Dear Friends and supporters of FAMILY, and Members of the General Council:

The Family Day in LA has come and gone and it was a successful event - successful in several ways, which I will share will you briefly. By the end of this week, David Kantor will put 2 pages of the handout which I passed out as part of my talk - the "Model of the Universal Family of the Supreme" and the "Temple of the Divine Mother"- on the Family Life Web page.

This model of the Universal Family of the Supreme was a joint effort, began by Marvin Gawryn many years ago as he studied what the Urantia Book had to say about family. At that time he identified 5 arenas of family. I asked his permission to expand on this as I saw it, which he gladly gave, and I have conceptualized the 7 arenas of family. Who knows, it may change from here. Would you kindly look at these two formulations, and give me a critique? I think they can be used as we go forth with the vision of FAMILY in its most expansive ideal. However I have learned that it is only through checking things out with one's cohorts that one can see if it really makes sense.

The Temple of the Divine Mother will be developed into a poster to be sold at IC99. Robert Burns was the artist. I was the conceptualist. And the picture in the middle which many of you will recognize as the one on the cover of the book: How I found the Urantia Book, is by Chick Montgomery. The Family Life Committee was given permission by Saskia Raevouri. to use this rendition on the poster.

It is my hope that Family Day will become an event that Fellowship societies and IUA associations will find most beneficial to jointly implement in their area. This was one of the successes of Family Day in LA - it was jointly planned by Fellowship and IUA SURF folks - president -Jane Ploetz, Sioux Harvey, Dorothy Elders, and the SMV. One of the outstanding experiences that some of us didn't realize until afterward, was as 60 + people introduced themselves, telling where they were from and how long they had been reading the book, that not ONE person said anything about what organization they belonged to! This was not about organizations; it was about family as it was experienced in several different arenas.

I have been talking to Bruce Porter about his interest in promoting Family Day in areas where there is an IUA, and soon I hope to have a letter to send to our society Presidents. We would like to see enthusiasm for putting on such an event. Bruce has already send out a notice in the IUA newsletter.

Other reasons for the success of the day were: the shortness of the talks. There were 10 or 12 middle and high school youth who seemed to be listening intently and could do so for a short period of time. There was music, food, and art experiences which were shared by almost everyone, and these four dimensions of experience- intellectual, emotional, fun, physical - were divided up during the day so there was a flow of the variety. The two art experiences were 1) a group collage expressing in pictures a word which represented family, such as "challenge." 2) a family T shirt design of a family crest. There are pictures of families wearing their family crest shirt. The day was well promoted with Mike Rahl developing a web page just for this day where people could sign up on the web.

One personal touch to this experience for me was my stay for two nights with Dorothy Elder. Bob and I used to be really close friends with Dorothy before everything happened. We had not been in touch for years until this event, and it felt so good to be sharing with her again person to person.

I look forward to your critique. If you be interested in promoting a Family Day event in your area please let me know and share with me any thoughts. I need your guidance as we slowly evolve our vision of FAMILY for the Urantia Movement.

In God's cosmic family,

Sara