God Never Forgets You
Juliet Thompson, The Diary of Juliet Thompson, (1947), Kalimát Press · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
A retelling based on The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Kalimát Press; diary entry dated 13 April 1912). The narrative is retold in our own words; the lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the Diary. Read the full text for Juliet's own account.
It was the 13th of April, 1912, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá had spent the day as He spent so many — receiving hundreds of visitors, one after another, until He was utterly worn out. He had lain down to rest at last.
Juliet Thompson's mother came to Him there.
She was a woman carrying a double weight. There was a grief over her son, who was about to marry a woman unwilling to be a friend to the family — the kind of private family sorrow that sits heavy on a mother's heart. And there was something else: a quiet resentment she had nursed toward the Bahá'í Faith, and toward the work her daughter Juliet had given herself to. She had not welcomed this new devotion of Juliet's. It had, in some way, come between them.
And yet now she hurried to the Master's bedside, and knelt.
'Abdu'l-Bahá, tired as He was, welcomed her with warmth. He did not brush past her sorrow. He spoke to her tenderly of her daughter — likening Juliet to Mary Magdalene, a soul the world had once been quick to scorn but would come at last to honor — and He promised her, gently, that her son too would in time come round. And then He gave her the words that went straight through all her bitterness like sunlight through a cloud:
God is kind. God is faithful. God never forgets you.
Something in the mother gave way. The woman who had knelt down carrying resentment and grief rose up carrying neither. She took the Master's hand and kissed it, and told Him how long, in truth, she had loved Him.
The next day she said it plainly to her daughter: all my bitterness has gone. The Master, she was sure, must be helping her still.
It is a small domestic scene — a tired man, a grieving mother, a few quiet sentences at a bedside. But it shows how 'Abdu'l-Bahá healed the wounds that divide families: not by taking sides, not by argument, but by reminding a worried heart of the one thing it most needed to hear — that it was held, and faithful, and never once forgotten by God.
This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted words are verbatim from The Diary of Juliet Thompson. See the source for Juliet's complete entry.
Cite this story
Thompson, J.. (1947). *The Diary of Juliet Thompson*. Kalimát Press. https://bahai-library.com/thompson_diary
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