God's Work

A Bahai children’s class teacher shares about the importance of involving new believer, Sylviya, in one of the core activities. Their first encounter was in a laundry mat during a door to door campaign. After some time Sylviya shares that she believes her long journey after suffering much hardship in her native country was to discover Baha’u’llah.

Sylviya and I arrived at 4PM and our host welcomed us. We decided to relocate to a nearby apartment because some children were already there. Also (there was) a new African family, two adults and 3 children from Burundi just 3 days in the country. The mother and her children attended class along with our regular attendees. Sylviya began devotions with a prayer in her native language which was followed by the children who sang many of their prayers. We reviewed all the quotes we learned from the summer classes and hoped to begin a new quote next week. This group excels at singing to memorize their quotes from Baha’u’llah which is so imbedded in their culture. The children are extremely eager to read in English. We had key words from quotes on flash cards and with Sylviya translating, explaining the meaning of the quote with these cards. The children benefited from Sylviya’s translation. She is at the heart of these classes. After class she insisted that we do home visits and visited 3 families with invitations to parents to join us.  

Her children have been attending Feast regularly but she had only come once with her husband months ago. She now understands the importance of Feast because her English has improved greatly in 2 years. She enjoyed Feast and seeing the Bahais that she remembers from long ago. She was part of the consultation, she sang a prayer in Swahili for devotions and chatted away, non-stop in English for the social refreshment hour. When I dropped her home she whispered in my ear that she was sooooooo happy! AND ME TOO!!!

There are certain to be challenges but we will overcome them, learn from them and grow in our Faith. And not only in numbers! Nothing, nothing can compare to God’s work.