Cannot You Serve Him Once?

A retelling based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937). Ives heard this account from Lua Getsinger herself. The narrative below is retold in our own words; the lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for Ives's own telling.

Lua Getsinger had given up a great deal to be there.

Among the first Americans to embrace the Bahá'í Faith, she had crossed an ocean and made her way to 'Akka — the grey prison-city on the Syrian coast where 'Abdu'l-Bahá was still a captive of the Ottoman state. She had come as a pilgrim, hungry for nearness to Him, ready, as she imagined, for any great work He might set before her. Surely a soul who had travelled so far had come to do something important.

One day He gave her a task.

A certain man in the city was poor, and very ill, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá was too occupied that day to go to him Himself. He asked Lua to go in His place — to take the man food, and to care for him as He had been doing. She went out gladly. To be trusted with an errand by the Master was itself a kind of glory, and she carried it like one.

But the place she came to was dreadful. The room was filthy; the air was thick with the smell of sickness; the man himself lay in a degradation that turned her stomach and frightened her. She did not stay. Fearing disease, she fled — and hurried back to the One she had crossed the world to serve, certain He would understand.

He did not soften it for her. Ives records that 'Abdu'l-Bahá regarded her "sadly and sternly," and then He spoke the words that would follow Lua for the rest of her life:

Dost thou desire to serve God, serve thy fellow man for in him dost thou see the image and likeness of God.

Go back, He told her. If the house is filthy, clean it. If your brother is dirty, bathe him. If he is hungry, feed him. And do not return until it is done.

Then came the sentence that turned the whole lesson like a key in a lock. He told her that He Himself had gone to that wretched room and done these very things — not once, but many times. Many times had He done this for him — and could she not serve him once?

There it was. The Master she had sailed across the world to wait upon had all the while been quietly kneeling in the worst room in 'Akka, washing a stranger no one else would touch. The greatness Lua had been looking for had been there the whole time, only it wore an apron and carried a basin. What she had recoiled from in horror, He had been doing in love — and calling it, not a burden, but the very service of God.

Lua took the lesson to heart, and she carried it tenderly for the rest of her life — telling it, years later, while Howard Colby Ives spoke of brotherhood to a gathering in America, so that through his book it has gone on to warm countless hearts since. What stays with us is not a reproach but an invitation: that the love of God, which had drawn Lua across an ocean, was waiting for her all along in the most ordinary place of all — at the bedside of someone who simply needed help. 'Abdu'l-Bahá was not asking her for something hard so much as opening to her a door she had not yet noticed, the door through which His own life so quietly and joyfully passed each day. To kneel beside the forgotten, He showed her, is not the lowliest service we can offer. It is the nearest we can come to God.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted words are verbatim from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937). See the source for Ives's complete telling.

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom