When I was 10 years old I climbed to the top floor of our house because I heard a voice.

I went up slowly, pausing to listen. I crawled on hands and knees across the short landing that led to my parents room and pressed my ear against the door.

It was unlike any voice I’d ever heard. My father’s name was mentioned. Something about “Preparation,” and then “You, Marshall…” I pulled back from the door and sat there for a while. The voice continued speaking.

I remember going down each step backwards, my eyes and ears fixed to that door and that voice. I found my mom downstairs in the kitchen and asked her who’s voice this was. “Well, your father is conferring with a great teacher now,” she said.

Day after day, I watched my mother return from work at the local hospital to find my father there at home. He had spent many hours that day receiving the revelation. After being in this state of revelation, he was deeply tired and very disoriented from normal activities. She asked him what had happened that day. “A message for the individual” he would say, or a message for the world, an entire book, another 20 steps of Steps to Knowledge.

Sometimes a single revelation-event continued over a series of days, producing a multi-hundred page text such as Greater Community Spirituality. During most of those days my mother was at work. For years she was circumstantially taken away from my father. She wanted nothing more than to be at his side as he underwent this arduous process of revelation.

As a kid, I rarely understood what was happening. But I knew it was intensely important. It was consequential. It was history being made. And I could feel that. It was like a vast furnace at the center of a small family. It radiated more heat than any of us could handle. Or, as an early student of the New Message once remarked, it was like “drinking from a fire hose.”

This intensity and consequentiality at times abated. But even in quieter times it was there, like a tectonic movement deep below us; always advancing, always taking our family into the unknown.

The revelation has taken us on a vast traverse through the unknown; from Life in the Universe to Inner Knowing, The Angelic Presence, The Allies of Humanity, The Intervention, Inner Development, Spiritual Families, The Nature and Will of God, and the Proclamation of a New Message.

For a kid, this was a struggle. I trod back and forth from home to school to friends’ houses, not knowing how could I explain what was happening to anyone.

As I got older, the size and scope of the Revelation chafed at me. I struggled to accept the reality of these words, these words that kept coming. Hundreds of pages of words. Then thousands. They were there all around our house, bound in early volumes or sitting in stacks. In the presence of a new message from God, how can you have a normal life, the life you think you want?

Yet I’ve had the benefit of seeing this process first hand; seeing Marshall day after day consumed in a process he did not make or control; being in the room as the first words of new revelation came through him, all in the same voice as the one I heard with my ear pressed to the door 17 years ago.

From this life-long experience, it is clear to me that the revelation was prepared. It was laid down by forces far beyond my father before it was ever spoken through him on this Earth. It really does happen as the New Message itself says: “The voice of the Angels transmitting to the world a New Message from God through their messenger, Marshall Vian Summers.”