The Banner-Bearer

A retelling for children, based on the account of Lua Getsinger from Bahá'í Chronicles.

On a small farm in New York, a long time ago, a girl named Lua was born. Her full name was Lua Aurelia Moore, and she grew up among the fields and the seasons of farm country. She went to the ordinary schools near her home, and when she was a young woman, she traveled out to the West to become a schoolteacher herself.

People who knew Lua remembered her as warm and full of feeling. When something mattered to her, it mattered with her whole heart. And there was one thing, when she finally found it, that would matter to her more than anything else in the world.

In a city called Chicago, when she was a young woman, Lua first heard about the Bahá'í Faith. A small group of seekers was meeting there, asking big questions and learning together, and Lua joined them. What she learned filled her up. She had found the thing she had been waiting for without even knowing she was waiting.

Then came the great adventure of her life. A little group of fifteen believers from the West decided to make a long, long journey across the sea to the prison-city of 'Akká, where they would meet 'Abdu'l-Bahá. No Western Bahá'ís had ever stood in His presence before. Lua was one of those fifteen. Imagine the ship, and the waves, and the days of travel, and the beating hearts of fifteen people who had come so far to meet Him at last.

Of all the fifteen who went, the journey changed Lua the most deeply. She came home from 'Akká a different person, lit up from the inside, with one single wish burning in her: she wanted to share the Faith she loved with everyone in her own country.

And that is exactly what she did. She married a man named Edward Getsinger, and together the two of them set out across the United States. From city to city they traveled. Lua would stand up in front of gatherings of people — in big cities and in small towns alike — and tell them about Bahá'u'lláh. Wherever she stopped, new believers gathered: in Ithaca, in Washington, in Boston, in San Francisco, and in many little towns along the way. She was like someone planting seeds in field after field, and watching gardens grow up behind her.

'Abdu'l-Bahá saw what kind of teacher Lua was. In His letters, He gave her a special name. He called her Livá — a word that means a banner, the flag that an army carries high at the very front so everyone can see it and follow. It was the perfect name for her. She was the one who carried the Faith out ahead into new places and raised it up where it had never been seen before.

Lua's later years were not always easy. There were hard times in her marriage, and more and more she traveled alone. But she never stopped. She crossed the sea again and served in faraway places — in Europe, in Egypt, and in the Holy Land itself, close beside 'Abdu'l-Bahá. She helped translate words from one language to another. She welcomed pilgrims who came from far away. She wrote letters and letters. She simply kept giving.

Lua died in a city called Cairo, in Egypt, while she was on yet another teaching trip. She was forty-five years old — not very old at all. 'Abdu'l-Bahá was deeply saddened to lose her. He arranged for her to be buried there in Cairo, and He wrote about her with great love. He gave her one more name in those words: He called her the first Western martyr of the Cause. He did not mean that anyone had harmed her. He meant something tender and true — that she had poured out every last bit of herself in the work she loved, until there was nothing of herself she had held back.

Ever since, the Bahá'ís of her country have remembered Lua Getsinger as the very first of their traveling teachers — the bright young woman who came home from one journey so full of love that she spent her whole life carrying it to others.

You do not have to live a hundred years to do something beautiful with your life. Lua's life was short, but she filled it all the way to the top. What makes a life great is not how long it lasts, but how much love you pour into it.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "Lua Getsinger: The Mother-Teacher of the West".

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/lua-getsinger/