The Biggest Plan of All

*A retelling for children, based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.*

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It was springtime in the year 1953, in the city of Haifa, by the sea.

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High on the mountainside, something new and beautiful had just been finished. For years, workers had been building the upper part of the Shrine of the Báb — and now, at last, it was crowned with a great golden dome. When the lights came on, the dome shone over the whole city like a lamp in the dark.

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People had traveled from all over the world to see it. Pilgrims came from forty different countries, gathering together in Haifa to mark a special hundred-year anniversary. It was a glad and shining time, perhaps the brightest of all the years that Shoghi Effendi guided the Bahá'í community. Shoghi Effendi was the Guardian of the Faith, the one who looked after the Bahá'ís everywhere and helped them know what to do.

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And it was in this happy hour, with so many friends gathered close and the golden dome glowing above them, that the Guardian did something nobody expected. He unfolded a plan — a bigger plan than the Bahá'ís had ever attempted before.

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He called it the World Crusade. But because it would last exactly ten years, from one springtime to another springtime far in the future, most people came to call it the Ten Year Crusade.

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Now here is the thing you have to understand. The Bahá'í community in those days was small. Very small. There were fewer than two hundred thousand Bahá'ís in the whole wide world — that may sound like a lot, but spread across all the countries on Earth, it was only a tiny scattering of people. They did not have much money. They were not famous or powerful.

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And yet the Guardian handed this small community an enormous list of things to do.

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He asked them to carry the Faith to one hundred and thirty-one new countries and territories — places where not a single Bahá'í lived yet. He asked them to build the very first Houses of Worship in Africa, in Australia, and in Europe. He asked them to translate Bahá'í books into a hundred new languages, so that people everywhere could read them in their own words. He asked them to gather lands and properties for the Faith, and to start many new councils to guide the work in country after country.

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When you read the list all at once, it sounds impossible. The community was so small, and the tasks were so big. Many of those far-off places were hard to reach — some were closed off by their governments, some had languages no one knew, some were freezing cold or burning hot. It would have been easy to look at it all and decide that it was simply too much to do.

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But the Guardian named every single country anyway. He wrote the whole list down, and he shared it with the friends, and then he simply asked them to answer.

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And they did.

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In the months and years that followed, ordinary Bahá'ís all over the world packed their bags and left home. They left their jobs. They said goodbye to their families. They crossed oceans and continents to go and live in places they had only ever seen on a map — sitting on the docks of strange little islands, or shivering in the cold streets of faraway capital cities, just so the people there could hear about Bahá'u'lláh.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum, who wrote this story, tells us something lovely about these travelers. They were not all brave and bold by nature. Most of them were quite plain and ordinary, the kind of people you might pass on the street without a second look. But the plan gave them something to do together, and so together they did it. By the time the ten years were over, nearly the whole impossible list had come true.

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Shoghi Effendi himself did not live to see the very end of the Crusade. But the work he lit that spring kept burning brightly for all ten years. And when it was finally finished, the worldwide Bahá'í community had grown four times bigger than it had been at the start. It was the last and the greatest work of his life as Guardian.

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So remember this when something seems far too big for you. The Guardian looked at a tiny community and asked it to change the whole world — and it said yes. Great things are not done by people who are sure they can do them. They are done by ordinary people who are willing to try.

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*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["Launching the Ten Year Crusade in 1953"](/stories/pp-ten-year-crusade).*

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