL! Hallelujah!

13. (WHAT WAS THAT ENORMOUS BOOK-LENGTH THING WE PUT OUT, THE BIGGEST ONE WE EVER PUBBED?—BOTM 2! That's when we really hit bottom! I'll bet they didn't read that in three days! I'll bet they were reading day & night, 24 hours a day! I'll bet they haven't read it all yet!) Well, some of them have been reference books, so they're not expected to sit down & read it all at once. (Peter: They'd have to read 44 pages a day.) My goodness, that takes an hour-&-a-half or two hours at least.

14. (DAD: I'D LIKE TO SEE A PICTURE—IF WE COULD GET THOSE ALL TOGETHER ON THE BOOKSHELF—TO SHOW JUST WHAT WE PUBBED THIS PAST YEAR ALONE! We published pictures not long ago of all the things we'd published that far, but I think we've got another whole shelf now with 123 more titles!)

15. I THINK I'M TAKING TOO MUCH TIME, I'VE GOT TO SAVE LOTS OF TIME FOR YOUR REPORT! (Dad: Mine? Mine won't take five minutes! Don't worry about me, folks, this is not my night, this is your night!) Okay, I just want to run quickly down the pubs that we have in the works now that‚ D.V.‚ all our Creation Units will be working on this year‚ D.V., & that we're hoping we can publish this year coming. I'll tell you what my biggest prayer for this coming year is, that the Lord will give us time to get these pubs out!

16. THIS YEAR WE'LL BE EMPHASISING THE CHILDREN MORE THAN EVER BEFORE, & RIGHT NOW WE HAVE ALREADY TWO KIDZ KOMIC BOOKS IN THE WORKS! One will probably take a couple of months & we'll have it ready to go‚ because we've almost approved the Komix now. It's a book of miscellaneous Komix, about 384 pages. (Dad: Selected especially for children.) Then in a few months, D.V., we'll be able to have another one, because the artists are all in the process of drawing more & there are a lot of assignments out. So we should have another one‚ Lord willing, if we have a few more months. God bless our faithful & talented artists!

17. ANOTHER KOMIC BOOK IN THE WORKS FOR THE KIDS IS ONE ON BASIC LESSONS. It's more of a compilation type like "7 Ways to Know the Will of God" & "Healing in His Wings". (Dad: Sort of a Basic Book for kids!) Yes! It covers Heaven‚ the Endtime, the Millennium, the Family & all kinds of things for children in komic form. Apollos is going to be a big help in doing some of the compiled texts, & we'll use a lot of existing art so it'll speed up the work very much faster than normal. So I think we should be able to get that out in a few months too. (Dad: It'll be too late for David, of course he's already reading the adult stuff anyhow‚ but at least some of our little ones will benefit by it. God bless David, he had to grow up real fast, he's doing a big job.)

18. WE ALSO HAVE THE KIDS' POETRY BOOK! It's almost finalised, we just need to give FC the corrections on it & it will be ready to go, Lord willing. It has all the MO Poetry in it & a lot of other good little poems for the children. It's real good Word with lots & lots of illustrations, an illustrated poetry book.

19. (DAD: YOU OUGHT TO SEE THE FAMILY POETRY BOOK, IT'S A GREAT BIG THING THIS THICK!—BEAUTIFUL POETRY & EVERY PAGE ILLUSTRATED! It's just gorgeous & they've had that ready for a couple of years, we just haven't had time to print it. Everything else is more important.) Well, you know what we did with that? I really prayed & prayed about what we were going to do with it, & all of a sudden I was opening it up & I just saw that the first half was all for children & most of the second half was for adults, even though we hadn't purposely intended it to be that way, so we just split it! So what we're publishing as the Kids' Poetry Book is the first half of that Family Poetry Book. Maybe we'll put the adult poetry little by little in a "Heavenly Helpers" or something‚ but the Kids' Poetry Book will be a real tool & it's very beautifully illustrated. God bless Family Care for such a beautiful job.

20. WE'VE ALSO GOT ANOTHER FLANNELGRAPH BOOK IN THE WORKS because the artists are also working on new flannelgraphs as well as Komix, & it shouldn't take very long to get another book ready. Then there's also the Activity Book which of course is more for parents to use with the children, but it's going to be a real real help! It's difficult to know what to do with children all day long, they need ideas & they need things to do with them, & this will have all kinds of handicrafts & ideas for MO games etc. (Dad: Help is coming, girls & boys!) And Family Care has done a phenomenal job at putting all this material together on our instructions. (Amen! GB'M!)

21. IT'S GOING TO BE A WONDERFUL TOOL, BECAUSE THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE LIKE ALF, FOR EXAMPLE, WHO ARE SO IMAGINATIVE & CREATIVE that just on the spur of the moment they can come up with something out of nothing, things to do hour after hour out of the clear blue! Most people can't, so we have put hundreds & hundreds of things in this book that the children can do, some on their own but mostly with parental supervision.—Even some magic tricks! (Dad: Now you see who's the real power behind the throne here!) No, I'm just beside the throne!

22. SO ALL OF THAT IS FOR CHILDREN, PLUS MORE SLIDE SHOWS, OF COURSE, THAT THE CHILDREN ALSO REALLY ENJOY. And for the parents, more of the "Story of Our Children" that Sara & Dora are continuing to write—Techi's Story hasn't even come out yet. (Dad: I've just got one more chapter of Sara's & then I go to work on you, Dora!)

23. OH, DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE KIDS' QUOTEBOOK? This is tremendous! This is a book taken from the MOP, the Adult Quotebook. Out of about 10,000 quotes & 4,000 verses in the adult MOP, we took 2,000 quotes & verses out for the Children's Quotebook! We're going to do it in large print & illustrate it very liberally, illustrating about 80% of the quotes. It's going to be a picture book! I mean, it's really illustrated, it's going to be beautiful! Hart & Jac went through all the existing art & got out many of the illustrations‚ & also Eman‚ Jeremy & others are doing many new ones for it! I hope to get my final mock-up in a month or two. (Dad: Now you know what you're going to be doing when I'm gone, she's going to keep you busy!)

24. THE CHILDREN'S QUOTEBOOK IS GOING TO BE REALLY BEAUTIFUL & SIMPLE‚ WHEREAS THE ADULT QUOTEBOOK IS PRETTY DEEP. I think the adults will like the Children's Quotebook almost as well as the children! By the way, the MOP, the Adult Quotebook‚ should be out pretty soon. (Dad: It was a big job‚ two volumes, & has been in the works a year-&-a–half. Hallelujah! That's what keeps us going! I figure after tonight you'll know how little credit I should get.)

25. IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU, WE WOULDN'T HAVE ANY OF THIS! (Dad: Honey‚ it's just the Lord. You'd better give Him the credit, let me tell you, if you don't want something to happen to me just to show you it's the Lord!) Amen, I sure do. I think you've made that very clear, but we also know that if you hadn't been obedient& faithful & yielded, the Lord couldn't have done it. (Dad: Then He would have found somebody else—like you.) Maybe not! Sometimes He doesn't get it done if He doesn't have someone to use. (Dad: Oh, He always gets it done somehow! If it hadn't been me, it would have been somebody else.) Okay, we'll stop arguing! (Dad: This is a debate nobody ever wins!)

26. NOW I'LL TELL YOU SOME OF THE REST OF THE PUBS WE'RE WORKING ON. We're going to try, Lord willing, to do some more "Daily Bread" Condos if Apollos can get'm done, & we're in the process of doing more "Daily Mights"‚ more days, & hopefully we'll be able to do a whole year's worth. Justus & Adar & Ho & Ruthie have been working on these & already have almost 100 done. Maybe we'll put it out a month at a time this time & we have quite a few days already done. We're also still working on the Catechism in our spare time, & we have quite a few of those questions & answers done.—Thanks to Ho, Ruthie, Isaac, Hart, Paul Theophilus, Lois etc.

27. WE ALSO HAVE ANOTHER "HEAVENLY HELPERS" IN THE WORKS, ONE THAT SHOULD CONTAIN THE FOOD & HEALTH CHECKLIST.—Not just a checklist but all the rules on food, health, safety, everything on survival, security, economy—that's a new one we just added—plus everything on disasters. (Dad: She has more ideas than I have!) Well, I've had lots of help! Look at all the good raw material we have in the Letters. So that "Heavenly Helpers" should include all of what we call checklists, but they're expanded. In fact, the one on Security is about 86 pages!

28. AND THEN ANOTHER "HEAVENLY HELPERS" WE HAVE IN THE WORKS IS A 500-PAGE COMMUNICATIONS CLASS! (Dad: Compared to what she's doing, I'm on a vacation!) You do more pages a day than I could ever think of doing! (Dad: No no, never never never! She reads more pages—on top of all this, all the mail & everything else! You have no idea how much she does! She does ten times as much work as I do!) I couldn't! You get up at 5:30 & work all day. Okay, this is another argument that we never win. We really do argue a lot! Ha! (Dad: It's the mutual admiration society—she's always bragging about me & I'm always bragging about her.) In this case I'm right, see?

29. SO WE'VE GOT A 500-PAGE COMMUNICATIONS CLASS, ORAL & WRITTEN COMMUNICATION. It sounds very text-booky but actually it's really a fantastic class! Don't you like it, those who have read it? All the books I brought home, our editor read, summarised & edited them & added MO quotes & really did a lot on it. It covers office procedures, grammar, spelling‚ time management, banking, finances, P.R., personnel, how to write & lots more! (Dad: I never even heard of half of these projects!) So when I finally get a chance to read 500 pages we'll print it! I'm the big hold-up because it takes me forever to get around to it! (Dad: With her there are no Alps, not even Himalayas!) That's why I have to have so many other people go over it, & I'll just try to look at their questions & maybe I can get it done that way.

30. THEN WE ALSO HAVE AN FN & "HEAVENLY HELPERS" INDEX IN THE WORKS‚ INDEXING ALL THE MAJOR ARTICLES—not the ones that are just news articles that you wouldn't want to keep later, but reference material like what we have now in the Family Specials Book.—All of the things that you might want to go back & read later. So that's being worked on too & everybody's helping on all of these things. (Dad: Not me! I'm going to go back to my little GN & WND & relax!) That's what makes the whole thing possible! You're what's inspiring us to do all this.

31. LORD WILLING WE'LL CONTINUE TO DO THE FNS BECAUSE THE FAMILY'S FAITHFUL TO SEND THEIR ARTICLES IN‚ & THE FAMILY SPECIALS BOOK WHICH IS ALL DONE BY THE FAMILY IN THE FIELD, SENDING ARTICLES IN. And of course, Lord willing‚ we'll continue to do more Kidz, more LINs, more colour posters, more tape mailings, Lord willing, also more GP tracts & some more DFO material for friends. Luke Free sent us a little book that was a real good idea & that maybe we can reprint. It's taken straight out of the "Thoughts" that they use in the newspaper where he is‚ each page a little picture with a quote. We thought we could make it a daily thing, January 1, January 2, January 3 etc.

32. (DAD: HE ALREADY HAS 286 OF THEM, SO WE'RE GOING TO TRY TO ADD MORE TO MAKE 365 & MAKE IT A DAILY THOUGHT BOOK! Of course, we're not going to publish it in the fancy kind of a cover he got put on. He bound his in some beautiful little covers which would be pretty expensive & which we can't afford to publish, but we could put ours in a little magazine cover like we've had before with lighter-weight paper & it would be a lot cheaper. It's something the Family could give to friends, very simple too & good for children & simple people in simple cultures. It will be a very useful book!

33. (SO AS THE LORD SAID IN THE "BIRTHDAY WARNING", WE'LL NEVER RUN OUT, THERE'LL ALWAYS BE MORE, MORE THAN WE CAN EVER HOLD! He can pour it out faster than we can ever handle it. PTL!—She can too! She's doing it right now & she's been doing it.) We have some other projects we could be doing if we had personnel to do it, but everybody's pretty much backlogged right now‚ so we have to wait. (Dad: No matter how many people we have, she can keep them all busy!)

34. TWO OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WE BARELY STARTED & WE'VE HAD TO PUT ON HOLD FOR AWHILE because of all these other ones are the Prayers of David & the Anecdotes—MO Letter illustrations, anecdotes & jokes—but we've had to put those aside for some other more important things for now. So those are the main projects that, Lord willing, we'll be working on this coming year! And the most important thing is the Letters, of course, that Dad's going to do & get, & now we can have his report!

35. (DAD: NOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE BEEN MISSING ALL THIS TIME! I don't know what I've been doing all the talking for anyhow, I should have turned her loose sooner! I knew she could talk like this because I get it in our room, but when she comes out here she's quiet as a little mouse & just pins mikes on me! Of course, some of you who have to do business with her, I know you know she can sock it to you & keep you busy! Talk about a dog having fleas‚ she's got more ideas than the whole canine population!) I just pray for them!—The ideas I mean. (Dad: She really turns them out! I don't think she'll ever run out of ideas. The Lord gives her all these wonderful ideas for what I think are really needed pubs. So can you see what's been keeping us going & what's going to keep you going even after I'm gone?) He has the inspiration & I have some added ideas, so together we do really good! (Dad: I have the inspiration, she has the perspiration! She does all the work, I have all the fun!)

36. P.S. ANOTHER PROJECT WE'VE STARTED SINCE THE ABOVE REPORT, IS A WHOLE ILLUSTRATED COURSE ON PRACTICAL LESSONS FOR CHILDREN, sort of an expanded Health & Hygiene Course, including rules on Health, safety, diet & security, each point illustrated for maximum retention. Dad has given us adults so much in these areas, but about all our children have is one or two Komix‚ one on "Food Or Poison" & another on "Cleanliness Is Godliness". We've been relying on the parents to pass on by word-of-mouth all the rules for healthful & safe living. But if they fail to keep them themselves as they sometimes do, how can we expect them to teach their children? So there's a real need to have material in the children's language, appealing directly to them & which they can read & look at on their own. So please pray for this project, & for all the others, too. (Amen! GBY!—And GBH!—Isn't she terrific!—A real lioness!—A genuine Leo!—Or is the feminine form "Leah"? She's got a terrific feminine form too!—Ha!—And I love her!—Do you? GBAKHACTMHAB!—In Jesus' name, amen.—Amen?)

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family